Biblio

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for distributed training of machine learning models. In FL, several participants train a global model collaboratively by only sharing model parameter updates while keeping their training data local. However, FL was recently shown to be vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, in which malicious participants send parameter updates derived from poisoned training data. In this paper, we focus on defending against targeted data poisoning attacks, where the attacker’s goal is to make the model misbehave for a small subset of classes while the rest of the model is relatively unaffected. To defend against such attacks, we first propose a method called MAPPS for separating malicious updates from benign ones. Using MAPPS, we propose three methods for attack detection: MAPPS + X-Means, MAPPS + VAT, and their Ensemble. Then, we propose an attack mitigation approach in which a "clean" model (i.e., a model that is not negatively impacted by an attack) can be trained despite the existence of a poisoning attempt. We empirically evaluate all of our methods using popular image classification datasets. Results show that we can achieve \textgreater 95% true positive rates while incurring only \textless 2% false positive rate. Furthermore, the clean models that are trained using our proposed methods have accuracy comparable to models trained in an attack-free scenario.

Differentially private location trace synthesis (DPLTS) has recently emerged as a solution to protect mobile users' privacy while enabling the analysis and sharing of their location traces. A key challenge in DPLTS is to best preserve the utility in location trace datasets, which is non-trivial considering the high dimensionality, complexity and heterogeneity of datasets, as well as the diverse types and notions of utility. In this paper, we present OptaTrace: a utility-optimized and targeted approach to DPLTS. Given a real trace dataset D, the differential privacy parameter ε controlling the strength of privacy protection, and the utility/error metric Err of interest; OptaTrace uses Bayesian optimization to optimize DPLTS such that the output error (measured in terms of given metric Err) is minimized while ε-differential privacy is satisfied. In addition, OptaTrace introduces a utility module that contains several built-in error metrics for utility benchmarking and for choosing Err, as well as a front-end web interface for accessible and interactive DPLTS service. Experiments show that OptaTrace's optimized output can yield substantial utility improvement and error reduction compared to previous work.