Biblio

Smart meters migrate conventional electricity grid into digitally enabled Smart Grid (SG), which is more reliable and efficient. Fine-grained energy consumption data collected by smart meters helps utility providers accurately predict users' demands and significantly reduce power generation cost, while it imposes severe privacy risks on consumers and may discourage them from using those “espionage meters". To enjoy the benefits of smart meter measured data without compromising the users' privacy, in this paper, we try to integrate distributed differential privacy (DDP) techniques into data-driven optimization, and propose a novel scheme that not only minimizes the cost for utility providers but also preserves the DDP of users' energy profiles. Briefly, we add differential private noises to the users' energy consumption data before the smart meters send it to the utility provider. Due to the uncertainty of the users' demand distribution, the utility provider aggregates a given set of historical users' differentially private data, estimates the users' demands, and formulates the data- driven cost minimization based on the collected noisy data. We also develop algorithms for feasible solutions, and verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme through simulations using the simulated energy consumption data generated from the utility company's real data analysis.

In practice, Defenders need a more efficient network detection approach which has the advantages of quick-responding learning capability of new network behavioural features for network intrusion detection purpose. In many applications the capability of Deep Learning techniques has been confirmed to outperform classic approaches. Accordingly, this study focused on network intrusion detection using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based on LeNet-5 to classify the network threats. The experiment results show that the prediction accuracy of intrusion detection goes up to 99.65% with samples more than 10,000. The overall accuracy rate is 97.53%.

Nowadays, an increasing number of IoT vendors have complied and deployed third-party code bases across different architectures. Therefore, to avoid the firmware from being affected by the same known vulnerabilities, searching known vulnerabilities in binary firmware across different architectures is more crucial than ever. However, most of existing vulnerability search methods are limited to the same architecture, there are only a few researches on cross-architecture cases, of which the accuracy is not high. In this paper, to promote the accuracy of existing cross-architecture vulnerability search methods, we propose a new approach based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Attributed Control Flow Graph (ACFG) to search known vulnerability in firmware across different architectures at function level. We employ a known vulnerability function to recognize suspicious functions in other binary firmware. First, considering from the internal and external characteristics of the functions, we extract the function level features and basic-block level features of the functions to be inspected. Second, we employ SVM to recognize a little part of suspicious functions based on function level features. After the preliminary screening, we compute the graph similarity between the vulnerability function and suspicious functions based on their ACFGs. We have implemented our approach CVSSA, and employed the training samples to train the model with previous knowledge to improve the accuracy. We also search several vulnerabilities in the real-world firmware images, the experimental results show that CVSSA can be applied to the realistic scenarios.

In the production process of embedded device, due to the frequent reuse of third-party libraries or development kits, there are large number of same vulnerabilities that appear in more than one firmware. Homology analysis is often used in detecting this kind of vulnerabilities caused by code reuse or third-party reuse and in the homology analysis, the widely used methods are mainly Binary difference analysis, Normalized compression distance, String feature matching and Fuzz hash. But when we use these methods for homology analysis, we found that the detection result is not ideal and there is a high false positive rate. Focusing on this problem, we analyzed the application scenarios of these four methods and their limitations by combining different methods and different types of files and the experiments show that the combination of methods and files have a better performance in homology analysis.

In a world where traditional notions of privacy are increasingly challenged by the myriad companies that collect and analyze our data, it is important that decision-making entities are held accountable for unfair treatments arising from irresponsible data usage. Unfortunately, a lack of appropriate methodologies and tools means that even identifying unfair or discriminatory effects can be a challenge in practice. We introduce the unwarranted associations (UA) framework, a principled methodology for the discovery of unfair, discriminatory, or offensive user treatment in data-driven applications. The UA framework unifies and rationalizes a number of prior attempts at formalizing algorithmic fairness. It uniquely combines multiple investigative primitives and fairness metrics with broad applicability, granular exploration of unfair treatment in user subgroups, and incorporation of natural notions of utility that may account for observed disparities. We instantiate the UA framework in FairTest, the first comprehensive tool that helps developers check data-driven applications for unfair user treatment. It enables scalable and statistically rigorous investigation of associations between application outcomes (such as prices or premiums) and sensitive user attributes (such as race or gender). Furthermore, FairTest provides debugging capabilities that let programmers rule out potential confounders for observed unfair effects. We report on use of FairTest to investigate and in some cases address disparate impact, offensive labeling, and uneven rates of algorithmic error in four data-driven applications. As examples, our results reveal subtle biases against older populations in the distribution of error in a predictive health application and offensive racial labeling in an image tagger.