Privacy Preserving Research Articles

Advancing Federated Learning by Addressing Data and System Heterogeneity

In the emerging field of federated learning (FL), the challenge of heterogeneity, both in data and systems, presents significant obstacles to efficient and effective model training. This talk focuses on the latest advancements and solutions addressing these challenges. The first part of the talk delves into data heterogeneity, a core issue in FL, where data distributions across different clients vary widely and affect FL convergence. We will introduce the FedCor framework addressing this by modeling loss correlations between clients using Gaussian Process and reducing expected global loss. External covariate shift in FL is uncovered, demonstrating that normalization layers are crucial, and layer normalization proves effective. Additionally, class imbalance in FL degrades performance, but our proposed Federated Class-balanced Sampling (Fed-CBS) mechanism reduces this imbalance by employing homomorphic encryption for privacy preservation. The second part of the talk shifts focus to system heterogeneity, an equally critical challenge in FL. System heterogeneity involves the varying computational capabilities, network speeds, and other resource-related constraints of participating devices in FL. To address this, we introduce FedSEA, which is a semi-asynchronous FL framework that addresses accuracy drops by balancing aggregation frequency and predicting local update arrival. Additionally, we discuss FedRepre, a framework specifically designed to enhance FL in real-world environments by addressing challenges including unbalanced local dataset distributions, uneven computational capabilities, and fluctuating network speeds. By introducing a client selection mechanism and a specialized server architecture, FedRepre notably improves the efficiency, scalability, and performance of FL systems. Our talk aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the current research and advancements in tackling both data and system heterogeneity in federated learning. We hope to highlight the path forward for FL, underlining its potential in diverse real-world applications while maintaining data privacy and optimizing resource usage.

Edge server enhanced secure and privacy preserving federated learning

Federated learning (FL) has been smoothly embedded into current IoT edge computing architecture, and hatching advanced IoT-FL applications. While so, sensitive messages generated on terminal sides brings privacy issues; and vulnerable terminal devices are easy targets for Byzantine adversaries, they inject malicious data to manipulate the IoT-FL system. Now an inherent dilemma is, the privacy preserving requires anonymous indistinguishable individual characteristics, while the malicious adversary detection requires transparent distinguishable results. Existing fragmented schemes are not able to handle both problems coherently. This time, inherit our previous study, based on the IoT edge computing architecture, we utilize Homomorphic Encryption (HE) and Threshold Secret Sharing (SS) methods, propose a joint scheme (namely, Sec-IoTFL) for anonymous adversary detection. Specifically, we batch encode the clients’ training result vectors (message) as polynomials, and split them as secret pieces with a unified SS key set; then edge server and cloud server joint deal with these secret pieces in a specialized flow, where Byzantine adversaries will be filtered out. The theoretical analysis and solid experimental results suggest, in our scheme, local sensitive data is well preserved, and malicious behavior is precisely screened. Comparing with traditional methods, our Sec-IoTFL scheme shows the superiority in accuracy and efficiency.

Provably secure optimal homomorphic signcryption for satellite-based internet of things

Satellites have long been reliable and widely used mediums for communication. With recent advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT), satellite-based IoT has emerged, enhancing global connectivity by enabling real-time communication between remote sensing devices and central hubs through satellite links. However, secure and authenticated communication between Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites and resource-constrained ground devices remains underexplored. This paper introduces a novel homomorphic signcryption scheme designed for satellite IoT environments. Our scheme employs hyperelliptic curve cryptography and homomorphic encryption to facilitate the privacy-preserving transmission of aggregated data from multiple IoT devices to LEO satellites. We benchmark our homomorphic signcryption scheme against several established schemes tailored for different network environments, including for satellite networks, Identity-based Signcryption for Smart Grids, 3-Factor Authentication schemes and heterogeneous Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) encryption schemes. Our scheme demonstrates substantial improvements in computational efficiency, communication overhead, and storage capacity. It reduces computational costs by 90% to 99%, communication overhead by 41% to 92%, and storage demands by 62% to 93% compared to existing methods. These quantitative findings demonstrate the practical viability of our approach for satellite IoT deployments with limited resources. Additionally, the robustness of our approach is confirmed through formal security validation using BAN Logic and Scyther, which verifies its strong security, optimal performance, and privacy preservation capabilities, making it ideally suited for real-world satellite IoT systems.

HydraGAN: A Cooperative Agent Model for Multi-Objective Data Generation.

Generative adversarial networks have become a de facto approach to generate synthetic data points that resemble their real counterparts. We tackle the situation where the realism of individual samples is not the sole criterion for synthetic data generation. Additional constraints such as privacy preservation, distribution realism, and diversity promotion may also be essential to optimize. To address this challenge, we introduce HydraGAN, a multi-agent network that performs multi-objective synthetic data generation. We theoretically verify that training the HydraGAN system, containing a single generator and an arbitrary number of discriminators, leads to a Nash equilibrium. Experimental results for six datasets indicate that HydraGAN consistently outperforms prior methods in maximizing the Area under the Radar Curve (AuRC), balancing a combination of cooperative or competitive data generation goals.

Nonlinear Analysis and Topological Approaches towards a Deep Intelligent Framework for Privacy Assurance of Autonomous IoT Systems

The proliferation of autonomous Internet of Things (IoT) systems powered by deep learning and artificial intelligence has ushered in a new era of data-driven convenience and automation. However, this innovation comes hand in hand with heightened concerns regarding data privacy. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for Privacy Assurance in Autonomous IoT Systems (PAIS), which amalgamates cutting-edge technologies and best practices to safeguard individual privacy in the era of pervasive connectivity and autonomous decision-making. The PAIS framework comprises multifaceted strategies to address privacy challenges in autonomous IoT ecosystems. It leverages advanced encryption techniques, robust access control mechanisms, and anonymization protocols to ensure data confidentiality. Moreover, differential privacy mechanisms are deployed to protect the identities of individuals within data streams. An innovative aspect of PAIS is the integration of AI-driven privacy monitoring, which constantly evaluates data for potential breaches and triggers immediate responses when anomalies are detected. Ensuring regulatory compliance is a paramount facet of the PAIS framework, as it aligns with evolving data protection regulations globally. Users are afforded control and transparency through intuitive interfaces, enabling them to manage their data usage preferences effectively. The ethical implications of AI in privacy preservation are also examined within the framework, emphasizing the importance of fairness and bias mitigation. PAIS promotes a privacy-by-design approach, where privacy considerations are integral to the inception and development of IoT systems. Regular risk assessments are performed to identify potential privacy vulnerabilities, ensuring that the framework adapts to emerging threats. Education and training programs are provided to stakeholders to foster awareness and adherence to privacy best practices.

Invariant Content Representation for Generalizable Medical Image Segmentation.

Domain generalization (DG) for medical image segmentation due to privacy preservation prefers learning from a single-source domain and expects good robustness on unseen target domains. To achieve this goal, previous methods mainly use data augmentation to expand the distribution of samples and learn invariant content from them. However, most of these methods commonly perform global augmentation, leading to limited augmented sample diversity. In addition, the style of the augmented image is more scattered than the source domain, which may cause the model to overfit the style of the source domain. To address the above issues, we propose an invariant content representation network (ICRN) to enhance the learning of invariant content and suppress the learning of variability styles. Specifically, we first design a gamma correction-based local style augmentation (LSA) to expand the distribution of samples by augmenting foreground and background styles, respectively. Then, based on the augmented samples, we introduce invariant content learning (ICL) to learn generalizable invariant content from both augmented and source-domain samples. Finally, we design domain-specific batch normalization (DSBN) based style adversarial learning (SAL) to suppress the learning of preferences for source-domain styles. Experimental results show that our proposed method improves by 8.74% and 11.33% in overall dice coefficient (Dice) and reduces 15.88 mm and 3.87 mm in overall average surface distance (ASD) on two publicly available cross-domain datasets, Fundus and Prostate, compared to the state-of-the-art DG methods.The code is available at https://github.com/ZMC-IIIM/ICRN-DG .

Ensuring Fairness and Gradient Privacy in Personalized Heterogeneous Federated Learning

With the increasing tension between conflicting requirements of the availability of large amounts of data for effective machine learning-based analysis, and for ensuring their privacy, the paradigm of federated learning has emerged, a distributed machine learning setting where the clients provide only the machine learning model updates to the server rather than the actual data for decision making. However, the distributed nature of federated learning raises specific challenges related to fairness in a heterogeneous setting. This motivates the focus of our article, on the heterogeneity of client devices having different computational capabilities and their impact on fairness in federated learning. Furthermore, our aim is to achieve fairness in heterogeneity while ensuring privacy. As far as we are aware there are no existing works that address all three aspects of fairness, device heterogeneity, and privacy simultaneously in federated learning. In this article, we propose a novel federated learning algorithm with personalization in the context of heterogeneous devices while maintaining compatibility with the gradient privacy preservation techniques of secure aggregation. We analyze the proposed federated learning algorithm under different environments with different datasets and show that it achieves performance close to or greater than the state-of-the-art in heterogeneous device personalized federated learning. We also provide theoretical proofs for the fairness and convergence properties of our proposed algorithm.

Semantic-enabled architecture for auditable privacy-preserving data analysis

Small and medium-sized organisations face challenges in acquiring, storing and analysing personal data, particularly sensitive data (e.g., data of medical nature), due to data protection regulations, such as the GDPR in the EU, which stipulates high standards in data protection. Consequently, these organisations often refrain from collecting data centrally, which means losing the potential of data analytics and learning from aggregated user data. To enable organisations to leverage the full-potential of the collected personal data, two main technical challenges need to be addressed: (i) organisations must preserve the privacy of individual users and honour their consent, while (ii) being able to provide data and algorithmic governance, e.g., in the form of audit trails, to increase trust in the result and support reproducibility of the data analysis tasks performed on the collected data. Such an auditable, privacy-preserving data analysis is currently challenging to achieve, as existing methods and tools only offer partial solutions to this problem, e.g., data representation of audit trails and user consent, automatic checking of usage policies or data anonymisation. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no approach providing an integrated architecture for auditable, privacy-preserving data analysis. To address these gaps, as the main contribution of this paper, we propose the WellFort approach, a semantic-enabled architecture for auditable, privacy-preserving data analysis which provides secure storage for users’ sensitive data with explicit consent, and delivers a trusted, auditable analysis environment for executing data analytic processes in a privacy-preserving manner. Additional contributions include the adaptation of Semantic Web technologies as an integral part of the WellFort architecture, and the demonstration of the approach through a feasibility study with a prototype supporting use cases from the medical domain. Our evaluation shows that WellFort enables privacy preserving analysis of data, and collects sufficient information in an automated way to support its auditability at the same time.

NGMD: next generation malware detection in federated server with deep neural network model for autonomous networks

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks persistently proliferate, impacting individuals and Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Deep learning (DL) models are paving the way to address these challenges and the dynamic nature of potential threats. Traditional detection systems, relying on signature-based techniques, are susceptible to next-generation malware. Integrating DL approaches in cloud-edge/federated servers enhances the resilience of these systems. In the Internet of Things (IoT) and autonomous networks, DL, particularly federated learning, has gained prominence for attack detection. Unlike conventional models (centralized and localized DL), federated learning does not require access to users’ private data for attack detection. This approach is gaining much interest in academia and industry due to its deployment on local and global cloud-edge models. Recent advancements in DL enable training a quality cloud-edge model across various users (collaborators) without exchanging personal information. Federated learning, emphasizing privacy preservation at the cloud-edge terminal, holds significant potential for facilitating privacy-aware learning among collaborators. This paper addresses: (1) The deployment of an optimized deep neural network for network traffic classification. (2) The coordination of federated server model parameters with training across devices in IoT domains. A federated flowchart is proposed for training and aggregating local model updates. (3) The generation of a global model at the cloud-edge terminal after multiple rounds between domains and servers. (4) Experimental validation on the BoT-IoT dataset demonstrates that the federated learning model can reliably detect attacks with efficient classification, privacy, and confidentiality. Additionally, it requires minimal memory space for storing training data, resulting in minimal network delay. Consequently, the proposed framework outperforms both centralized and localized DL models, achieving superior performance.

NERO: NEural algorithmic reasoning for zeRO-day attack detection in the IoT: A hybrid approach

Anomaly detection approaches for network intrusion detection learn to identify deviations from normal behavior on a data-driven basis. However, current approaches strive to infer the degree of abnormality of out-of-distribution samples when these appertain to different zero-day attacks. Inspired by the successes of the neural algorithmic reasoning paradigm to leverage the generalization of rule-based behavior, this paper presents a deep learning strategy for solving zero-day network attack detection and categorization. Moreover, focusing on the particular scenario of the Internet of Things (IoT), the privacy preservation requirement may imply a low training data regime for any learning algorithm. To this respect, the presented framework uses metric-based meta-learning to achieve few-shot learning capabilities. The presented pipeline is called NERO, as it imports the encode-process-decode architecture from the NEural algorithmic reasoning blueprint to converge zeRO-day attack detection policies within constrained training data.

Lightweight Privacy Preserving Scheme for IoT based Smart Home

Background: The Internet of Things (IoT) is the interconnection of physical devices, controllers, sensors and actuators that monitor and share data to another end. In a smart home network, users can remotely access and control home appliances/devices via wireless channels. Due to the increasing demand for smart IoT devices, secure communication also becomes the biggest challenge. Hence, a lightweight authentication scheme is required to secure these devices and maintain user privacy. The protocol proposed is secure against different kinds of attacks and as well as is efficient. Methods: The proposed protocol offers mutual authentication using shared session key establishment. The shared session key is established between the smart device and the home gateway, ensuring that the communication between the smart devices, home gateway, and the user is secure and no third party can access the information shared. Results: Informal and formal analysis of the proposed scheme is done using the AVISPA tool. Finally, the results of the proposed scheme also compare with existing security schemes in terms of computation and communication performance cost. The results show that the proposed scheme is more efficient and robust against different types of attacks than the existing protocols. Conclusion: In the upcoming years, there will be a dedicated network system built inside the home so that the user can have access to the home from anywhere. The proposed scheme offers secure communication between the user, the smart home, and different smart devices. The proposed protocol makes sure that security and privacy are maintained since the smart devices lack computation power which makes them vulnerable to different attacks.

A privacy-preserving federated learning protocol with a secure data aggregation for the Internet of Everything

Although there are significant advantages to the popular use of connected devices on the Internet of Everything, there remain distinct concerns surrounding privacy. Federated learning has been one of the solutions suggested to remediate such issues and looks promising given the collaborative model it provides, which is shared across local gradients Grds without the exposure of raw data. However, the shared Grds threaten the local data with a privacy risk. The central server could produce summarized results. Besides, in federated learning devices with resource constraints frequently dropout. There are only two possible solutions now: efficiency or privacy preservation. Designing a verifiable secure aggregation on the scale of federated learning is still a difficult test. Here, an efficient privacy-preserving federated learning protocol is proposed, with a secure data aggregation for the Internet of Everything. Aggregator encryption effectively masks the local Grds of clients. The central server aggregates the obscured Grds without exposing the local data. At the same time, clients can effectively verify whether the aggregated result is correct. Secondly, the suggested protocol employs a group management mechanism to tolerate the dropout of clients without negatively affecting their further participation in subsequent learning activities. Security analysis shows that the protocol guarantees privacy-preserving federated learning’s security demand. The results of experiments carried out on datasets reveal the highly efficient practical performance of the proposed protocol.

Privacy-preserving quantum federated learning via gradient hiding

Distributed quantum computing, particularly distributed quantum machine learning, has gained substantial prominence for its capacity to harness the collective power of distributed quantum resources, transcending the limitations of individual quantum nodes. Meanwhile, the critical concern of privacy within distributed computing protocols remains a significant challenge, particularly in standard classical federated learning (FL) scenarios where data of participating clients is susceptible to leakage via gradient inversion attacks by the server. This paper presents innovative quantum protocols with quantum communication designed to address the FL problem, strengthen privacy measures, and optimize communication efficiency. In contrast to previous works that leverage expressive variational quantum circuits or differential privacy techniques, we consider gradient information concealment using quantum states and propose two distinct FL protocols, one based on private inner-product estimation and the other on incremental learning. These protocols offer substantial advancements in privacy preservation with low communication resources, forging a path toward efficient quantum communication-assisted FL protocols and contributing to the development of secure distributed quantum machine learning, thus addressing critical privacy concerns in the quantum computing era.

A Reliable and Privacy-Preserving Vehicular Energy Trading Scheme Using Decentralized Identifiers

As the usage of electric vehicles (EVs) expands, various energy management technologies, including battery energy storage systems, are being developed to efficiently charge EVs using various energy sources. In recent years, many blockchain-based energy trading schemes have been proposed for secure energy trading. However, existing schemes cannot fully solve privacy issues and security problems during energy trading. In this paper, we propose a reliable and privacy-preserving vehicular energy trading scheme utilizing decentralized identifier technology. In the proposed scheme, identity information and trading result information are not revealed publicly; this is due to the use of decentralized identifiers and verifiable credential technologies. Additionally, only parties who have successfully conducted energy trading can manage complete transaction information. We also demonstrate our method’s security and ensure privacy preservation by performing informal and formal security analyses. Furthermore, we analyze the performance and security features of the proposed scheme and related works and show that the proposed scheme has competitive performance.

GOVERNMENT SCHEME SPECULATION SYSTEM

The public authority presents a ton of plans for general society, however a large number of them don't fulfill every one individuals. They think their thought is superior to else's. Individuals might communicate their complaints, however it depends on the public authority to conclude which plan to execute. Individuals might feel like their complaints are not being heard and that their thoughts are not considered, at the end of the day, settling on the most ideal choice for everyone is the public authorities. This venture's purpose is to focus on open ideas and afterward carry out the new plan. The Chatbot-Based Government Plan Hypothesis Framework presents a creative way to deal with upgrade resident commitment and availability to government plans. In this framework, chairmen are enabled to enter plot subtleties, view appraisals, and examine client ideas, cultivating straightforwardness and responsibility. A critical element of the framework is the reconciliation of a complex chatbot, utilizing normal language handling to determine client questions and give itemized data about government plans. Residents can undoubtedly interface with the chatbot to ask about qualification standards, application strategies, and other plan related subtleties, smoothing out the most common way of getting to essential data. By joining managerial functionalities with client driven chatbot help, the framework expects to overcome any barrier among residents and government plans, at last advancing more noteworthy interest and comprehension of public drives. Keywords: Privacy Preserving, E-Government, middle-man attack, Government plan Hypothesis framework (GHF)

Chaos in fractals on FPGA – privacy preservation for a secure IoT node

Chaos in fractals on FPGA – privacy preservation for a secure IoT node

Game-theoretic analytics for privacy preservation in Internet of Things networks: A survey

Privacy preservation of the big data generated, deposited, and communicated by smart IoT (Internet of Things) nodes is the major challenge in IoT networks. Anonymization, encryption, and routing protocol constitute the existing prevalent privacy-preserving approaches, most of which have successfully implemented the privacy preservation of data query, data mining and data aggregation. Nevertheless, there has been a gradual switch in the selection of privacy-preserving technology. Predictive game-theoretic analytics for privacy preservation in IoT networks has received significant attention since it can effectively settle the conflicts between attackers and defenders. In this survey, we explain the basics of various games mainly applied for IoT privacy preservation, such as simultaneous game, stochastic game, bargain game, differential game, mean field game, aggregation game, Stackelberg game, signaling game, repeated game, evolutionary game, and cooperative game. We then explore different applications for game theory-based privacy preservation in IoT networks, followed by discussing the differences among the existing solution of privacy-preserving issues using different games under specific IoT scenarios. Moreover, we consider the challenges and outline future research directions. In conclusion, this survey not only presents existing work on applying game theory to preserve privacy in current IoT networks including smart grids, intelligent transportation systems, crowdsensing, edge-based IoT, integrated energy systems, blockchain IoT, Social IoT and Industrial IoT, but it also encourages researches to further dig deeper into rare areas.

Deep Sea Fisherman’s App using WWSN

In this study, we present a method for recognizing daily living activities using Doppler sensors with extended detection ranges, addressing key challenges in cost, accuracy, user convenience, and privacy preservation. We highlight the importance of accurate and affordable activity recognition for enabling advanced services in energy-saving home appliance control and other daily life applications. The proposed method leverages Doppler sensors' capabilities to detect dynamic objects and achieve precise recognition of a wide range of activities, including location-independent tasks like reading. Our evaluation includes optimizing recognition accuracy through logistic regression and assessing ensemble methods to enhance performance. Additionally, we explore the impact of sensor reduction strategies on recognition accuracy, demonstrating the potential of this approach to streamline sensor deployment while maintaining effectiveness. This research contributes to advancing sensor-based technologies for improving everyday life services, emphasizing practical solutions that prioritize cost-effectiveness and user experience

P3LS: Partial Least Squares under privacy preservation

Modern manufacturing value chains require intelligent orchestration of processes across company borders in order to maximize profits while fostering social and environmental sustainability. However, the implementation of integrated, systems-level approaches for data-informed decision-making along value chains is currently hampered by privacy concerns associated with cross-organizational data exchange and integration. We here propose Privacy-Preserving Partial Least Squares (P3LS) regression, a novel federated learning technique that enables cross-organizational data integration and process modeling with privacy guarantees. P3LS involves a singular value decomposition (SVD) based PLS algorithm and employs removable, random masks generated by a trusted authority in order to protect the privacy of the data contributed by each data holder. We demonstrate the capability of P3LS to vertically integrate process data along a hypothetical value chain consisting of three parties and to improve the prediction performance on several process-related key performance indicators. Furthermore, we show the numerical equivalence of P3LS and PLS model components on both a synthetic and a real-world dataset and provide a thorough privacy analysis of the former. Moreover, we propose privacy-preserving explained X- and Y-block variance computations for determining the contribution of each data holder to the federated process model as a basis to incentivize data federation and fair profit-sharing.

Identifying autism spectrum disorder from multi-modal data with privacy-preserving

The application of deep learning models to precision medical diagnosis often requires the aggregation of large amounts of medical data to effectively train high-quality models. However, data privacy protection mechanisms make it difficult to perform medical data collection from different medical institutions. In autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis, automatic diagnosis using multimodal information from heterogeneous data has not yet achieved satisfactory performance. To address the privacy preservation issue as well as to improve ASD diagnosis, we propose a deep learning framework using multimodal feature fusion and hypergraph neural networks for disease prediction in federated learning (FedHNN). By introducing the federated learning strategy, each local model is trained and computed independently in a distributed manner without data sharing, allowing rapid scaling of medical datasets to achieve robust and scalable deep learning predictive models. To further improve the performance with privacy preservation, we improve the hypergraph model for multimodal fusion to make it suitable for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis tasks by capturing the complementarity and correlation between modalities through a hypergraph fusion strategy. The results demonstrate that our proposed federated learning-based prediction model is superior to all local models and outperforms other deep learning models. Overall, our proposed FedHNN has good results in the work of using multi-site data to improve the performance of ASD identification.