Privacy-preserving solutions enable companies to offload confidential data to third-party services while fulfilling their government regulations. To accomplish this, they leverage various cryptographic techniques such as Homomorphic Encryption (HE), which allows performing computation on encrypted data. Most HE schemes work in a SIMD fashion, and the data packing method can dramatically affect the running time and memory costs. Finding a packing method that leads to an optimal performant implementation is a hard task. We present a simple and intuitive framework that abstracts the packing decision for the user. We explain its underlying data structures and optimizer, and propose a novel algorithm for performing 2D convolution operations. We used this framework to implement an inference operation over an encrypted HE-friendly AlexNet neural network with large inputs, which runs in around five minutes, several orders of magnitude faster than other state-of-the-art non-interactive HE solutions.
Many applications have security vulnerabilities that can be exploited. It is practically impossible to find all of them due to the NP-complete nature of the testing problem. Security solutions provide defenses against these attacks through continuous application testing, fast-patching of vulnerabilities, automatic deployment of patches, and virtual patching detection techniques deployed in network and endpoint security tools. These techniques are limited by the need to find vulnerabilities before the 'black hats'. We propose an innovative technique to virtually patch vulnerabilities before they are found. We leverage testing techniques for supervised-learning data generation, and show how artificial intelligence techniques can use this data to create predictive deep neural-network models that read an application's input and predict in real time whether it is a potential malicious input. We set up an ahead-of-threat experiment in which we generated data on old versions of an application, and then evaluated the predictive model accuracy on vulnerabilities found years later. Our experiments show ahead-of-threat detection on LibXML2 and LibTIFF vulnerabilities with 91.3% and 93.7% accuracy, respectively. We expect to continue work on this field of research and provide ahead-of-threat virtual patching for more libraries. Success in this research can change the current state of endless racing after application vulnerabilities and put the defenders one step ahead of the attackers.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.