EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Derui Wang
dblp:170/8837
· DBLP profile ↗
31ranked-venue papers
6as first author
29since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0003-1388-7715ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Security and privacy · 20 · 4 first-author · 18 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 7 · 1 first-author · 7 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 3 · 3 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 since 2021Computer networks · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Failures to Surface Harmful Contents in Video Large Language ModelsabstractVideo Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) are increasingly deployed on numerous critical applications, where users rely on auto-generated summaries while casually skimming the video stream. We show that this interaction hides a critical safety gap: if harmful content is embedded in a video, either as full-frame inserts or as small corner patches, state-of-the-art VideoLLMs rarely mention the harmful content in the output, despite its clear visibility to human viewers. A root-cause analysis reveals three compounding design flaws: (1) insufficient temporal coverage resulting from the sparse, uniformly spaced frame sampling used by most leading VideoLLMs, (2) spatial information loss introduced by aggressive token downsampling within sampled frames, and (3) encoder-decoder disconnection, whereby visual cues are only weakly utilized during text generation. Leveraging these insights, we craft three zero-query black-box attacks, aligning with these flaws in the processing pipeline. Our large-scale evaluation across five leading VideoLLMs shows that the harmfulness omission rate exceeds 90\% in most cases. Even when harmful content is clearly present in all frames, these models consistently fail to identify it. These results underscore a fundamental vulnerability in current VideoLLMs' designs and highlight the urgent need for sampling strategies, token compression, and decoding mechanisms that guarantee semantic coverage rather than speed alone. Derui Wang, Jingling Xue, Jin Song Dong 0001 |
AAAI | 3 |
| 2026 | Re-Key-Free, Risky-Free: Adaptable Model Usage Control
Zhongkui Ma, Xinguo Feng, Chuan Yan, Dongge Liu, Ruoxi Sun 0001, Derui Wang, Minhui Xue 0001, Guangdong Bai |
EuroS&P | 7 |
| 2026 | Bones of Contention: Exploring Query-Efficient Attacks Against Skeleton Recognition SystemsabstractSkeleton action recognition models have secured more attention than video-based ones in various applications due to privacy preservation and lower storage requirements. Skeleton data are typically transmitted to cloud servers for action recognition, with results returned to clients via Apps/APIs. However, the vulnerability of skeletal models against adversarial perturbations gradually reveals the unreliability of these systems. Existing black-box attacks all operate in a decision-based manner, resulting in numerous queries that hinder efficiency and feasibility in real-world applications. Moreover, all attacks off the shelf focus on only restricted perturbations, while ignoring model weaknesses when encountered with non-semantic perturbations. In this paper, we propose two query-effIcient Skeletal Adversarial AttaCks, ISAAC-K and ISAAC-N. As a black-box attack, ISAAC-K utilizes Grad-CAM in a surrogate model to extract key joints where minor sparse perturbations are then added to fool the classifier. To guarantee natural adversarial motions, we introduce constraints of both bone length and temporal consistency. ISAAC-K finds stronger adversarial examples on ℓ∞norm, which can encompass those on other norms. Exhaustive experiments substantiate that ISAAC-K can uplift the attack efficiency of the perturbations under 10 skeletal models. Additionally, as a byproduct, ISAAC-N fools the classifier by replacing skeletons unrelated to the action. We surprisingly find that skeletal models are vulnerable to large perturbations where the part-wise non-semantic joints are just replaced, leading to a query-free no-box attack without any prior knowledge. Based on that, four adaptive defenses are eventually proposed to improve the robustness of skeleton recognition models. Derui Wang, Minhui Xue 0001, Chenxiong Qian, Jin Song Dong 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 3 |
| 2025 | LAMPS '25: ACM CCS Workshop on Large AI Systems and Models with Privacy and Security AnalysisabstractWith large AI systems and models (LAMs) playing an ever-growing role across diverse applications, their impact on the privacy and cybersecurity of critical infrastructure has become a pressing concern. The LAMPS workshop is dedicated to tackling these emerging challenges, promoting dialogue on cutting-edge developments and ethical issues in safeguarding LAMs within critical infrastructure contexts. Bringing together leading experts from around the world, this workshop will delve into the complex privacy and cybersecurity risks posed by LAMs in critical sectors. Attendees will explore innovative solutions, exchange best practices, and contribute to shaping the future research agenda, emphasizing the crucial balance between advancing AI technologies and securing critical digital and physical infrastructures. Kwok-Yan Lam, Xiaoning Liu 0002, Derui Wang, Bo Li 0026, Wenyuan Xu 0001, Jieshan Chen, Minhui Xue 0001, Xingliang Yuan, Guangdong Bai, Shuo Wang 0012 |
CCS | 3 |
| 2025 | MAID: Model Attribution via Inverse DiffusionabstractThe surge in AI-generated images, blending authentic and synthetic content, raises security concerns and complicates model attribution, especially with limited transparency. Existing methods either struggle to attribute across multiple frameworks or rely on additional conditions, such as textual descriptions and white-box access to the source model, limiting their practicality and effectiveness in real-world scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce Model Attribution via Inverse Diffusion (MAID), the first framework-agnostic and self-sufficient approach that leverages the source model features extracted by diffusion models, which also works for images generated from GANs. By employing the inverse diffusion process, we are able to utilize pre-trained Diffusion Models as Denoising Autoencoders, mapping images into a latent space and extracting the Diffusion Model Activations (DMA). This mapping effectively captures the unique characteristics of images originating from different source models, including authentic images, which showcase distinct latent Gaussian signatures. Experimental results show that, even in data-asymmetric unfair comparisons, the attribution classifier trained with our proposed DMA achieves approximately 15% and 3% higher ACC compared to SOTA methods on the DiffusionForensics and Artifact datasets, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/Zhu-Luyu/MAID. Luyu Zhu, Jiayu Yao, Luwen Zhao, Derui Wang, Jie Hao 0001 |
ICASSP | 7 |
| 2025 | Provably Unlearnable Data Examples
Derui Wang, Minhui Xue 0001, Bo Li 0026, Seyit Ahmet Çamtepe, Liming Zhu 0001 |
NDSS | 1 |
| 2025 | Reinforcement Unlearning
Dayong Ye, Tianqing Zhu, Congcong Zhu, Derui Wang, Kun Gao 0006, Zewei Shi, Sheng Shen 0005, Wanlei Zhou 0001, Minhui Xue 0001 |
NDSS | 4 |
| 2025 | ALMGuard: Safety Shortcuts and Where to Find Them as Guardrails for Audio-Language ModelsabstractRecent advances in Audio-Language Models (ALMs) have significantly improved multimodal understanding capabilities. However, the introduction of the audio modality also brings new and unique vulnerability vectors. Previous studies have proposed jailbreak attacks that specifically target ALMs, revealing that defenses directly transferred from traditional audio adversarial attacks or text-based Large Language Model (LLM) jailbreaks are largely ineffective against these ALM-specific threats.
To address this issue, we propose ALMGuard, the first defense framework tailored to ALMs.
Based on the assumption that safety-aligned shortcuts naturally exist in ALMs, we design a method to identify universal Shortcut Activation Perturbations (SAPs) that serve as triggers that activate the safety shortcuts to safeguard ALMs at inference time.
To better sift out effective triggers while preserving the model’s utility on benign tasks, we further propose Mel-Gradient Sparse Mask (M-GSM), which restricts perturbations to Mel-frequency bins that are sensitive to jailbreaks but insensitive to speech understanding.
Both theoretical analyses and empirical results demonstrate the robustness of our method against both seen and unseen attacks. Overall, \MethodName reduces the average success rate of advanced ALM-specific jailbreak attacks to 4.6\% across four models, while maintaining comparable utility on benign benchmarks, establishing it as the new state of the art. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/WeifeiJin/ALMGuard. Weifei Jin, Junjie Su, Minhui Xue 0001, Jie Hao 0001, Jin Song Dong 0001, Derui Wang |
NeurIPS | 8 |
| 2025 | E2E-VGuard: Adversarial Prevention for Production LLM-based End-To-End Speech SynthesisabstractRecent advancements in speech synthesis technology have enriched our daily lives, with high-quality and human-like audio widely adopted across real-world applications. However, malicious exploitation like voice-cloning fraud poses severe security risks. Existing defense techniques struggle to address the production large language model (LLM)-based speech synthesis. While previous studies have considered the protection for fine-tuning synthesizers, they assume manually annotated transcripts. Given the labor intensity of manual annotation, end-to-end (E2E) systems leveraging automatic speech recognition (ASR) to generate transcripts are becoming increasingly prevalent, e.g., voice cloning via commercial APIs. Therefore, this E2E speech synthesis also requires new security mechanisms. To tackle these challenges, we propose E2E-VGuard, a proactive defense framework for two emerging threats: (1) production LLM-based speech synthesis, and (2) the novel attack arising from ASR-driven E2E scenarios. Specifically, we employ the encoder ensemble with a feature extractor to protect timbre, while ASR-targeted adversarial examples disrupt pronunciation. Moreover, we incorporate the psychoacoustic model to ensure perturbative imperceptibility. For a comprehensive evaluation, we test 16 open-source synthesizers and 3 commercial APIs across Chinese and English datasets, confirming E2E-VGuard's effectiveness in timbre and pronunciation protection. Real-world deployment validation is also conducted. Our code and demo page are available at https://wxzyd123.github.io/e2e-vguard/. Derui Wang, Yifan Mi, Minhui Xue 0001, Jie Hao 0001 |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2025 | Whispering Under the Eaves: Protecting User Privacy Against Commercial and LLM-powered Automatic Speech Recognition Systems
Weifei Jin, Junjie Su, Derui Wang, Yedi Zhang, Minhui Xue 0001, Jie Hao 0001, Jin Song Dong 0001, Yixian Yang |
USENIX Security Symposium | 4 |
| 2025 | CAMP in the Odyssey: Provably Robust Reinforcement Learning with Certified Radius Maximization
Derui Wang, Kristen Moore, Diksha Goel, Minjune Kim, Gang Li 0009, Yang Li 0182, Robin Doss, Minhui Xue 0001, Bo Li 0026, Seyit Ahmet Çamtepe, Liming Zhu 0001 |
USENIX Security Symposium | 1 |
| 2025 | SafeSpeech: Robust and Universal Voice Protection Against Malicious Speech Synthesis
Derui Wang, Qianyi Yang, Pengyang Huang, Junhan Pu, Jie Hao 0001, Yixian Yang |
USENIX Security Symposium | 2 |
| 2025 | AI Model Modulation with Logits RedistributionabstractLarge-scale models are typically adapted to meet the diverse requirements of model owners and users.However, maintaining multiple specialized versions of the model is inefficient.In response, we propose Aim, a novel model modulation paradigm that enables a single model to exhibit diverse behaviors to meet the specific end requirements.Aim enables two key modulation modes: utility and focus modulations.The former provides model owners with dynamic control over output quality to deliver varying utility levels, and the latter offers users precise control to shift model's focused input features.Aim introduces a logits redistribution strategy that operates in a training data-agnostic and retraining-free manner.We establish a formal foundation to ensure Aim's regulation capability, based on the statistical properties of logits ordering via joint probability distributions.Our evaluation confirms Aim's practicality and versatility for AI model modulation, with tasks spanning image classification, semantic segmentation and text generation, and prevalent architectures including ResNet, SegFormer and Llama. Zhongkui Ma, Xinguo Feng, Zhiyang Mei, Ethan Ma, Derui Wang, Minhui Xue 0001, Guangdong Bai |
WWW | 6 |
| 2025 | QUEEN: Query Unlearning Against Model ExtractionabstractModel extraction attacks currently pose a non-negligible threat to the security and privacy of deep learning models. By querying the model with a small dataset and using the query results as the ground-truth labels, an adversary can steal a piracy model with performance comparable to the original model. Two key issues that cause the threat are, on the one hand, accurate and unlimited queries can be obtained by the adversary; on the other hand, the adversary can aggregate the query results to train the model step by step. The existing defenses usually employ model watermarking or fingerprinting to protect the ownership. However, these methods cannot proactively prevent the violation from happening. To mitigate the threat, we propose QUEEN (QUEry unlEarNing) that proactively launches counterattacks on potential model extraction attacks from the very beginning. To limit the potential threat, QUEEN has sensitivity measurement and outputs perturbation that prevents the adversary from training a piracy model with high performance. In sensitivity measurement, QUEEN measures the single query sensitivity by its distance from the center of its cluster in the feature space. To reduce the learning accuracy of attacks, for the highly sensitive query batch, QUEEN applies query unlearning, which is implemented by gradient reverse to perturb the softmax output such that the piracy model will generate reverse gradients to worsen its performance unconsciously. Experiments show that QUEEN outperforms the state-of-the-art defenses against various model extraction attacks with a relatively low cost to the model accuracy. The artifact is publicly available athttps://github.com/MaraPapMann/QUEEN. Huajie Chen, Tianqing Zhu, Lefeng Zhang, Bo Liu 0001, Derui Wang, Wanlei Zhou 0001, Minhui Xue 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 5 |
| 2025 | TrapNet: Model Inversion Defense via TrapdoorabstractModel inversion (MI) attacks, for which effective defense strategies are still lacking, pose significant risks to privacy by reconstructing private training data through access to well-trained classifiers. Addressing this concern, this study introduces TrapNet, designed to defend against advanced MI attacks while maintaining good model utility. TrapNet intentionally injects trapdoors into the classification manifold of the protected target model. In this way, TrapNet can effectively mislead MI attack optimization. Specifically, TrapNet leverages a conditional GAN (cGAN) trained on the private dataset to generate diverse and realistic trapdoor samples. In addition, we propose a graph-matching self-obfuscation strategy and an entropy regularization technique to optimize trapdoor injection while preserving model utility. Compared to the existing defense, TrapNet can provide universal protection to all target classes without access to any auxiliary public data. Extensive experiments on CelebA, VGG-Face, and VGG-Face2 datasets demonstrate TrapNet’s superior performance over existing defenses, including the most advanced NetGuard and BiDO, against state-of-the-art model inversion attacks, i.e., PLG-MI, LOMMA, and Plug&Play. Wanlun Ma, Derui Wang, Yiliao Song, Minhui Xue 0001, Sheng Wen, Zhengdao Li, Yang Xiang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 2 |
| 2025 | Anonymous and Efficient (t, n)-Threshold Ownership Transfer for Cloud EMRs AuditingabstractIn cloud Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), health-related private information such as genetics and diseases is contained. Thus, the secure ownership transfer protocol should protect users’ privacy. In certain scenarios, some users, including patients, doctors, medical and research institutions, may be offline. As a result, existing protocols cannot be directly employed. Motivated by these observations, in this paper we propose a secure and efficient ownership transfer for cloud EMRs auditing protocol. Specifically, our protocol allows the existence of offline users while ensuring users anonymity, it is achieved using different signature constructions. Additionally, a tracing mechanism is introduced to safeguard against malicious users. We rigorously prove the security of our protocol, comprehensively evaluate the performance of it, and compare our protocol with a few closely relevant protocols. According to the evaluations, our protocol significantly improves ownership transfer efficiency while achieving additional functionalities, including public verifiability, multi-ownership transferability, anonymity, and traceability. Yamei Wang, Yuexin Zhang, Ayong Ye, Jian Shen 0001, Derui Wang, Yang Xiang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 5 |
| 2024 | LogoStyleFool: Vitiating Video Recognition Systems via Logo Style TransferabstractVideo recognition systems are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Recent studies show that style transfer-based and patch-based unrestricted perturbations can effectively improve attack efficiency. These attacks, however, face two main challenges: 1) Adding large stylized perturbations to all pixels reduces the naturalness of the video and such perturbations can be easily detected. 2) Patch-based video attacks are not extensible to targeted attacks due to the limited search space of reinforcement learning that has been widely used in video attacks recently. In this paper, we focus on the video black-box setting and propose a novel attack framework named LogoStyleFool by adding a stylized logo to the clean video. We separate the attack into three stages: style reference selection, reinforcement-learning-based logo style transfer, and perturbation optimization. We solve the first challenge by scaling down the perturbation range to a regional logo, while the second challenge is addressed by complementing an optimization stage after reinforcement learning. Experimental results substantiate the overall superiority of LogoStyleFool over three state-of-the-art patch-based attacks in terms of attack performance and semantic preservation. Meanwhile, LogoStyleFool still maintains its performance against two existing patch-based defense methods. We believe that our research is beneficial in increasing the attention of the security community to such subregional style transfer attacks. Xi Xiao 0001, Derui Wang, Minhui Xue 0001 |
AAAI | 4 |
| 2024 | Optimizing Cyber Defense in Dynamic Active Directories Through Reinforcement Learning
Diksha Goel, Kristen Moore, Mingyu Guo 0001, Derui Wang, Minjune Kim, Seyit Ahmet Çamtepe |
ESORICS (1) | 4 |
| 2024 | A Fine-Grained Ownership Transfer Protocol for Cloud EMRs Auditing
Yamei Wang, Yuexin Zhang, Weijing You, Yunru Ma, Derui Wang |
ICA3PP (4) | 5 |
| 2024 | Effects of Exponential Gaussian Distribution on (Double Sampling) Randomized SmoothingabstractRandomized Smoothing (RS) is currently a scalable certified defense method providing robustness certification against adversarial examples. Although significant progress has been achieved in providing defenses against $\ell_p$ adversaries, the interaction between the smoothing distribution and the robustness certification still remains vague. In this work, we comprehensively study the effect of two families of distributions, named Exponential Standard Gaussian (ESG) and Exponential General Gaussian (EGG) distributions, on Randomized Smoothing and Double Sampling Randomized Smoothing (DSRS). We derive an analytic formula for ESG’s certified radius, which converges to the origin formula of RS as the dimension $d$ increases. Additionally, we prove that EGG can provide tighter constant factors than DSRS in providing $\Omega(\sqrt{d})$ lower bounds of $\ell_2$ certified radius, and thus further addresses the curse of dimensionality in RS. Our experiments on real-world datasets confirm our theoretical analysis of the ESG distributions, that they provide almost the same certification under different exponents $\eta$ for both RS and DSRS. In addition, EGG brings a significant improvement to the DSRS certification, but the mechanism can be different when the classifier properties are different. Compared to the primitive DSRS, the increase in certified accuracy provided by EGG is prominent, up to 6.4% on ImageNet. Youwei Shu, Xi Xiao 0001, Derui Wang, Siji Chen, Minhui Xue 0001, Linyi Li 0001, Bo Li 0026 |
ICML | 3 |
| 2024 | LocGuard: A Location Privacy Defender for Image SharingabstractThe privacy of social media users is a major concern when the users share their content to the public. Sensitive information such as the location of the users can be inferred from relevant content without arising the awareness of the users. With blooming services provided by social media platforms, the users have more freedom to share information via diverse data formats. The multi-modality of the shared information may, in return, worsen the private information leakage caused by inference attacks. In this paper, we first examine the problem of location inference on multi-modal data comprised of textual information and visual content. It is observed that the visual content, such as photos shared by social media users, can significantly boost the success rate of location inference. To thwart adversaries who are driven by visual-related data, we propose a defence that mitigates the threat of location privacy breach under an imperceptible utility loss. Our defence, namely LocGuard, perturbs the photos in a one-off manner before sharing them. The perturbations, along with a simple but effective bipartite perturbation strategy, ensure that LocGuard is resistant to adaptive adversaries who can perform adversarial training based on the perturbed photos. Moreover, LocGuard remains effective against open-set adversaries whose data categories in the training dataset are hidden from the defender. In the evaluation, we conduct extensive experiments based on real-world datasets and compare our work with previous methods. The results show that LocGuard significantly outperforms the existing defences. In particular, LocGuard not only achieves better privacy protection and utility preservation for image sharing, but also can effectively defend against adversarial-training-capable attackers. Wanlun Ma, Derui Wang, Chao Chen 0015, Sheng Wen, Gaolei Fei, Yang Xiang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 2 |
| 2023 | The "Beatrix" Resurrections: Robust Backdoor Detection via Gram Matrices
Wanlun Ma, Derui Wang, Ruoxi Sun 0001, Minhui Xue 0001, Sheng Wen, Yang Xiang 0001 |
NDSS | 2 |
| 2023 | Flow-Attention-based Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Network for 3D Mask DetectionabstractAnti-spoofing detection has become a necessity for face recognition systems due to the security threat posed by spoofing attacks. Despite great success in traditional attacks, most deep-learning-based methods perform poorly in 3D masks, which can highly simulate real faces in appearance and structure, suffering generalizability insufficiency while focusing only on the spatial domain with single frame input. This has been mitigated by the recent introduction of a biomedical technology called rPPG (remote photoplethysmography). However, rPPG-based methods are sensitive to noisy interference and require at least one second (> 25 frames) of observation time, which induces high computational overhead. To address these challenges, we propose a novel 3D mask detection framework, called FASTEN (Flow-Attention-based Spatio-Temporal aggrEgation Network). We tailor the network for focusing more on fine-grained details in large movements, which can eliminate redundant spatio-temporal feature interference and quickly capture splicing traces of 3D masks in fewer frames. Our proposed network contains three key modules: 1) a facial optical flow network to obtain non-RGB inter-frame flow information; 2) flow attention to assign different significance to each frame; 3) spatio-temporal aggregation to aggregate high-level spatial features and temporal transition features. Through extensive experiments, FASTEN only requires five frames of input and outperforms eight competitors for both intra-dataset and cross-dataset evaluations in terms of multiple detection metrics. Moreover, FASTEN has been deployed in real-world mobile devices for practical 3D mask detection. Yian Li, Yumeng Zhu, Derui Wang, Minhui Xue 0001 |
NeurIPS | 4 |
| 2023 | StyleFool: Fooling Video Classification Systems via Style TransferabstractVideo classification systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which can create severe security problems in video verification. Current black-box attacks need a large number of queries to succeed, resulting in high computational overhead in the process of attack. On the other hand, attacks with restricted perturbations are ineffective against defenses such as denoising or adversarial training. In this paper, we focus on unrestricted perturbations and propose StyleFool, a black-box video adversarial attack via style transfer to fool the video classification system. StyleFool first utilizes color theme proximity to select the best style image, which helps avoid unnatural details in the stylized videos. Meanwhile, the target class confidence is additionally considered in targeted attacks to influence the output distribution of the classifier by moving the stylized video closer to or even across the decision boundary. A gradient-free method is then employed to further optimize the adversarial perturbations. We carry out extensive experiments to evaluate StyleFool on two standard datasets, UCF-101 and HMDB-51. The experimental results demonstrate that StyleFool outperforms the state-of-the-art adversarial attacks in terms of both the number of queries and the robustness against existing defenses. Moreover, 50% of the stylized videos in untargeted attacks do not need any query since they can already fool the video classification model. Furthermore, we evaluate the indistinguishability through a user study to show that the adversarial samples of StyleFool look imperceptible to human eyes, despite unrestricted perturbations. Xi Xiao 0001, Ruoxi Sun 0001, Derui Wang, Minhui Xue 0001, Sheng Wen |
SP | 4 |
| 2022 | Daedalus: Breaking Nonmaximum Suppression in Object Detection via Adversarial ExamplesabstractThis article demonstrates that nonmaximum suppression (NMS), which is commonly used in object detection (OD) tasks to filter redundant detection results, is no longer secure. Considering that NMS has been an integral part of OD systems, thwarting the functionality of NMS can result in unexpected or even lethal consequences for such systems. In this article, an adversarial example attack that triggers malfunctioning of NMS in OD models is proposed. The attack, namely, Daedalus, compresses the dimensions of detection boxes to evade NMS. As a result, the final detection output contains extremely dense false positives. This can be fatal for many OD applications, such as autonomous vehicles and surveillance systems. The attack can be generalized to different OD models, such that the attack cripples various OD applications. Furthermore, a way of crafting robust adversarial examples is developed by using an ensemble of popular detection models as the substitutes. Considering the pervasive nature of model reuse in real-world OD scenarios, Daedalus examples crafted based on an ensemble of substitutes can launch attacks without knowing the parameters of the victim models. The experimental results demonstrate that the attack effectively stops NMS from filtering redundant bounding boxes. As the evaluation results suggest, Daedalus increases the false positive rate in detection results to 99.9% and reduces the mean average precision scores to 0, while maintaining a low cost of distortion on the original inputs. It also demonstrates that the attack can be practically launched against real-world OD systems via printed posters. Derui Wang, Sheng Wen, Qing-Long Han, Surya Nepal, Xiangyu Zhang 0001, Yang Xiang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Cybern. | 1 |
| 2022 | Backdoor Attack on Machine Learning Based Android Malware DetectorsabstractMachine learning (ML) has been widely used for malware detection on different operating systems, including Android. To keep up with malware's evolution, the detection models usually need to be retrained periodically (e.g., every month) based on the data collected in the wild. However, this leads to poisoning attacks, specifically backdoor attacks, which subvert the learning process and create evasion ‘tunnels’ for manipulated malware samples. To date, we have not found any prior research that explored this critical problem in Android malware detectors. Although there are already some similar works in the image classification field, most of those similar ideas cannot be borrowed to solve this problem, because the assumption that the attacker has full control of the training data collection or labelling process is not realistic in real-world malware detection scenarios. In this article, we are motivated to study the backdoor attack against Android malware detectors. The backdoor is created and injected into the model stealthily without access to the training data and activated when an app with the trigger is presented. We demonstrate the proposed attack on four typical malware detectors that have been widely discussed in academia. Our evaluation shows that the proposed backdoor attack achieves up to 99 percent evasion rate over 750 malware samples. Moreover, the above successful attack is realised by a small size of triggers (only four features) and a very low data poisoning rate (0.3 percent). Xiao Chen 0002, Derui Wang, Sheng Wen, M. Ejaz Ahmed, Seyit Ahmet Çamtepe, Yang Xiang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 3 |
| 2022 | Defending Against Adversarial Attack Towards Deep Neural Networks Via Collaborative Multi-Task TrainingabstractDeep neural networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples which contain human-imperceptible perturbations. A series of defending methods, either proactive defence or reactive defence, have been proposed in the recent years. However, most of the methods can only handle specific attacks. For example, proactive defending methods are invalid against grey-box or white-box attacks, while reactive defending methods are challenged by low-distortion adversarial examples or transferring adversarial examples. This becomes a critical problem since a defender usually does not have the type of attack asa prioriknowledge. Moreover, existing two-pronged defences (e.g., MagNet), which take advantage of both proactive and reactive methods, have been reported as broken under transferring attacks. To address this problem, this article proposed a novel defensive framework based on collaborative multi-task training, aiming at providing defence for different types of attacks. The proposed defence first encodes training labels into label pairs and counters black-box attacks leveraging adversarial training supervised by the encoded label pairs. The defence further constructs a detector to identify and reject high-confidence adversarial examples that bypass the black-box defence. In addition, the proposed collaborative architecture can prevent adversaries from finding valid adversarial examples when the defence strategy is exposed. In the experiments, we evaluated our defence against four state-of-the-art attacks on$MNIST$and$CIFAR10$datasets. The results showed that our defending method achieved up to 96.3 percent classification accuracy on black-box adversarial examples, and detected up to 98.7 percent of the high confidence adversarial examples. It only decreased the model accuracy on benign example classification by 2.1 percent for the$CIFAR10$dataset. Derui Wang, Sheng Wen, Surya Nepal, Yang Xiang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 1 |
| 2022 | On the Neural Backdoor of Federated Generative Models in Edge ComputingabstractEdge computing, as a relatively recent evolution of cloud computing architecture, is the newest way for enterprises to distribute computational power and lower repetitive referrals to central authorities. In the edge computing environment, Generative Models (GMs) have been found to be valuable and useful in machine learning tasks such as data augmentation and data pre-processing. Federated learning and distributed learning refer to training machine learning models in the edge computing network. However, federated learning and distributed learning also bring additional risks to GMs since all peers in the network have access to the model under training. In this article, we study the vulnerabilities of federated GMs to data-poisoning-based backdoor attacks via gradient uploading. We additionally enhance the attack to reduce the required poisonous data samples and cope with dynamic network environments. Last but not least, the attacks are formally proven to be stealthy and effective toward federated GMs. According to the experiments, neural backdoors can be successfully embedded by including merely 5\% poisonous samples in the local training dataset of an attacker. Derui Wang, Sheng Wen, Alireza Jolfaei, Mohammad Sayad Haghighi, Surya Nepal, Yang Xiang 0001 |
ACM Trans. Internet Techn. | 1 |
| 2021 | Man-in-the-Middle Attacks Against Machine Learning Classifiers Via Malicious Generative ModelsabstractDeep Neural Networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to deliberately crafted adversarial examples. In the past few years, many efforts have been spent on exploring query-optimisation attacks to find adversarial examples of either black-box or white-box DNN models, as well as the defending countermeasures against those attacks. In this article, we explore vulnerabilities of DNN models under the umbrella of Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks, which have not been investigated before. From the perspective of an MitM adversary, the aforementioned adversarial example attacks are not viable anymore. First, such attacks must acquire the outputs from the models multiple times before actually launching attacks, which is difficult for the MitM adversary in practice. Second, such attacks are one-off and cannot be directly generalised onto new data examples, which decreases the rate of return for the attacker. In contrast, using generative models to craft adversarial examples on the fly can mitigate the drawbacks. However, the adversarial capability of the generative models, such as Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE), has not been extensively studied. Therefore, given a classifier, we investigate using a VAE decoder to either transform benign inputs to their adversarial counterparts or decode outputs from benign VAE encoders to be adversarial examples. The proposed method can endue more capability to MitM attackers. Based on our evaluation, the proposed attack can achieve above 95 percent success rates on both MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets, which is better or comparable with state-of-the-art query-optimisation attacks. In the meantime, the attack is 104times faster than the query-optimisation attacks. Derui Wang, Sheng Wen, Surya Nepal, Yang Xiang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 1 |
| 2020 | Android HIV: A Study of Repackaging Malware for Evading Machine-Learning DetectionabstractMachine learning-based solutions have been successfully employed for the automatic detection of malware on Android. However, machine learning models lack robustness to adversarial examples, which are crafted by adding carefully chosen perturbations to the normal inputs. So far, the adversarial examples can only deceive detectors that rely on syntactic features (e.g., requested permissions, API calls,etc.), and the perturbations can only be implemented by simply modifying application’s manifest. While recent Android malware detectors rely more on semantic features from Dalvik bytecode rather than manifest, existing attacking/defending methods are no longer effective. In this paper, we introduce a new attacking method that generates adversarial examples of Android malware and evades being detected by the current models. To this end, we propose a method of applying optimal perturbations onto Android APK that can successfully deceive the machine learning detectors. We develop an automated tool to generate the adversarial examples without human intervention. In contrast to existing works, the adversarial examples crafted by our method can also deceive recent machine learning-based detectors that rely on semantic features such as control-flow-graph. The perturbations can also be implemented directly onto APK’s Dalvik bytecode rather than Android manifest to evade from recent detectors. We demonstrate our attack on two state-of-the-art Android malware detection schemes, MaMaDroid and Drebin. Our results show that the malware detection rates decreased from 96% to 0% in MaMaDroid, and from 97% to 0% in Drebin, with just a small number of codes to be inserted into the APK. Xiao Chen 0002, Derui Wang, Sheng Wen, Jun Zhang 0010, Surya Nepal, Yang Xiang 0001, Kui Ren 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 3 |
| 2019 | STRIP: a defence against trojan attacks on deep neural networksabstractA recent trojan attack on deep neural network (DNN) models is one insidious variant of data poisoning attacks. Trojan attacks exploit an effective backdoor created in a DNN model by leveraging the difficulty in interpretability of the learned model to misclassify any inputs signed with the attacker's chosen trojan trigger. Since the trojan trigger is a secret guarded and exploited by the attacker, detecting such trojan inputs is a challenge, especially at run-time when models are in active operation. This work builds STRong Intentional Perturbation (STRIP) based run-time trojan attack detection system and focuses on vision system. We intentionally perturb the incoming input, for instance by superimposing various image patterns, and observe the randomness of predicted classes for perturbed inputs from a given deployed model---malicious or benign. A low entropy in predicted classes violates the input-dependence property of a benign model and implies the presence of a malicious input---a characteristic of a trojaned input. The high efficacy of our method is validated through case studies on three popular and contrasting datasets: MNIST, CIFAR10 and GTSRB. We achieve an overall false acceptance rate (FAR) of less than 1%, given a preset false rejection rate (FRR) of 1%, for different types of triggers. Using CIFAR10 and GTSRB, we have empirically achieved result of 0% for both FRR and FAR. We have also evaluated STRIP robustness against a number of trojan attack variants and adaptive attacks. Yansong Gao 0001, Chang Xu 0002, Derui Wang, Shiping Chen 0001, Damith Chinthana Ranasinghe, Surya Nepal |
ACSAC | 3 |