Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) represent sophisticated cyberattacks that evade detection through stealthy, multistage operations, posing severe risks to critical infrastructure and organizational security. Due to their ability to effectively capture contextual information of attack behaviors, provenance graphs have emerged as a promising approach for APT detection. However, traditional binary edges in provenance graphs fail to represent the collaborative nature of APT attacks, where multiple entities coordinate in single operations, and local graph structures cannot capture the long-range dependencies across attack stages. To address these challenges, we propose HyperDetector, a novel hypergraph-based method for APT detection. First, we introduce hypergraph representation for provenance data, where hyperedges naturally connect multiple entities involved in system events, preserving the higher-order relational structures that characterize APT behaviors. Second, we employ block self-attention mechanisms that enable global reasoning across distant hypergraph regions, effectively linking dispersed attack indicators throughout the system. Through the synergistic integration of these approaches, HyperDetector achieves comprehensive understanding of both localized multi-entity collaborative behaviors and system-wide attack propagation patterns. Extensive evaluations across multiple prominent datasets demonstrate that HyperDetector outperforms state-of-the-art methods, showcasing its effectiveness for robust and holistic APT detection. Additionally, we make our code and datasets publicly available to facilitate reproducibility and foster further research in this critical area.

Data valuation provides a principled framework for quantifying the contribution of data to model training. It plays a crucial role in trustworthy machine learning (ML) by supporting data curation, enhancing interpretability, and enabling fair incentive mechanisms in data markets. Shapley value is a popular method for data valuation, but accurate estimation remains computationally expensive, particularly at the dataset level. In this paper, we introduce Ensemble Shapley, an efficient framework tailored for dataset-level valuation on the sharded structure. To reduce the computational costs, we propose a two-phase estimation method that apportions the intensive contribution computation costs across disjoint data shards and strategically reuses the computation results, achieving efficient contribution evaluation through the ensemble of shard models. However, weak shard models trained on noisy data may degrade ensemble models’ performance. To solve this, we introduce a behavior-driven guided sampling method that pairs noisy datasets with benign ones, ensuring reliable contribution estimates despite the noise. We also derive an advantageous lower bound for the number of evaluation iterations that balances efficiency and accuracy by the number of shards. Experimental results show Ensemble Shapley has superior efficiency over existing methods while maintaining comparable accuracy across various ML tasks, and demonstrates strong scalability and integration potential.

A fundamental goal of Web 3.0 is to establish a decentralized network and application ecosystem, thereby enabling users to retain control over their data while promoting value exchange. However, the recent TRON-Steem takeover incident poses a significant threat to this vision. In this paper, we present a thorough empirical analysis of the TRON-Steem takeover incident. By conducting a fine-grained reconstruction of the stake and election snapshots within the Steem blockchain, one of the most prominent social-oriented blockchains, we quantify the marked shifts in decentralization pre and post the takeover incident, highlighting the severe threat that blockchain network takeovers pose to the decentralization principle of Web 3.0. Moreover, by employing heuristic methods to identify anomalous voters and conducting clustering analyses on voter behaviors, we unveil the underlying mechanics of takeover strategies employed in the TRON-Steem incident and suggest potential mitigation strategies, which contribute to the enhanced resistance of Web 3.0 networks against similar threats in the future. We believe the insights gleaned from this research help illuminate the challenges imposed by blockchain network takeovers in the Web 3.0 era, suggest ways to foster the development of decentralized technologies and governance, as well as to enhance the protection of Web 3.0 user rights.

Intelligent traffic signal systems, crucial for intelligent transportation systems, have been widely studied and deployed to enhance vehicle traffic efficiency and reduce air pollution. Unfortunately, intelligent traffic signal systems are at risk of data spoofing attack, causing traffic delays, congestion, and even paralysis. In this paper, we reveal a multivehicle collaborative data spoofing attack to intelligent traffic signal systems and propose a collaborative attack sequence generation model based on multiagent reinforcement learning (RL), aiming to explore efficient and stealthy attacks. Specifically, we first model the spoofing attack based on Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) at single and multiple intersections. This involves constructing the state space, action space, and defining a reward function for the attack. Then, based on the attack modeling, we propose an automated approach for generating collaborative attack sequences using the Multi‐Actor‐Attention‐Critic (MAAC) algorithm, a mainstream multiagent RL algorithm. Experiments conducted on the multimodal traffic simulation (VISSIM) platform demonstrate a 15% increase in delay time (DT) and a 40% reduction in attack ratio (AR) compared to the single‐vehicle attack, confirming the effectiveness and stealthiness of our collaborative attack.

The widespread application of deep neural network (DNN) techniques is being challenged by adversarial examples—the legitimate input added with imperceptible and well-designed perturbation that can fool DNNs easily in the DNN testing/deploying stage. Previous white-box adversarial example generation algorithms used the Jacobian gradient information to add the perturbation. This imprecise and inexplicit information can cause unnecessary perturbation when generating adversarial examples. This paper aims to address this issue. We first propose to apply the more informative and distilled gradient information, namely, integrated gradient, to generate adversarial examples. To further make the perturbation more imperceptible, we propose to employ the restriction combination of L 0 and L 1 / L 2 second, which can restrict the total perturbation and the perturbation points simultaneously. Meanwhile, to address the nondifferentiable problem of L 1 , we explore a proximal operation of L 1 third. On the basis of these three works, we propose two Integrated gradient-based White-box Adversarial example generation algorithms (IWA): Integrated gradient-based Finite Point Attack (IFPA) and Integrated gradient-based Universe Attack (IUA). IFPA is suitable for situations where there are a determined number of points to be perturbed. IUA is suitable for situations where no perturbation point number is preset to obtain more adversarial examples. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms on both structured and unstructured data sets, and compare them with five baseline generation algorithms. The results show that our proposed algorithms craft adversarial examples with more imperceptible perturbation and satisfactory crafting rate. L 2 restriction is suitable for unstructured data sets and L 1 restriction performs better in the structured data set.

In the era of big data with exponential growth in data volume, how to reduce data security issues such as data leakage caused by machine learning is a hot area of recent research. The existing privacy budget allocation strategies are usually only suitable for data applications in specific spaces and cannot meet users' personalized needs for privacy budget allocation. Therefore, a linear privacy budget allocation strategy is proposed. The strategy assigns each layer a linearly increasing privacy budget from the root of the decision tree to the bottom by adjusting the coefficient or constant term. Combining this strategy with the random forest algorithm, a random forest algorithm based on linear privacy budget allocation (DiffPRF_linear) is formed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can realize uniform, arithmetic, and geometric privacy budget allocation policy effects and can also achieve better classification effects than the former, which not only meets the needs of users to protect private data personalized but also maintains high classification accuracy.

Pathfinding becomes an important component in many real-world scenarios, such as popular warehouse systems and autonomous aircraft towing vehicles. With the development of reinforcement learning (RL) especially in the context of asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C), pathfinding is undergoing a revolution in terms of efficient parallel learning. Similar to other artificial intelligence-based applications, A3C-based pathfinding is also threatened by the adversarial attack. In this paper, we are the first to study the adversarial attack to A3C, that can unexpectedly wake up longtime retraining mechanism until successful pathfinding. We also discover an attack example generation to launch the attack based on gradient band, in which only one baffle of extremely few unit lengths can successfully perform the attack. Experiments with detailed analysis are conducted to show a high attack success rate of 95% with an average baffle length of 2.95. We also discuss defense suggestions leveraging the insights from our analysis.

In answer aggregation of crowdsourced data management, rank aggregation aims to combine different agents' answers or preferences over the given alternatives into an aggregate ranking which agrees the most with the preferences. However, since the aggregation procedure relies on a data curator, the privacy within the agents' preference data could be compromised when the curator is untrusted. Existing works that guarantee differential privacy in rank aggregation all assume that the data curator is trusted. In this paper, we formulate and address the problem of locally differentially private rank aggregation, in which the agents have no trust in the data curator. By leveraging the approximate rank aggregation algorithm KwikSort, the Randomized Response mechanism, and the Laplace mechanism, we propose an effective and efficient protocol LDP-KwikSort. Theoretical and empirical results show that the solution LDP-KwikSort:RR can achieve the acceptable trade-off between the utility of aggregate ranking and the privacy protection of agents' pairwise preferences.