EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Cong Wu 0003
dblp:30/10768-3
· DBLP profile ↗
59ranked-venue papers
16as first author
55since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-0930-0283ORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Security and privacy · 31 · 12 first-author · 30 since 2021Computer networks · 14 · 3 first-author · 12 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 4 · 4 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 4 · 1 first-author · 4 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 3 · 2 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 2 · 2 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 2 · 2 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Fake news detection with GAN-augmented contrastive learning and multimodal attentionabstractAbstract The rapid proliferation of fake news in digital media has emerged as a major threat to information credibility and public trust. Although recent advances have explored multimodal learning for fake news detection, existing models often fail to effectively integrate heterogeneous data sources and remain vulnerable to adversarial manipulations. To address these challenges, we propose (Multimodal Adversarial Deep Semantic Learning), a robust multimodal fake news detection framework that unifies generative adversarial networks (GANs) with supervised contrastive learning. Specifically, employs a multi-layer joint attention mechanism to align and fuse textual and visual features, while adversarial training encourages the extraction of event-invariant representations, enhancing generalizability across unseen news events. Additionally, contrastive learning with adversarial perturbations further strengthens feature discrimination and robustness against attacks. Extensive experiments on benchmark Twitter and Weibo datasets demonstrate that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy (85.3%) and maintains stable performance with only a 1.1% drop under adversarial conditions, outperforming existing methods in both detection accuracy and resilience. These results underscore ’s effectiveness in advancing robust multimodal fake news detection and promoting digital information integrity. Cong Wu 0003, Jing Chen 0003, Yebo Feng, Ju Jia, Zijian Zhang 0001, Jiahua Xu 0002, Teng Li 0003, Yang Liu 0003 |
Cybersecur. | 1 |
| 2026 | CTEA: Camouflaged topological element attack via causal influence discovery
Ju Jia, Pengyuan Gao, Meng Luo 0002, Cong Wu 0003, Jiabao Guo |
Expert Syst. Appl. | 4 |
| 2026 | CANDICE: An explainable and intelligent framework for network intrusion detection
Ruiying Du, Jing Chen 0003, Kun He 0008, Cong Wu 0003, Yebo Feng |
Future Gener. Comput. Syst. | 5 |
| 2026 | CLAD: Robust audio deepfake detection against manipulation attacks with contrastive learning
Haolin Wu 0001, Jing Chen 0003, Ruiying Du, Cong Wu 0003, Kun He 0008, Xingcan Shang, Hao Ren 0001, Guowen Xu |
Knowl. Based Syst. | 4 |
| 2026 | Exploring Security Vulnerabilities in Multilingual Speech Translation Systems via Deceptive InputsabstractAs speech translation (ST) systems become increasingly prevalent, understanding their vulnerabilities is crucial for ensuring robust and reliable communication. However, limited work has explored this issue in depth. This paper explores methods of compromising these systems through imperceptible audio manipulations. Specifically, we present two approaches: (1) adapting perturbation-based techniques used for automatic speech recognition (ASR) attacks to the ST context, making our work the first to apply this approach to ST, and (2) proposing a novel music generation-based method to guide targeted translation, while also conducting more practical over-the-air attacks in the physical world. Our experiments reveal that carefully crafted audio perturbations can mislead translation models to produce targeted, harmful outputs, while adversarial music achieve this goal more covertly, exploiting the natural imperceptibility of music. These attacks have proven effective across multiple languages and translation models, highlighting a systemic vulnerability in current ST architectures. Beyond immediate security concerns, our findings highlight broader challenges in the robustness and interpretability of neural speech systems. Chang Liu 0089, Haolin Wu 0001, Cong Wu 0003, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Qing Guo 0005, Jie Zhang 0073 |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 5 |
| 2026 | Defensive Adversarial CAPTCHA: A Semantics-Driven Framework for Natural Adversarial Example GenerationabstractTraditional CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) schemes are increasingly vulnerable to automated attacks powered by deep neural networks (DNNs). Existing adversarial attack methods often rely on the original image characteristics, resulting in distortions that hinder human interpretation and limit their applicability in scenarios where no initial input images are available. To address these challenges, we propose the Unsourced Adversarial CAPTCHA (DAC), a novel framework that generates high-fidelity adversarial examples guided by attacker-specified semantics information. Leveraging a Large Language Model (LLM), DAC enhances CAPTCHA diversity and enriches the semantic information. To address various application scenarios, we examine the white-box targeted attack scenario and the black-box untargeted attack scenario. For target attacks, we introduce two latent noise variables that are alternately guided in the diffusion step to achieve robust inversion. The synergy between gradient guidance and latent variable optimization achieved in this way ensures that the generated adversarial examples not only accurately align with the target conditions but also achieve optimal performance in terms of distributional consistency and attack effectiveness. In untargeted attacks, especially for black-box scenarios, we introduce bi-path unsourced adversarial CAPTCHA (BP-DAC), a two-step optimization strategy employing multimodal gradients and bi-path optimization for efficient misclassification. Experiments show that the defensive adversarial CAPTCHA generated by BP-DAC is able to defend against most of the unknown models, and the generated CAPTCHA is indistinguishable to both humans and DNNs. Xia Du, Jizhe Zhou 0001, Zheng Lin 0001, Chi-Man Pun, Cong Wu 0003, Tao Li 0001, Zhe Chen 0015, Wei Ni 0001, Jun Luo 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 6 |
| 2026 | AdaptiveShield: Dynamic Defense Against Decentralized Federated Learning Poisoning AttacksabstractFederated learning allows decentralized devices to collaboratively train a shared model while keeping data local, enhancing the privacy and security of the training process. However, it is vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where malicious participants inject false data to corrupt the global model. To address this, we propose AdaptiveShield, a dynamic hybrid defense approach designed to protect decentralized federated learning against such attacks. AdaptiveShield employs dynamic detection strategies that consider multiple risk factors to assess the maliciousness index and dynamically adjust the detection thresholds, which is able to adapt to various attack scenarios. In addition to attack detections, AdaptiveShield minimizes the negative impact on the global model from missed attackers by dynamically adjusting hyperparameters, thereby enhancing the robustness of the defense. It also dissociates user identities from their uploaded local models through a hierarchical shuffle mechanism, providing an extra layer of privacy protection for both the users and their local models. We evaluate AdaptiveShield across various experimental environments, attack settings, and datasets, demonstrating that it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by achieving over 0.1 improvement in training accuracy while incurring negligible time overhead. Yebo Feng, Baichuan Zheng, Teng Li 0003, Cong Wu 0003, Zhuo Ma 0001, Yulong Shen 0001, Jianfeng Ma 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 4 |
| 2026 | FGRW: Fine-Grained Reversible Watermarking Based on Distribution-Adaptive Contrastive Augmentation Across Diverse Domains
Ju Jia, Bo Feng 0002, Anran Li 0001, Cong Wu 0003, Siqi Ma 0001, Robert H. Deng |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 5 |
| 2026 | Catching Scam Tokens With Temporal Graph Learning in Decentralized FinanceabstractDecentralized finance has experienced phenomenal growth, revolutionizing the landscape of financial transactions and asset management via blockchain. Yet, this swift growth brings with it substantial challenges, notably the surge in scam tokens, imposing significant security threats on cryptocurrency investments and trading. Existing detection methods of scam token, primarily relying on analyzing contract codes or transaction patterns, struggle to catch increasingly sophisticated tactics employed by scammers. For example, contract-based analysis are unable to identify scams lacking overt malicious code, e.g., most rugpulls, while transaction-based methods generally lack the foresight to early-detect potential risks. In this paper, we present TOKENSCOUT, the first temporal GNN-based framework for scam token early detection. TOKEN SCOUT formulates token transfer data as a dynamic temporal attributed multigraph and leverages the temporal graph learning model to learn graph representations. It also builds a graph rep resentation refining model based on contrastive learning to learn a more discriminative representation space for risk identification. We evaluated TOKENSCOUT using a comprehensive dataset of 214,084 standard ERC20 tokens from 2015 to February 2023. TOKENSCOUT achieves a balanced accuracy of 98.41%. Additionally, from March to May 2023, deploying TOKENSCOUT on Ethereum effectively identified 706 rugpulls, 174 honeypots, and 90 Ponzi schemes, thereby alerting to potential risks exceeding $240 million. Cong Wu 0003, Jing Chen 0003, Jian Shen 0001, Guowen Xu, Yueming Wu 0001, Haijun Wang 0002, Hongwei Li 0001, Yang Liu 0003, Yang Xiang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 1 |
| 2026 | Unveiling Ethereum Mixing Services Using Enhanced Graph Structure LearningabstractAs cryptocurrency prices continue to recover, crypto crimes such as money laundering are becoming increasingly rampant. Mixing services such as Tornado Cash have become the primary tools for obfuscating illegal financial transactions due to their inherent anonymity mechanisms. Tornado Cash is a non-custodial, smart contract-based mixing service (SC-CMS) that breaks the direct mapping between deposit and withdrawal accounts, hindering regulators from tracking illicit fund flows. Existing deanonymization methods for Tornado Cash suffer from several challenges, including vague theoretical concepts, evolving mixing mechanisms, and insufficient labeled samples. To address these concerns, this paper proposes the first formal concept of SC-CMS to facilitate and evaluate the deanonymization efforts systematically. We design a novel linkability attack, LASC, based on enhanced graph structure learning, to associate mixing accounts on Tornado Cash and mathematically prove its feasibility. Comprehensive experiments on real Ethereum transactions demonstrate that LASC outperforms state-of-the-art works in both performance and efficiency. Yan Wu 0014, Cong Wu 0003, Yebo Feng, Jiahang Sun, Zijian Zhang 0001, Jincheng An, Zhitao Guan, Liehuang Zhu |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 2 |
| 2026 | MagLive: Robust Voice Liveness Detection on Smartphones Using Magnetic Pattern ChangesabstractVoice authentication has been widely used on smartphones. However, it remains vulnerable to spoofing attacks, where the attacker replays recorded voice samples from authentic humans using loudspeakers to bypass the voice authentication system. In this paper, we present MagLive, a robust voice liveness detection scheme designed for smartphones to mitigate such spoofing attacks. MagLive leverages the differences in magnetic pattern changes generated by different speakers (i.e., humans or loudspeakers) when speaking for liveness detection, which are captured by the built-in magnetometer on smartphones. To extract effective and robust magnetic features, MagLive utilizes a TF-CNN-SAF model as the feature extractor, which includes a time-frequency convolutional neural network (TF-CNN) combined with a self-attention-based fusion (SAF) model. Supervised contrastive learning is then employed to achieve user-irrelevance, device-irrelevance, and content-irrelevance. MagLive imposes no additional burden on users and does not rely on active sensing or specialized hardware. We conducted comprehensive experiments with various settings to evaluate the security and robustness of MagLive. Our results demonstrate that MagLive effectively distinguishes between humans and attackers (i.e., loudspeakers), achieving an average balanced accuracy (BAC) of 99.01% and an equal error rate (EER) of 0.77%. Xiping Sun, Jing Chen 0003, Cong Wu 0003, Kun He 0008, Haozhe Xu, Yebo Feng, Ruiying Du, Xianhao Chen |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 3 |
| 2026 | LEO-Split: A Semi-Supervised Split Learning Framework Over LEO Satellite NetworksabstractRecently, the increasing deployment of LEO satellite systems has enabled various space analytics (e.g., crop and climate monitoring), which heavily relies on the advancements in deep learning (DL). However, the intermittent connectivity between LEO satellites and ground station (GS) significantly hinders the timely transmission of raw data to GS for centralized learning, while the scaled-up DL models hamper distributed learning on resource-constrained LEO satellites. Thoughsplit learning(SL) can be a potential solution to these problems by partitioning a model and offloading primary training workload to GS, the labor-intensive labeling process remains an obstacle, with intermittent connectivity and data heterogeneity being other challenges. In this paper, we propose LEO-Split, asemi-supervised(SS) SL design tailored for satellite networks to combat these challenges. Leveraging SS learning to handle (labeled) data scarcity, we construct an auxiliary model to tackle the training failure of the satellite-GS non-contact time. Moreover, we propose a pseudo-labeling algorithm to rectify data imbalances across satellites. Lastly, an adaptive activation interpolation scheme is devised to prevent the overfitting of server-side sub-model training at GS. Extensive experiments with real-world LEO satellite traces (e.g., Starlink) demonstrate that our LEO-Split framework achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art benchmarks. Zheng Lin 0001, Zhe Chen 0015, Zihan Fang 0003, Cong Wu 0003, Xianhao Chen, Yue Gao 0001, Jun Luo 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. | 5 |
| 2025 | StealthHub: Utxo-Based Stealth Address ProtocolabstractPrivacy remains a significant challenge in public blockchain ecosystems. Mainstream add-on privacy solutions, such as Stealth Address Protocols (SAPs) and Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP)-based mixers, have recently attracted considerable attention. However, existing SAPs offer only ephemeral anonymity for users' transaction data, and their implementation and evaluation within the highly concurrent Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model remain largely unexplored. ZKP-based mixers are limited to native coin transfers with fixed denominations and require additional security assumptions, employing out-of-band encrypted channels to transmit notes. To overcome these challenges, we unify the core principles underlying both SAPs and ZKP mixers and formally introduce StealthHub, a UTXObased SAP. Compared with the widely adopted dual-key-based Umbra protocol prevalent on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible chains, StealthHub reduces computational overhead for the prepare and scan announcements stages by over 71% and 32%, respectively. Furthermore, by leveraging Merkle Mountain Range (MMR) commitments and off-chain batch aggregation, our StealthHub implementation lowers deposit and shielded transfer transaction costs to approximately 76% of those for a standard transfer, substantially improving practical usability. Hanze Guo, Yebo Feng, Cong Wu 0003, Zengpeng Li 0001, Jiahua Xu 0002 |
ICWS | 3 |
| 2025 | Prompt as a Double-Edged Sword: A Dynamic Equilibrium Gradient-Assigned Attack against Graph Prompt LearningabstractGraph prompt learning (GPL) is designed to bridge the gap between graph pretraining models and downstream graph tasks, providing advantages in terms of graph knowledge transfer. However, GPL is vulnerable to poisoned graph attacks that induce abnormal training via adversarial malicious perturbations. We observe that the prevalent meta-gradient attacks, which heavily rely on the training of surrogate graph neural networks (GNNs), fail to account for the impact of perturbations on GPL where the pretrained GNN remains frozen and graph prompt tokens are tuned. Moreover, their gradient-assigned strategies tend to corrupt the topological semantics on a few influential labeled graphs, which in turn diminishes the trustworthiness of the surrogate training. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic equilibrium gradient-assigned attack against GPL, named MetaGpro. To guarantee the transferability of MetaGpro, the surrogate GPL is utilized in our simulation across various downstream tasks. To dynamically equilibrate the relationships between the reliability of surrogate models and instable structures, the over-robust contrastive learning is integrated into the surrogate training. In this way, the gradient bias caused by excessive perturbations of labeled nodes can be effectively mitigated. Subsequently, the topology perturbation generation is exploited to assign more gradient weights to nodes that are closer to the misclassification area. The experimental results reveal that the surrogate GPL outperforms the surrogate GNN in 96% of downstream evaluations, and our MetaGpro reduces the accuracy of GPL by 2%∼20% compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) works mostly. The code for our MetaGpro is available here. Ju Jia, Jingxuan Yu, Di Wu 0050, Cong Wu 0003, Hengjie Zhu, Lina Wang 0001 |
KDD (2) | 4 |
| 2025 | PATFinger: Prompt-Adapted Transferable Fingerprinting against Unauthorized Multimodal Dataset UsageabstractThe multimodal datasets can be leveraged to pre-train large-scale vision-language models by providing cross-modal semantics. Current endeavors for determining the usage of datasets mainly focus on single-modal dataset ownership verification through intrusive methods and non-intrusive techniques, while cross-modal approaches remain under-explored. Intrusive methods can adapt to multimodal datasets but degrade model accuracy, while non-intrusive methods rely on label-driven decision boundaries that fail to guarantee stable behaviors for verification. To address these issues, we propose a novel prompt-adapted transferable fingerprinting scheme from a training-free perspective, called PATFinger, which incorporates the global optimal perturbation (GOP) and the adaptive prompts to capture dataset-specific distribution characteristics. Our scheme utilizes inherent dataset attributes as fingerprints instead of compelling the model to learn triggers. The GOP is derived from the sample distribution to maximize embedding drifts between different modalities. Subsequently, our PATFinger re-aligns the adaptive prompt with GOP samples to capture the cross-modal interactions on the carefully crafted surrogate model. This allows the dataset owner to check the usage of datasets by observing specific prediction behaviors linked to the PATFinger during retrieval queries. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme against unauthorized multimodal dataset usage on various cross-modal retrieval architectures by 30% over state-of-the-art baselines. Ju Jia, Xiaojun Jia, Yihao Huang 0001, Xinfeng Li, Cong Wu 0003, Lina Wang 0001 |
SIGIR | 6 |
| 2025 | When Translators Refuse to Translate: A Novel Attack to Speech Translation Systems
Haolin Wu 0001, Chang Liu 0089, Jing Chen 0003, Ruiying Du, Kun He 0008, Yu Zhang 0036, Cong Wu 0003, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Qing Guo 0005, Jie Zhang 0073 |
USENIX Security Symposium | 7 |
| 2025 | Fighting Fire with Fire: Continuous Attack for Adversarial Android Malware Detection
Yinyuan Zhang, Cuiying Gao, Yueming Wu 0001, Shihan Dou, Cong Wu 0003, Ying Zhang 0066, Wei Yuan 0001, Yang Liu 0003 |
USENIX Security Symposium | 5 |
| 2025 | ESL-LEO: An Efficient Split Learning Framework over LEO Satellite Networks
Zheng Lin 0001, Zhe Chen 0015, Zihan Fang 0003, Yanni Yang 0003, Cong Wu 0003, Xianhao Chen, Yue Gao 0001 |
WASA (1) | 8 |
| 2025 | EyeAuth: smartphone user authentication via reflexive eye movements
Zhixiang He, Jing Chen 0003, Kun He 0008, Cong Wu 0003, Xiangyu Qu, Yangyang Gu, Xiping Sun, Ruiying Du |
Frontiers Comput. Sci. | 4 |
| 2025 | HeteroSample: Meta-Path Guided Sampling for Heterogeneous Graph Representation LearningabstractThe rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) has resulted in vast, heterogeneous graphs that capture complex interactions among devices, sensors, and systems. Efficient analysis of these graphs is critical for deriving insights in IoT scenarios, such as smart cities, industrial IoT, and intelligent transportation systems. However, the scale and diversity of IoT-generated data present significant challenges, and existing methods often struggle with preserving the structural integrity and semantic richness of these complex graphs. Many current approaches fail to maintain the balance between computational efficiency and the quality of the insights generated, leading to potential loss of critical information necessary for accurate decision-making in IoT applications. We introduce HeteroSample, a novel sampling method designed to address these challenges by preserving the structural integrity, node and edge type distributions, and semantic patterns of IoT-related graphs. HeteroSample works by incorporating the novel top-leader selection, balanced neighborhood expansion, and meta-path guided sampling strategies. The key idea is to leverage the inherent heterogeneous structure and semantic relationships encoded by meta-paths to guide the sampling process. This approach ensures that the resulting subgraphs are representative of the original data while significantly reducing computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HeteroSample outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 15% higher F1 scores in tasks, such as link prediction and node classification, while reducing runtime by 20%. These advantages make HeteroSample a transformative tool for scalable and accurate IoT applications, enabling more effective and efficient analysis of complex IoT systems, ultimately driving advancements in smart cities, industrial IoT, and beyond. Jing Chen 0003, Ruiying Du, Cong Wu 0003, Yebo Feng, Teng Li 0003, Jianfeng Ma 0001 |
IEEE Internet Things J. | 4 |
| 2025 | DynaShard: Secure and Adaptive Blockchain Sharding Protocol With Hybrid Consensus and Dynamic Shard ManagementabstractBlockchain sharding has emerged as a promising solution to the scalability challenges in traditional blockchain systems by partitioning the network into smaller, manageable subsets called shards. Despite its potential, existing sharding solutions face significant limitations in handling dynamic workloads, ensuring secure cross-shard transactions, and maintaining system integrity. To address these gaps, we propose DynaShard, a dynamic and secure cross-shard transaction processing mechanism designed to enhance blockchain sharding efficiency and security. DynaShard combines adaptive shard management, a hybrid consensus approach, plus an efficient state synchronization and dispute resolution protocol. Our performance evaluation, conducted using a robust experimental setup with real-world network conditions and transaction workloads, demonstrates DynaShard's superior throughput, reduced latency, and improved shard utilization compared to the fast transaction scheduling in blockchain sharding (FTSBS) method. Specifically, DynaShard achieves up to a 42.6% reduction in latency and a 78.77% improvement in shard utilization under high transaction volumes and varying cross-shard transaction ratios. These results highlight DynaShard's ability to outperform state-of-the-art sharding methods, ensuring scalable and resilient blockchain systems. We believe that DynaShard's innovative approach will significantly impact future developments in blockchain technology, paving the way for more efficient and secure distributed systems. Jing Chen 0003, Kun He 0008, Ruiying Du, Jiahua Xu 0002, Cong Wu 0003, Yebo Feng, Teng Li 0003, Jianfeng Ma 0001 |
IEEE Internet Things J. | 6 |
| 2025 | Universal and Efficient Adversarial Training Framework With Membership Inference ResistanceabstractAdversarial training is an effective approach to enhance the robustness of machine learning models via adding adversarial examples into the training phase. However, existing adversarial training methods increase the advantage of membership inference attacks, which aim to determine from the model whether an example is in the training dataset. In this article, we propose an adversarial training framework that guarantees both robustness and membership privacy by introducing a tailor-made example called reverse-symmetry example. Moreover, our framework reduces the number of required adversarial examples compared with existing adversarial training methods. We implement our framework using four adversarial training methods on the FMNIST and CIFAR10 datasets and compare its performance with deep learning differential privacy. Our experimental findings demonstrate that our framework mitigates model overfitting and outperforms the original adversarial training with respect to the overall performance of accuracy, robustness, privacy, and runtime. Ran Yan 0001, Ruiying Du, Kun He 0008, Jing Chen 0003, Cong Wu 0003 |
IEEE Internet Things J. | 6 |
| 2025 | DP-TRAE: A Dual-Phase Merging Transferable Reversible Adversarial Example for Image Privacy ProtectionabstractIn the field of digital security, Reversible Adversarial Examples (RAE) combine adversarial attacks with reversible data hiding techniques to effectively protect sensitive data and prevent unauthorized analysis by malicious Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, existing RAE techniques primarily focus on white-box attacks, lacking a comprehensive evaluation of their effectiveness in black-box scenarios. This limitation impedes their broader deployment in complex, dynamic environments. Furthermore, traditional black-box attacks are often characterized by poor transferability and high query costs, significantly limiting their practical applicability. To address these challenges, we propose the Dual-Phase Merging Transferable Reversible Attack method, which generates highly transferable initial adversarial perturbations in a white-box model and employs a memory-augmented black-box strategy to effectively mislead target models. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach, achieving a 99.0% attack success rate and 100% recovery rate in black-box scenarios with the DN-121 target model and 1000 attack iterations, highlighting its robustness in privacy protection. Moreover, we successfully implemented a black-box attack on a commercial model, further substantiating the potential of this approach for practical use. Xia Du, Jizhe Zhou 0001, Chi-Man Pun, Zheng Lin 0001, Cong Wu 0003, Zhe Chen 0015, Jun Luo 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 6 |
| 2025 | SIGFinger: A Subtle and Interactive GNN Fingerprinting Scheme Via Spatial Structure Inference PerturbationabstractThere have been significant improvements in intellectual property (IP) protection for deep learning models trained on euclidean data. However, the complex and irregular graph-structured data in non-euclidean space poses a huge challenge to the IP protection of graph neural networks (GNNs). To address this issue, we propose a subtle and interactive GNN fingerprinting scheme through spatial structure inference perturbation, which captures the stable coordination patterns of fingerprint to guarantee the reliability of copyright verification. Specifically, the data augmentation based on adaptive graph diffusion is first exploited to generate more samples, which enables the exploration of fingerprint information from coarse to fine. Subsequently, the graph-structured data are manipulated by multi-constrained spectral clustering to analyze intrinsic and extrinsic structure correlations in a causal inference manner. Ultimately, the cycle-consistent statistical optimization is performed to determine the copyright of GNN models from both intra-graph and inter-graph perspectives. Extensive experiments show that our proposed scheme can effectively verify the IP of GNN models on various challenging graph-structured datasets. Furthermore, we reveal that the space causality inference can facilitate the acquisition of inherent structural information, which improves the quality and robustness of the fingerprint under model modification operations and other model stealing attacks. Ju Jia, Cong Wu 0003, Siqi Ma 0001, Lina Wang 0001, Robert H. Deng |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 3 |
| 2025 | Sanitizable Cross-Domain Access Control With Policy-Driven Dynamic AuthorizationabstractThe increasing demand for secure and efficient data sharing has underscored the importance of developing robust cryptographic schemes. However, many existing endeavors have overlooked the following critical issues: (1) unauthorized access resulting from malicious information leakage by senders; (2) absence of constraints on write and read permissions for participants; (3) and inflexibility of strategies to dynamically designate ciphertexts to multiple recipients. In this paper, we present SCPA, a cross-domain access control scheme imbued with sanitization features and propelled by policy-driven dynamic authorization, tailored for cloud-based data sharing. This scheme not only facilitates access controls, including regulations for no-read and no-write stipulations, governing the data permissible for senders to transmit and recipients to acquire but also enables the dynamic sharing of a data ciphertext subset with additional recipients beyond the originally sanctioned ones. We also provide comprehensive security proofs rigorously indicating the security of the invented SCPA. Moreover, to assess the efficacy of our SCPA, we undertake thorough theoretical and experimental analyses, showcasing its feasibility and superior performance. Jianfei Sun, Guowen Xu, Hongwei Li 0001, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Cong Wu 0003, Xuehuan Yang, Robert H. Deng |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 5 |
| 2025 | WAFBooster: Automatic Boosting of WAF Security Against Mutated Malicious PayloadsabstractWeb application firewall (WAF) examines malicious traffic to and from a web application via a set of security rules. It plays a significant role in securing Web applications against web attacks. However, as web attacks grow in sophistication, it is becoming increasingly difficult for WAFs to block the mutated malicious payloads designed to bypass their defenses. In response to this critical security issue, we have developed a novel learning-based framework calledWAFBooster, designed to unveil potential bypasses in WAF detections and suggest rules to fortify their security. Using a combination of shadow models and payload generation techniques, we can identify malicious payloads and remove or modify them as needed.WAFBoostergenerates signatures for these malicious payloads using advanced clustering and regular expression matching techniques to repair any security gaps we uncover. In our comprehensive evaluation of eight real-world WAFs,WAFBoosterimproved the true rejection rate of mutated malicious payloads from 21% to 96%, with no false rejections.WAFBoosterachieves a false acceptance rate 3× lower than State-of-the-Art methods for generating malicious payloads. WithWAFBooster, we have taken a step forward in securing web applications against the ever-evolving threats. Cong Wu 0003, Jing Chen 0003, Simeng Zhu, Wenqi Feng, Kun He 0008, Ruiying Du, Yang Xiang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 1 |
| 2025 | High Accuracy and Presentation Attack Resistant Hand Authentication via Acoustic Sensing for Commodity Mobile DevicesabstractBiometric authentication schemes, i.e., fingerprint and face authentication, raise serious privacy concerns. To alleviate such concerns, hand authentication has been proposed recently. Existing hand authentication schemes, however, use dedicated hardware, such as infrared or depth cameras, which are not available on commodity mobile devices. In this paper, we presentEchoHand, a high accuracy and presentation attack resistant authentication scheme that complements camera-based 2-dimensional hand geometry recognition of one hand with an active acoustic sensing of the other hand. To this end,EchoHandplays an inaudible acoustic signal using the speaker to actively sense the holding hand and collects the echoes using the microphone.EchoHanddoes not rely on any specialized hardware but uses the built-in speaker, microphone and camera.EchoHanddoes not place more burdens on users than existing hand authentication methods. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the reliability, security, and usability ofEchoHand. The results show thatEchoHandhas a low equal error rate of 2.45% with as few as 10 training data points and it defeats presentation attacks. The results of the user study also suggest that the required hand gestures are easy to perform, andEchoHandis very user-friendly with low latency. Cong Wu 0003, Kun He 0008, Jing Chen 0003, Ruiying Du, Ran Yan 0001, Ziming Zhao 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 1 |
| 2025 | Unveiling the Superiority of Unsupervised Learning on GPU Cryptojacking Detection: Practice on Magnetic Side Channel-Based MechanismabstractAmple profits of GPU cryptojacking attract hackers to recklessly invade victims’ devices, for completing specific cryptocurrency mining tasks. Such malicious invasion undoubtedly obstructs normal device usage and wastes computation resources. To resist the threat of GPU cryptojacking, existing works aim to timely detect and clear away it, by distinguishing the dissimilitude between it and legitimate applications. However, these detection mechanisms inappropriately rely on two conflict cornerstones, manifested in leveragingmutable samples of illegitimate cryptojackingto designsupervision-based detection models requiring samples with stable patterns. This limitation compromises the practicability of existing detection mechanisms in the face of mutable cryptojacking samples. To fill the gap, we explore the superiority of unsupervised learning in handling this issue and further propose an unsupervised manner-enabled detection mechanism named MagInspector, only using legitimate applications’ magnetic signatures from GPU side channels for model construction. MagInspector innovates in training an unsupervised autoencoder network by an adversarial mode that well learns the stable signature patterns of legitimate applications, while incompatible with mutable cryptojacking ones. In the process of model training, we elaborately extract mutual energy cumulation distribution features to represent legitimate applications to overcome the impact of their inter-type differences. Meanwhile, a locality sensitive hashing-driven outlier removal algorithm is designed to enhance MagInspector’s robustness to the noise samples. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted on GPUs covering four generations of common NVIDIA architectures and two generations of AMD architectures; the results show that applying MagInspector to mutable cryptojacking signature detection achieves a significant average accuracy improvement of 25.5% and 17.8%, respectively. Hangcheng Cao, Guowen Xu, Shaoqing Shi, Shengmin Xu, Cong Wu 0003, Jianting Ning |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 6 |
| 2025 | Environment-Adaptive Representation Interaction for Privacy-Perturbed Graphs Against Deceptive OOD AttacksabstractGraph neural networks (GNNs) have gained increasing popularity in understanding graph-structured data due to their ability to derive meaningful representations by aggregating complicated topological information. However, privacy operations such as differential privacy mechanisms that inject noise into node features or graph structures to protect sensitive information, and distribution shifts in graph data pose tremendous security risks for the wide application of GNN models. Current researches mainly focus on defending the out-of-distribution (OOD) attacks through robust adversarial training and graph structure purification. Nonetheless, privacy perturbations of graph structures may render OOD attacks more deceptive by obfuscating the distinctiveness of nodes, leading to the failure of existing defense methods. To address these shortcomings, we propose an environment-adaptive representation interaction (EARI) scheme that strengthens the privacy perception of GNNs. Specifically, our scheme leverages the interaction between non-private and private data to enable targeted embedding propagation by the guidance of confidence score feedback. Subsequently, the representation-enriched topological aggregation is implemented to capture more discriminative features by exploiting multi-hop neighborhoods rather than stacked multilayers. Finally, the generalization-enhanced cluster-wise adaptation learning is leveraged to highlight the invariant correlations from nodes across different environments. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our scheme can enhance the capability of learning representations from privacy-protected graph data, enabling GNNs to effectively defend against deceptive OOD attacks on various graph-structured datasets. Moreover, we reveal that the utilization of interactive topological aggregation can extremely enrich the diversity and guarantee the effectiveness for graph representations. Ju Jia, Cong Wu 0003, Yebo Feng, Siqi Ma 0001, Lina Wang 0001, Robert H. Deng |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 3 |
| 2025 | Vulseye: Detect Smart Contract Vulnerabilities via Stateful Directed Graybox FuzzingabstractSmart contracts, the cornerstone of decentralized applications, have become increasingly prominent in revolutionizing the digital landscape. However, vulnerabilities in smart contracts pose great risks to user assets and undermine overall trust in decentralized systems. Fuzzing, a prominent security testing technique, is extensively explored to detect vulnerabilities. But current smart contract fuzzers fall short of expectations in testing efficiency for two primary reasons. Firstly, smart contracts are stateful programs, and existing approaches, primarily coverage-guided, lack effective feedback from the contract state. Consequently, they struggle to effectively explore the contract state space. Secondly, coverage-guided fuzzers, aiming for comprehensive program coverage, may lead to a wastage of testing resources on benign code areas. This wastage worsens in smart contract testing, as the mix of code and state spaces further complicates comprehensive testing. To address these challenges, we propose Vulseye, a stateful directed graybox fuzzer for smart contracts guided by vulnerabilities. Different from prior works, Vulseyeachieves stateful directed fuzzing by prioritizing testing resources to code areas and contract states that are more prone to vulnerabilities. We introduceCode TargetsandState Targetsinto fuzzing loops as the testing targets of Vulseye. We use static analysis and pattern matching to pinpointCode Targets, and propose a scalable backward analysis algorithm to specifyState Targets. We design a novel fitness metric that leverages feedback from both the contract code space and state space, directing fuzzing toward these targets. With the guidance of code and state targets, Vulseyealleviates the wastage of testing resources on benign code areas and achieves effective stateful fuzzing. In comparison with state-of-the-art fuzzers, Vulseyedemonstrated superior effectiveness and efficiency. Notably, it uncovered 4,845 vulnerabilities in 42,738 real-world smart contracts, outperforming existing approaches by up to$9.7\times $, and identified 11 previously unknown vulnerabilities within the top 50 Ethereum DApps, involving approximately 2,500,000 USD. Ruichao Liang, Jing Chen 0003, Cong Wu 0003, Kun He 0008, Yueming Wu 0001, Ruochen Cao, Ruiying Du, Ziming Zhao 0001, Yang Liu 0003 |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 3 |
| 2025 | Detecting DeFi Fraud With a Graph-Transformer Language Model
Wei Ma 0014, Jiaxi Qiu, Cong Wu 0003, Jing Chen 0003, Lingxiao Jiang, Shangqing Liu, Yang Liu 0003, Yang Xiang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 4 |
| 2025 | SCR-Auth: Secure Call Receiver Authentication on Smartphones Using Outer Ear EchoesabstractReceiving calls is one of the most universal functions of smartphones, involving sensitive information and critical operations. Unfortunately, to prioritize convenience, the current call receiving process bypasses smartphone authentication mechanisms (e.g., passwords, fingerprint recognition, and face recognition), leaving a significant security gap. To address this issue, we propose SCR-Auth, a secure call receiver authentication scheme for smartphones that leverages outer ear echoes. It sends inaudible acoustic signals through the earpiece speaker to actively sense the call receiver’s outer ear structure and records the resulting echoes using the top microphone. These echoes are then analyzed to extract unique outer ear biometric information for authentication. It operates implicitly, without requiring extra hardware or imposing additional burden. Comprehensive experiments conducted under diverse conditions demonstrate SCR-Auth’s effectiveness and security, showing an average balanced accuracy of 96.95% and resilience against potential attacks. Xiping Sun, Jing Chen 0003, Kun He 0008, Zhixiang He, Ruiying Du, Yebo Feng, Qingchuan Zhao, Cong Wu 0003 |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 8 |
| 2025 | Forward-Secure Hierarchical Delegable Signature for Smart HomesabstractAiming to provide people with great convenience and comfort, smart home systems have been deployed in thousands of homes. In this paper, we focus on handling the security and privacy issues in such a promising system by customizing a new cryptographic primitive to provide the following security guarantees: 1) fine-grained, privacy-preserving authorization for smart home users and integrity protection of communication contents; 2) flexible self-sovereign permission delegation; 3) forward security of previous messages. To our knowledge, no previous system has been designed to consider these three security and privacy requirements simultaneously. To tackle these challenges, we put forward the first-ever efficient cryptographic primitive called the Forward-secure Hierarchical Delegable Signature (FS-HDS) scheme for smart homes. Specifically, we first propose a new primitive, efficient Hierarchical Delegable Signature (HDS) scheme, which is capable of supporting partial delegation capability while realizing privacy-preserving authorization and integrity guarantee. Then, we present an FS-HDS for smart homes with the efficient HDS as the underlying building block, which not only inherits all the desirable features of HDS but also ensures that the past content integrity is not affected even if the current secret key is compromised. We provide comprehensively strict security proofs to prove the security of our proposed solutions. Its performance is also validated via experimental simulations to showcase its practicability and effectiveness. Jianfei Sun, Guowen Xu, Yang Yang 0026, Xuehuan Yang, Xiaoguo Li, Cong Wu 0003, Zhen Liu 0008, Guomin Yang, Robert H. Deng |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 6 |
| 2025 | RugScreener: Leveraging Temporal Graph Neural Network for Rugpull Detection in DeFiabstractThe advent of decentralized finance has ushered in a transformative era in the financial sector, leveraging blockchain technology to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions without traditional intermediaries. Amidst this innovation, the DeFi landscape faces the pervasive threat of rugpulls, where developers abruptly abandon projects post-fundraising, leaving investors with devalued assets. This growing concern highlights a critical research gap in the proactive detection and prevention of such fraudulent schemes. To combat this, we propose RUGSCREENER, a temporal graph neural network-based solution to identify rugpull risks within DeFi transactions. It employs a dynamic representation of blockchain interactions, enriched with comprehensive node attributes and effective temporal graph learning techniques based on memory and attention mechanisms, effectively capturing the rapid-moving and complex transaction patterns indicative of potential fraud. Our evaluation is based on a newly compiled Ethereum dataset that includes two subsets: an unlabeled set with 1,882,114 transactions from 29,595 tokens for temporal graph representation learning, and a labeled set with 128,819 transactions from 1,000 tokens (500 rugpull and 500 benign) for downstream evaluation. Using this dataset, RUGSCREENER achieves a balanced accuracy of 95.7% in detecting rugpull tokens. Our extensive evaluation, utilizing the Ethereum dataset comprising 1000 tokens, showcases its robust performance with a balanced accuracy of 95.7% in detecting rugpull tokens. Remarkably, RUGSCREENER surpasses existing state-of-the-art graph learning models in detecting rugpull tokens with enhanced accuracy and reliability. Cong Wu 0003, Hangcheng Cao, Jing Chen 0003, Xiyu Yan, Guowen Xu, Ziming Zhao 0001, Yang Liu 0003, Hongbo Jiang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 1 |
| 2025 | Profit or Deceit? Mitigating Pump and Dump in DeFi via Graph and Contrastive LearningabstractPump-and-Dump (PD) schemes pose a significant threat to the stability and fairness of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) markets, often resulting in substantial financial losses for investors. The early and accurate detection of these schemes is crucial for preserving trust in the rapidly expanding cryptocurrency ecosystem. However, existing detection methods primarily rely on post-event analysis and heuristic-based approaches, which are often inadequate for real-time and precise identification of PD activities. In this paper, we present PUMPWATCHER, an innovative framework that employs Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and contrastive learning to detect PD schemes by modeling transaction behaviors within temporal graphs. PUMPWATCHER integrates advanced transaction graph construction, temporal GNNs, and contrastive learning techniques to enhance node and edge representations, thereby improving the detection of intricate and covert PD operations. We validate PUMPWATCHER on a dataset from Uniswap, encompassing 924,508 transactions across 858 tokens within December 2022. The results show that PUMPWATCHER outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving a superior balanced accuracy of 92.3%, while significantly minimizing false positives and negatives. These outcomes highlight its potential to set a new standard in real-time detection of market manipulation, paving the way for more secure and resilient DeFi ecosystems. Cong Wu 0003, Jing Chen 0003, Jiahua Xu 0002, Ju Jia, Yebo Feng, Yang Liu 0003, Yang Xiang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 1 |
| 2025 | $\mathsf{TCG}\text{-}\mathsf{IDS}$ : Robust Network Intrusion Detection via Temporal Contrastive Graph LearningabstractIn the era of zero trust security models and next-generation networks (NGN), the primary challenge is that network nodes may be untrusted, even if they have been verified, necessitating continuous validation and scrutiny. Effective intrusion detection systems (IDS) are crucial for continuously monitoring network traffic and identifying potential threats. However, traditional IDS approaches often struggle to keep pace with evolving threats, requiring extensive supervised training on labeled datasets. This limitation leads to high false positive rates, low detection accuracy, and a failure to provide real-time detection, thereby undermining the security of NGNs. This paper proposed the first self-supervised learning-based IDS, designed on temporal contrastive graph neural network (GNN), namely$\mathsf{TCG}\text{-}\mathsf{IDS}$. It innovatively integrates three contrastive learning strategies: temporal contrasting to capture temporal dependencies, asymmetric contrasting to account for the diverse interactions within network data, and masked contrasting to enhance the learning of node representations by masking parts of the data during training. Performance evaluation was conducted on two publicly available network traffic datasets, NF-CSE-CIC-IDS2018-V2 and NF-UNSW-NB15-V2.$\mathsf{TCG}\text{-}\mathsf{IDS}$achieved a balanced accuracy of 99.48% and 91.48% on two datasets respectively, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art graph learning models. In multi-class detection,$\mathsf{TCG}\text{-}\mathsf{IDS}$attained a mean false positive rate of 4.15% and 3.34% on the two datasets respectively. Besides, it exhibits high efficiency with its running time of 0.37s and 0.51s on the two datasets to predict per batch of 100 samples. Results highlight the effectiveness and efficiency of$\mathsf{TCG}\text{-}\mathsf{IDS}$in accurately detecting various types of network intrusions. This work significantly advances the field of network intrusion detection via self-supervised temporal graph learning, offering a promising solution for future network security systems. Cong Wu 0003, Jianfei Sun, Jing Chen 0003, Mamoun Alazab, Yang Liu 0003, Yang Xiang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 1 |
| 2025 | CSIPose: Unveiling Human Poses Using Commodity WiFi Devices Through the WallabstractThe popularity of WiFi devices and the development of WiFi sensing have alerted people to the threat of WiFi sensing-based privacy leakage, especially the privacy of human poses. Existing work on human pose estimation is deployed in indoor scenarios or simple occlusion (e.g., a wooden screen) scenarios, which are less privacy-threatening in attack scenarios. To reveal the risk of leakage of the pose privacy to users from commodity WiFi devices, we propose CSIPose, a privacy-acquisition attack that passively estimates dynamic and static human poses in through-the-wall scenarios. We design a three-branch network based on transfer learning, auto-encoder, and self-attention mechanisms to realize the supervision of video frames over CSI frames to generate human pose skeleton frames. Notably, we designAveCSI, a unified framework for preprocessing and feature extraction of CSI data corresponding to dynamic and static poses. This framework uses the average of CSI measurements to generate CSI frames to mitigate the instability of passively collected CSI data, and utilizes a self-attention mechanism to enhance key features. We evaluate the performance of CSIPose across different room layouts, subjects, devices, subject locations, and device locations. Evaluation results emphasize the generalizability of CSIPose. Finally, we discuss measures to mitigate this attack. Yangyang Gu, Jing Chen 0003, Congrui Chen, Kun He 0008, Ju Jia, Yebo Feng, Ruiying Du, Cong Wu 0003 |
IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. | 8 |
| 2025 | HeadSonic: Usable Bone Conduction Earphone Authentication via Head-Conducted SoundsabstractEarables (ear wearables) are rapidly emerging as a new platform encompassing a diverse of personal applications, prompting the development of authentication schemes to protect user privacy. Existing earable authentication methods are all specifically designed for air-conduction earphones, which are not suited for bone conduction earphones (BCEs) that rely on bone conduction mechanisms. In this paper, we propose HeadSonic, a usable BCE authentication system based on the unique head-conducted sounds, which can be acquired when the user wears the BCE device. Specifically, the system emits a millisecond-level sound to initiate the authentication session. The signal captured by the BCE microphone is propagated through the user's head, which is unique in density, geometry, and bone-tissue ratio. It operates implicitly, while maintaining robustness across different behaviors. Extensive experiments involving 60 subjects demonstrate that HeadSonic achieves a commendable balanced accuracy of 96.59%, proving its efficacy and resilience against replay and synthesis attacks. Our dataset and source codes are available athttps://anonymous.4open.science/r/HeadSonic-1CE4. Zhixiang He, Jing Chen 0003, Kun He 0008, Yangyang Gu, Qiyi Deng, Zijian Zhang 0001, Ruiying Du, Qingchuan Zhao, Cong Wu 0003 |
IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. | 9 |
| 2025 | Towards Effective Detection of Ponzi Schemes on Ethereum with Contract Runtime Behavior GraphabstractPonzi schemes, a form of scam, have been discovered in Ethereum smart contracts in recent years, causing massive financial losses. Existing detection methods primarily focus on rule-based approaches and machine learning techniques that utilize static information as features. However, these methods have significant limitations. Rule-based approaches rely on pre-defined rules with limited capabilities and domain knowledge dependency. Using static information like opcodes for machine learning fails to effectively characterize Ponzi contracts, resulting in poor reliability and interpretability. Our research shows no significant difference between Ponzi and non-Ponzi contracts at the opcode level. Moreover, relying on static information like transactions for machine learning requires a certain number of transactions to achieve detection, which limits the scalability of detection and hinders the identification of 0-day Ponzi schemes. In this article, we propose PonziGuard , an efficient Ponzi scheme detection approach based on contract runtime behavior. Inspired by the observation that a contract’s runtime behavior is more effective in disguising Ponzi contracts from the innocent contracts, PonziGuard establishes a comprehensive graph representation called contract runtime behavior graph (CRBG), to accurately depict the behavior of Ponzi contracts. Furthermore, it formulates the detection process as a graph classification task on CRBG, enhancing its overall effectiveness. The experiment results show that PonziGuard surpasses the current state-of-the-art approaches in the ground-truth dataset, achieving a precision of 96.9%, recall of 98.2%, and F1-score of 97.5%. It also exhibits the highest level of interpretability among the current tools. We applied PonziGuard to Ethereum Mainnet and demonstrated its effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Using PonziGuard , we identified 805 Ponzi contracts on Ethereum Mainnet, which have resulted in an estimated economic loss of 281,700 Ether or approximately \($\) 500 million USD. We also found 0-day Ponzi schemes in the recently deployed 10,000 smart contracts. Ruichao Liang, Jing Chen 0003, Cong Wu 0003, Kun He 0008, Yueming Wu 0001, Weisong Sun, Ruiying Du, Qingchuan Zhao, Yang Liu 0003 |
ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. | 3 |
| 2025 | Fine-Grained Code Clone Detection by Keywords-Based Connection of Program Dependency GraphabstractCode clone detection is intended to identify functionally similar code fragments, a matter of escalating significance in contemporary software engineering. Numerous methodologies have been proffered for the detection of code clones, among which graph-based approaches exhibit efficacy in addressing semantic code clones. However, they all only consider the feature extraction of a single sample and ignore the semantic connection between different samples, resulting in the detection effect being unsatisfactory. Simultaneously, the majority of existing methods can only ascertain the presence of clones, lacking the capability to provide nuanced insights into which lines of code exhibit greater similarity. In this article, we advocate a novel PDG-based semantic clone detection method, namely,Keyborwhich can locate specific cloned lines of code by providing a fine-grained analysis of clone pairs. The highlight of the approach is to consider keywords as a bridge to connect PDG nodes of the target program to retain more semantic information about the functional code. To examine the effectiveness ofKeybor, we assess it on a widely usedBigCloneBenchdataset. Experimental results indicate thatKeyboris superior to 14 advanced code clone detection tools (i.e.,CCAligner,SourcererCC,Siamese,NIL,NiCad,LVMapper,CCFinder,CloneWorks,Oreo,Deckard,CCGraph,Code2Img,GPT-3.5-turbo, andGPT-4). Yueming Wu 0001, Wenqi Suo, Siyue Feng, Cong Wu 0003, Deqing Zou, Hai Jin 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Reliab. | 4 |
| 2024 | TokenScout: Early Detection of Ethereum Scam Tokens via Temporal Graph LearningabstractDecentralized finance has experienced phenomenal growth, revolutionizing the landscape of financial transactions and asset management via blockchain. Yet, this swift growth brings with it substantial challenges, notably the surge in scam tokens, imposing significant security threats on cryptocurrency investments and trading. Existing detection methods of scam token, primarily relying on analyzing contract codes or transaction patterns, struggle to catch increasingly sophisticated tactics employed by scammers. For example, contract-based analysis are unable to identify scams lacking overt malicious code, e.g., most rugpulls, while transaction-based methods generally lack the foresight to early-detect potential risks. Cong Wu 0003, Jing Chen 0003, Ziming Zhao 0001, Kun He 0008, Guowen Xu, Yueming Wu 0001, Haijun Wang 0002, Hongwei Li 0001, Yang Liu 0003, Yang Xiang 0001 |
CCS | 1 |
| 2024 | PonziGuard: Detecting Ponzi Schemes on Ethereum with Contract Runtime Behavior Graph (CRBG)abstractPonzi schemes, a form of scam, have been discovered in Ethereum smart contracts in recent years, causing massive financial losses. Rule-based detection approaches rely on pre-defined rules with limited capabilities and domain knowledge dependency. Additionally, using static information like opcodes and transactions for machine learning models fails to effectively characterize the Ponzi contracts, resulting in poor reliability and interpretability. Ruichao Liang, Jing Chen 0003, Kun He 0008, Yueming Wu 0001, Gelei Deng, Ruiying Du, Cong Wu 0003 |
ICSE | 7 |
| 2024 | Semantic Sleuth: Identifying Ponzi Contracts via Large Language ModelsabstractSmart contracts, self-executing agreements directly encoded in code, are fundamental to blockchain technology, especially in decentralized finance (DeFi) and Web3. However, the rise of Ponzi schemes in smart contracts poses significant risks, leading to substantial financial losses and eroding trust in blockchain systems. Existing detection methods, such as PonziGuard, depend on large amounts of labeled data and struggle to identify unseen Ponzi schemes, limiting their reliability and generalizability. In contrast, we introduce PonziSleuth, the first LLM-driven approach for detecting Ponzi smart contracts, which requires no labeled training data. PonziSleuth utilizes advanced language understanding capabilities of LLMs to analyze smart contract source code through a novel two-step zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting technique. Our extensive evaluation on benchmark datasets and real-world contracts demonstrates that PonziSleuth delivers comparable, and often superior, performance without the extensive data requirements, achieving a balanced detection accuracy of 96.06% with GPT-3.5-turbo, 93.91% with LLAMA3, and 94.27% with Mistral. In real-world detection, PonziSleuth successfully identified 15 new Ponzi schemes from 4,597 contracts verified by Etherscan in March 2024, with a false negative rate of 0% and a false positive rate of 0.29%. These results highlight PonziSleuth's capability to detect diverse and novel Ponzi schemes, marking a significant advancement in leveraging LLMs for enhancing blockchain security and mitigating financial scams. Cong Wu 0003, Jing Chen 0003, Ruichao Liang, Ruiying Du |
ASE | 1 |
| 2024 | Shield-U: Safeguarding Traffic Sign Recognition Against Perturbation AttacksabstractTraffic sign recognition systems are crucial for the navigation and situation awareness of autonomous vehicles. They leverage deep learning technologies to swiftly and accurately identify traffic signs, even in the most challenging traffic environments. However, security researchers have uncovered a critical vulnerability in these systems: learning-based TSRs are particularly susceptible to physical-world perturbation attacks. Through subtle modifications (i.e., attaching well-designed patches on traffic signs), attackers can deceive the recognition system into making erroneous judgments, which can further lead to serious traffic accidents. Although several defense mechanisms have been proposed to enhance the security of sign recognition systems, these solutions generally target only specific types of malicious perturbations and thus lack robustness. To address this issue, we present a robust defense mechanism named Shield-U, which restores traffic sign images contaminated by physical patch perturbations, providing credible data for the recognition model. In the process of implementing Shield-U, we first design a feature difference-aware perturbation generator that outputs potential sign contamination patterns. Incorporating generated perturbations during the training phase enables our restoration model to gain sufficient understanding of diverse perturbation types, thus enhancing its ability to repair various perturbed signs. Following this, we build an attention-driven restoration network to repair sign images. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of Shield-U using widely used sign recognition models and public datasets. The results demonstrate that our defense mechanism excels in resisting potential perturbations, increasing the average sign recognition accuracy by 50.4%. Shengmin Xu, Jianfei Sun, Hangcheng Cao, Yulan Gao, Cong Wu 0003 |
TrustCom | 6 |
| 2024 | An Efficient Privacy-Aware Split Learning Framework for Satellite CommunicationsabstractIn the rapidly evolving domain of satellite communications, integrating advanced machine learning techniques, particularly split learning, is crucial for enhancing data processing and model training efficiency across satellites, space stations, and ground stations. Traditional ML approaches often face significant challenges within satellite networks due to constraints such as limited bandwidth and computational resources. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework for more efficient SL in satellite communications. Our approach, Dynamic Topology-Informed Pruning, namely DTIP, combines differential privacy with graph and model pruning to optimize graph neural networks for distributed learning. DTIP strategically applies differential privacy to raw graph data and prunes GNNs, thereby optimizing both model size and communication load across network tiers. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets demonstrate DTIP’s efficacy in enhancing privacy, accuracy, and computational efficiency. Specifically, on Amazon2M dataset, DTIP maintains an accuracy of 0.82 while achieving a 50% reduction in floating-point operations per second. Similarly, on ArXiv dataset, DTIP achieves an accuracy of 0.85 under comparable conditions. Our framework not only significantly improves the operational efficiency of satellite communications but also establishes a new benchmark in privacy-aware distributed learning, potentially revolutionizing data handling in space-based networks. Jianfei Sun, Cong Wu 0003, Shahid Mumtaz, Junyi Tao, Mingsheng Cao 0001, Mei Wang 0003, Valerio Frascolla |
IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun. | 2 |
| 2024 | Rethinking Membership Inference Attacks Against Transfer LearningabstractTransfer learning, successful in knowledge translation across related tasks, faces a substantial privacy threat from membership inference attacks (MIAs). These attacks, despite posing significant risk to ML model’s training data, remain limited-explored in transfer learning. The interaction between teacher and student models in transfer learning has not been thoroughly explored in MIAs, potentially resulting in an under-examined aspect of privacy vulnerabilities within transfer learning. In this paper, we propose a new MIA vector against transfer learning, to determine whether a specific data point was used to train the teacher model while only accessing the student model in a white-box setting. Our method delves into the intricate relationship between teacher and student models, analyzing the discrepancies in hidden layer representations between the student model and its shadow counterpart. These identified differences are then adeptly utilized to refine the shadow model’s training process and to inform membership inference decisions effectively. Our method, evaluated across four datasets in diverse transfer learning tasks, reveals that even when an attacker only has access to the student model, the teacher model’s training data remains susceptible to MIAs. We believe our work unveils the unexplored risk of membership inference in transfer learning. Cong Wu 0003, Jing Chen 0003, Qianru Fang, Kun He 0008, Ziming Zhao 0001, Hao Ren 0001, Guowen Xu, Yang Liu 0003, Yang Xiang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 1 |
| 2024 | WiFiLeaks: Exposing Stationary Human Presence Through a Wall With Commodity Mobile DevicesabstractWiFi devices are ubiquitous and may leak user and household privacy. In this paper, we report an attack, namely WiFiLeaks, which uses a commodity mobile device to passively detect stationary human presence through a wall by analyzing the channel state information of wireless signals transmitted by indoor WiFi devices. In our adversarial scenario, attackers cannot control the WiFi transmitter or use advanced radio devices. The main challenge of this attack is how to extract robust features from non-customized signals for stationary human presence. To address this challenge, we first combine methods based on outliers and wavelet denoising to enhance the low-frequency information related to human presence. Then we propose a novel feature extraction method based on the correlation among subcarriers since stationary human presence can enhance their correlations. We evaluate WiFiLeaks using nine different WiFi transmitter and one commodity smartphone in four different settings. The evaluations show WiFiLeaks can still achieve accuracy rates of 83.33% and 100% for human presence and absence at 20 meters between the monitor device and the transmitter in through-the-wall scenarios. Yangyang Gu, Jing Chen 0003, Kun He 0008, Cong Wu 0003, Ziming Zhao 0001, Ruiying Du |
IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. | 4 |
| 2024 | It's All in the Touch: Authenticating Users With HOST Gestures on Multi-Touch Screen DevicesabstractAs smartphones proliferate, secure and user-friendly authentication methods are increasingly critical. Existing behavioral biometrics, however, are often compromised by behavior variability, leading to poor authentication accuracy and an unsatisfactory user experience. To fill this gap, we proposeBioHold, a new robust and reliable user authentication method, fusing finger behavior and hand geometry, captured via a smartphone's multitouch screen during natural holding gestures. It synergistically fuses behavioral and physiological biometrics. In contrast to traditional methods that require restrictive, unnatural user patterns, our approach utilizes a stable, natural gesture for authentication, effectively mitigating behavior variability. It enables one-handed authentication through familiar smartphone-holding and unlocking gestures. During this interaction, hand geometry and behavioral characteristics are recorded for subsequent authentication. We evaluate our method using a dataset collected from 20 subjects, demonstrating its resilience against behavioral variability over time while maintaining a high level of distinctiveness. With only 10 training samples, our method achieves an equal error rate of 3.59%, which improves to 1.25% with 40 training samples. Importantly, our method is resistant to common security threats such as zero-effort attacks, smudge attacks, and shoulder surfing attacks. A usability study confirms the method's high user acceptance, as measured by the system usability score. Cong Wu 0003, Hangcheng Cao, Guowen Xu, Jianfei Sun, Ran Yan 0001, Yang Liu 0003, Hongbo Jiang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. | 1 |
| 2023 | Performance of Software-based Encrypted MPI Communication over Container ClustersabstractWe study the performance of software-based secure communication infrastructure for HPC Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications in container clusters. Specifically, extensive experiments are performed using micro-and application benchmarks to evaluate the encrypted MPI communication performance. Container built-in encrypted communication schemes including Docker Swarm and Kubernetes Antrea and Calico, as well as CryptMPI, a secure MPI library, are evaluated and compared. Our results confirm the findings in earlier studies that for some MPI applications, running in the container environment with unencrypted communication introduces only minor overheads over running on the bare metal system. However, when the communications are encrypted, all of the container built-in software-based encrypted communication mechanisms that we evaluated incur very large overheads in all of our experiments for both micro-benchmarks and application benchmarks. On the other hand, CryptMPI, which encrypts and decrypts messages in the MPI library, achieves much higher performance than the container built-in encryption schemes. Mohsen Gavahi, Abu Naser, Mehran Sadeghi Lahijani, Cong Wu 0003, Zhi Wang 0004, Xin Yuan 0001 |
IPCCC | 4 |
| 2023 | Efficient Privacy-Preserving Inference Outsourcing for Convolutional Neural NetworksabstractInference outsourcing enables model owners to deploy their machine learning models on cloud servers to serve users. In this paradigm, the privacy of model owners and users should be considered. Existing solutions focus on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) but their efficiency is much lower than GALA, which is a solution that only protects user privacy. Furthermore, these solutions adopt approximations that reduce the model accuracy and thus require model owners to retrain the models. In this paper, we present an efficient CNN inference outsourcing solution that protects the privacy of both model owners and users. Specifically, we design secure two-party computation protocols based on two non-colluding cloud servers, which calculate with additive secret shares of the model and the user’s input. Our protocols avoid the expensive permutation operations in linear calculations and approximations in non-linear calculations. We implement our solution on realistic CNNs and experimental results show that our solution is even 2–4 times faster than GALA. Xuanang Yang, Jing Chen 0003, Kun He 0008, Cong Wu 0003, Ruiying Du |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 5 |
| 2022 | EchoHand: High Accuracy and Presentation Attack Resistant Hand Authentication on Commodity Mobile DevicesabstractBiometric authentication schemes, i.e., fingerprint and face authentication, raise serious privacy concerns. To alleviate such concerns, hand authentication has been proposed recently. However, existing hand authentication schemes use dedicated hardware, such as infrared or depth cameras, which are not available on commodity mobile devices. In this paper, we present EchoHand, a high accuracy and presentation attack resistant authentication scheme that complements camera-based 2-dimensional hand geometry recognition of one hand with active acoustic sensing of the other holding hand. EchoHand plays an inaudible acoustic signal using the speaker to actively sense the holding hand and collects the echoes using the microphone. EchoHand does not rely on any specialized hardware but uses the built-in speaker, microphone and camera. Moreover, EchoHand does not place more burdens on users than existing hand authentication methods. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the reliability and security of EchoHand. The results show that EchoHand has a low equal error rate of 2.45% with as few as 10 training data points and it defeats presentation attacks. Cong Wu 0003, Jing Chen 0003, Kun He 0008, Ziming Zhao 0001, Ruiying Du |
CCS | 1 |
| 2022 | Faster Yet Safer: Logging System Via Fixed-Key Blockcipher
Viet Tung Hoang, Cong Wu 0003, Xin Yuan 0001 |
USENIX Security Symposium | 2 |
| 2022 | Toward Robust Detection of Puppet Attacks via Characterizing Fingertip-Touch BehaviorsabstractFingerprint authentication has gained increasing popularity on mobile devices in recent years. However, it is vulnerable to presentation attacks, which include that an attacker spoofs with an artificial replica. Many liveness detection solutions have been proposed to defeat such presentation attacks; however, they all fail to defend against a particular type of presentation attack, namelypuppet attack, in which an attacker places an unwilling victim's finger on the fingerprint sensor. In this article, we proposeFinAuth, an effective and efficient software-only solution, to complement fingerprint authentication by defeating both synthetic spoofs and puppet attacks usingfingertip-touchcharacteristics.FinAuthcharacterizes intrinsic fingertip-touch behaviors including the acceleration and the rotation angle of mobile devices when a legitimate user authenticates.FinAuthonly utilizes common sensors equipped on mobile devices and does not introduce extra usability burdens on users. To evaluate the effectiveness ofFinAuth, we carried out experiments on datasets collected from 90 subjects after the IRB approval. The results show thatFinAuthcan achieve the average balanced accuracy of 96.04% with 5 training data points and 99.28% with 100 training data points. Security experiments also demonstrate thatFinAuthis resilient against possible attacks. In addition, we report the usability analysis results ofFinAuth, including user authentication delay and overhead. Cong Wu 0003, Kun He 0008, Jing Chen 0003, Ziming Zhao 0001, Ruiying Du |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 1 |
| 2021 | Encrypted All-reduce on Multi-core ClustersabstractWe consider the encrypted all-reduce operation on multi-core clusters. We derive performance bounds for the encrypted all-reduce operation and develop efficient algorithms that are theoretically optimal in that they asymptotically achieve the performance bounds. We empirically evaluate our encrypted all-reduce algorithms on production clusters. The results show that with the right algorithm, encryption can be incorporated in the all-reduce operation on large messages without significant overheads on modern multi-core clusters whose compute node has a large number of cores. Mohsen Gavahi, Abu Naser, Cong Wu 0003, Mehran Sadeghi Lahijani, Zhi Wang 0004, Xin Yuan 0001 |
IPCCC | 3 |
| 2021 | Efficient Algorithms for Encrypted All-gather OperationabstractAs more High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications that process sensitive data are moving to run on the public cloud, there is a need for the cloud infrastructure to provide privacy and integrity support. In this work, we investigate how to add encryption to all-gather to protect internode communication. This task is challenging since encryption is often more expensive than communication in contemporary HPC systems. We derive performance bounds for encrypted allgather, and develop new algorithms that meet the theoretical lower bounds. Our empirical evaluation on production systems demonstrates that the new algorithms achieve substantially better performance than the naive approach. Mehran Sadeghi Lahijani, Abu Naser, Cong Wu 0003, Mohsen Gavahi, Viet Tung Hoang, Zhi Wang 0004, Xin Yuan 0001 |
IPDPS | 3 |
| 2020 | Liveness is Not Enough: Enhancing Fingerprint Authentication with Behavioral Biometrics to Defeat Puppet Attacks
Cong Wu 0003, Kun He 0008, Jing Chen 0003, Ziming Zhao 0001, Ruiying Du |
USENIX Security Symposium | 1 |
| 2020 | CaIAuth: Context-Aware Implicit Authentication When the Screen Is AwakeabstractRelieving users from the burden of remembering and inputting authentication information explicitly, such as passwords/PINs and lock patterns, implicit authentication mechanisms have gained an increasing concern. When providing authentication, the existing implicit methods only depend on a specific behavior, such as typing on the screen, performing gestures, or taking a walk. However, in real applications, a user's behavioral characteristics are also decided by the context where behavior is performed. Thus, those existing methods show limited authentication accuracy and usability. To address these issues, we propose CaIAuth, a reliable context-aware implicit authentication framework, which profiles users' behavior and context characteristics in a holistic fashion. It observes the states of context-sensing entities for different smartphone usage patterns and builds a context-aware model to distinguish between legitimate users and illegal ones. We conducted extensive experiments to evaluate system performance with a large data set collected from 142 subjects. The experimental results show that our system achieves a low equal error rate (EER) (e.g., less 7%) and is resilient against common threats, including zero-effect attack and mimicry attack. In addition, CaIAuth achieves a low authentication delay and overhead. Cong Wu 0003, Kun He 0008, Jing Chen 0003, Ruiying Du, Yang Xiang 0001 |
IEEE Internet Things J. | 1 |
| 2019 | An Empirical Study of Cryptographic Libraries for MPI CommunicationsabstractAs High Performance Computing (HPC) applications with data security requirements are increasingly moving to execute in the public cloud, there is a demand that the cloud infrastructure for HPC should support privacy and integrity. Incorporating privacy and integrity mechanisms in the communication infrastructure of today's public cloud is challenging because recent advances in the networking infrastructure in data centers have shifted the communication bottleneck from the network links to the network end points and because encryption is computationally intensive. In this work, we consider incorporating encryption to support privacy and integrity in the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library, which is widely used in HPC applications. We empirically study four contemporary cryptographic libraries, OpenSSL, BoringSSL, Libsodium, and CryptoPP using micro-benchmarks and NAS parallel benchmarks to evaluate their overheads for encrypting MPI messages on two different networking technologies, 10Gbps Ethernet and 40Gbps InfiniBand. The results indicate that (1) the performance differs drastically across cryptographic libraries, and (2) effectively supporting privacy and integrity in MPI communications on high speed data center networks is challenging-even with the most efficient cryptographic library, encryption can still introduce very significant overheads in some scenarios such as a single MPI communication operation on InfiniBand, but (3) the overall overhead may not be prohibitive for practical uses since there can be multiple concurrent communications. Abu Naser, Mohsen Gavahi, Cong Wu 0003, Viet Tung Hoang, Zhi Wang 0004, Xin Yuan 0001 |
CLUSTER | 3 |
| 2019 | ICAuth: Implicit and Continuous Authentication When the Screen Is AwakeabstractImplicit authentication has become increasingly popular over recent years due to the fact that it relieves users from explicit actions such as remembering and entering passwords. This paper puts forward ICAuth, a general and simple implicit authentication method for mobile devices, to authenticate the current user implicitly and continuously when the screen is awake. Distinct from existing implicit user authentication methods which only focus on behavioral characteristics and ignore contextual information, ICAuth is devised to understand different behaviors in various contexts. We investigate the correlations between the behavioral characteristics and contextual information via sensors on mobile devices and observe that user's behavioral characteristics are strongly related to the context. These sensors are divided into two kinds, including fine-grained sensors and coarse-grained sensors, where fine-grained sensor data represent behavioral features and the coarse-grained depict contextual information. ICAuth provides continuous authentication without the involvement of users. It promotes security via authenticating the current user continuously and improves the usability via eliminating the limitation of specific behaviors. We evaluate ICAuth comprehensively with a large dataset including 340842 samples collected from 142 subjects. Our approach achieves an accuracy of 96.85%, FNR of 2.95%, and FPR of 4.01%. Security analysis is also conducted to demonstrate that ICAuth is resilient against common smartphone authentication threats. Finally, we show the low power consumption and authentication latency with 2.2 seconds of ICAuth. Cong Wu 0003, Kun He 0008, Jing Chen 0003, Ruiying Du |
ICC | 1 |