Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities, but remain susceptible to a growing spectrum of safety risks, including jailbreaks, toxic content, hallucinations, and bias. Existing defenses often address only a single threat type or resort to rigid outright rejection, sacrificing user experience and failing to generalize across diverse and novel attacks. This paper introduces Adversarial Scenario Extrapolation (ASE), a novel inference-time computation framework that leverages Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to simultaneously enhance LLM robustness and seamlessness. ASE guides the LLM through a self-generative process of contemplating potential adversarial scenarios and formulating defensive strategies before generating a response to the user query. Comprehensive evaluation on four adversarial benchmarks with four latest LLMs shows that ASE achieves near-zero jailbreak attack success rates and minimal toxicity, while slashing outright rejections to

Fine-tuning large language models on private data for downstream applications poses significant privacy risks in potentially exposing sensitive information. Several popular community platforms now offer convenient distribution of a large variety of pre-trained models, allowing anyone to publish without rigorous verification. This scenario creates a privacy threat, as pre-trained models can be intentionally crafted to compromise the privacy of fine-tuning datasets. In this study, we introduce a novel poisoning technique that uses model-unlearning as an attack tool. This approach manipulates a pre-trained language model to increase the leakage of private data during the fine-tuning process. Our method enhances both membership inference and data extraction attacks while preserving model utility. Experimental results across different models, datasets, and fine-tuning setups demonstrate that our attacks significantly surpass baseline performance. This work serves as a cautionary note for users who download pretrained models from unverified sources, highlighting the potential risks involved.

In distributed learning settings, models are iteratively updated with shared gradients computed from potentially sensitive user data. While previous work has studied various privacy risks of sharing gradients, our paper aims to provide a systematic approach to analyze private information leakage from gradients. We present a unified game-based framework that encompasses a broad range of attacks including attribute, property, distributional, and user disclosures. We investigate how different uncertainties of the adversary affect their inferential power via extensive experiments on five datasets across various data modalities. Our results demonstrate the inefficacy of solely relying on data aggregation to achieve privacy against inference attacks in distributed learning. We further evaluate five types of defenses, namely, gradient pruning, signed gradient descent, adversarial perturbations, variational information bottleneck, and differential privacy, under both static and adaptive adversary settings. We provide an information-theoretic view for analyzing the effectiveness of these defenses against inference from gradients. Finally, we introduce a method for auditing attribute inference privacy, improving the empirical estimation of worst-case privacy through crafting adversarial canary records.

Text-conditioned image-to-video generation (TI2V) aims to synthesize a realistic video starting from a given image (e.g., a woman's photo) and a text description (e.g., “a woman is drinking water.”). Existing TI2V frameworks often require costly training on video-text datasets and spe-cific model designs for text and image conditioning. In this paper, we propose TI2V-Zero, a zero-shot, tuning-free method that empowers a pretrained text-to-video (T2V) diffusion model to be conditioned on a provided image, enabling TI2V generation without any optimization, fine-tuning, or introducing external modules. Our approach leverages a pretrained T2V diffusion foundation model as the generative prior. To guide video generation with the additional image input, we propose a “repeat-and-slide” strategy that modulates the reverse denoising process, al-lowing the frozen diffusion model to synthesize a video frame-by-frame starting from the provided image. To ensure temporal continuity, we employ a DDPM inversion strategy to initialize Gaussian noise for each newly synthesized frame and a resampling technique to help preserve visual details. We conduct comprehensive experiments on both domain-specific and open-domain datasets, where TI2V-Zero consistently outperforms a recent open-domain TI2V model. Furthermore, we show that TI2V-Zero can seam-lessly extend to other tasks such as video infilling and pre-diction when provided with more images. Its autoregressive design also supports long video generation.

We leverage standards-compliant beam training measurements from commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS) 802.11ad/ay devices for localization of a moving object. Two technical challenges need to be addressed: (1) the beam training measurements are intermittent due to beam scanning overhead control and contention-based channel-time allocation, and (2) how to exploit underlying object dynamics to assist the localization. To this end, we formulate the trajectory estimation as a sequence regression problem. We propose a dual-decoder neural dynamic learning framework to simultaneously reconstruct Wi-Fi beam training measurements at irregular time instances and learn the unknown dynamics over the latent space in a continuous-time fashion by enforcing strong supervision at both the coordinate and measurement levels. The proposed method was evaluated on an in-house mmWave Wi-Fi dataset and compared with a range of baseline methods, including traditional machine learning methods and recurrent neural networks.

System logs record rich information for system events. Practical anomaly detection from system logs should be able to address three challenges: 1) understanding complicated attributes in event logs; 2) extracting complex context relations among events; and 3) providing concrete explanations to human analysts. In this paper, we develop an attention-equipped encoder-decoder system to capture context from system logs for explainable anomaly detection. For each target event, we collect its nearby events in chronological order as its context events. Instead of using a recurrent neural network-based encoder like previous works, we adopt a Transformer-based encoder to extract complex relations among context events and their attributes. Then, a context vector is generated and passed to the decoder, where an attention matrix is learned and used to weigh the context events for detecting the anomalies. Evaluation on the large-scale real-world Los Alamos National Laboratory dataset shows that, compared with existing works, our methods can provide fine-grained one-to-one attention to help explain the importance of each attribute in the context events to the prediction, without sacrificing detection performance.

Conditional generative models typically demand large annotated training sets to achieve high-quality synthesis. As a result, there has been significant interest in designing models that perform plug-and-play generation, i.e., to use a predefined or pretrained model, which is not explicitly trained on the generative task, to guide the generative process (e.g., using language). However, such guidance is typically useful only towards synthesizing high-level semantics rather than editing fine-grained details as in image-to-image translation tasks. To this end, and capitalizing on the powerful fine-grained generative control offered by the recent diffusion-based generative models, we introduce Steered Diffusion, a generalized framework for photorealistic zero-shot conditional image generation using a diffusion model trained for unconditional generation. The key idea is to steer the image generation of the diffusion model at inference time via designing a loss using a pre-trained inverse model that characterizes the conditional task. This loss modulates the sampling trajectory of the diffusion process. Our framework allows for easy incorporation of multiple conditions during inference. We present experiments using steered diffusion on several tasks including inpainting, colorization, text-guided semantic editing, and image super-resolution. Our results demonstrate clear qualitative and quantitative improvements over state-of-the-art diffusion-based plug-and-play models while adding negligible additional computational cost.

Recent advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs) have led to remarkable achievements in face image synthesis. While methods that use style-based GANs can generate strikingly photorealistic face images, it is often difficult to control the characteristics of the generated faces in a meaningful and disentangled way. Prior approaches aim to achieve such semantic control and disentanglement within the latent space of a previously trained GAN. In contrast, we propose a framework that a priori models physical attributes of the face such as 3D shape, albedo, pose, and lighting explicitly, thus providing disentanglement by design. Our method, MOST-GAN, integrates the expressive power and photorealism of style-based GANs with the physical disentanglement and flexibility of nonlinear 3D morphable models, which we couple with a state-of-the-art 2D hair manipulation network. MOST-GAN achieves photorealistic manipulation of portrait images with fully disentangled 3D control over their physical attributes, enabling extreme manipulation of lighting, facial expression, and pose variations up to full profile view.

Beyond data communications, commercial-off-the-shelf Wi-Fi devices can be used to monitor human activities, track device locomotion, and sense the ambient environment. In particular, spatial beam attributes that are inherently available in the 60-GHz IEEE 802.11ad/ay standards have shown to be effective in terms of overhead and channel measurement granularity for these indoor sensing tasks. In this paper, we investigate transfer learning to mitigate domain shift in human monitoring tasks when Wi-Fi settings and environments change over time. As a proof-of-concept study, we consider quantum neural networks (QNN) as well as classical deep neural networks (DNN) for the future quantum-ready society. The effectiveness of both DNN and QNN is validated by an in-house experiment for human pose recognition, achieving greater than 90% accuracy with a limited data size.

This paper introduces a new quantum computing framework integrated with a two-step compressed sensing technique, applied to a joint channel estimation and user identification problem. We propose a variational quantum circuit (VQC) design as a new denoising solution. For a practical grant-free communications system having correlated device activities, variational quantum parameters for Pauli rotation gates in the proposed VQC system are optimized to facilitate to the non-linear estimation. Numerical results show that the VQC method can outperform modern compressed sensing techniques using an element-wise denoiser.

Domain adaptation (DA) aims to transfer the knowledge of a well-labeled source domain to facilitate unlabeled target learning. When turning to specific tasks such as indoor (Wi-Fi) localization, it is essential to learn a cross-domain regressor to mitigate the domain shift. This paper proposes a novel method Adversarial Bi-Regressor Network (ABRNet) to seek more effective cross- domain regression model. Specifically, a discrepant bi-regressor architecture is developed to maximize the difference of bi-regressor to discover uncertain target instances far from the source distribution, and then an adversarial training mechanism is adopted between feature extractor and dual regressors to produce domain-invariant representations. To further bridge the large domain gap, a domain- specific augmentation module is designed to synthesize two source-similar and target-similar inter- mediate domains to gradually eliminate the original domain mismatch. The empirical studies on two cross-domain regressive benchmarks illustrate the power of our method on solving the domain adaptive regression (DAR) problem.

The variational autoencoder (VAE) has been used in a myriad of applications, e.g., dimensionality reduction and generative modeling. VAE uses a specific model for stochastic sampling in latent space. The normal distribution is the most commonly used one because it allows a straightforward sampling, a reparameterization trick, and a differentiable expression of the Kullback–Leibler divergence. Although various other distributions such as Laplace were studied in literature, the effect of heterogeneous use of different distributions for posterior-prior pair is less known to date. In this paper, we investigate numerous possibilities of such a mismatched VAE, e.g., where the uniform distribution is used as a posterior belief at the encoder while the Cauchy distribution is used as a prior belief at the decoder. To design the mismatched VAE, the total number of potential combinations to explore grows rapidly with the number of latent nodes when allowing different distributions across latent nodes. We propose a novel framework called AutoVAE, which searches for better pairing set of posterior-prior beliefs in the context of automated machine learning for hyperparameter optimization. We demonstrate that the proposed irregular pairing offers a potential gain in the variational Rényi bound. In addition, we analyze a variety of likelihood beliefs and divergence order.

Complementary to the fine-grained channel state information (CSI) and coarse-grained received signal strength indicator (RSSI) measurements, the mid-grained spatial beam attributes [i.e., beam SNR (bSNR)] during the millimeter-wave (mmWave) beam training phase were recently repurposed for Wi-Fi sensing applications, such as human activity recognition and indoor localization. This article proposes a multiband Wi-Fi sensing framework to fuse features from both CSI from 5-GHz bands and the mid-grained bSNR at 60 GHz with feature granularity matching (GM) that pairs feature maps from the CSI and bSNR at different granularity levels with learnable weights. To address the issue of limited labeled training data, we propose to pretrain an autoencoder-based multiband Wi-Fi fusion network in an unsupervised fashion. For specific sensing tasks, separate sensing heads can be attached to the pretrained fusion network with fine-tuning. The proposed framework is thoroughly validated for three sensing applications using in-house experimental data sets: 1) pose recognition; 2) occupancy sensing; and 3) indoor localization. Comparison to a list of baseline methods demonstrates the effectiveness of GM. An ablation study is performed as a function of the amount of labeled data, the latent space dimension, and learning rates.

This paper proposes an anomaly detection algorithm for a factory automation system, which jointly performs data pre-processing and time-delay autoencoder (TDAE) with a hybrid loss function. The source data are pre-processed by digital filters before feeding into a TDAE for anomaly detection. The digital filters extract analog signals from a variety of frequency bands to facilitate identifying anomalies. The pre-processed data then takes time-delay reform to explore temporal relationship of data signals. In addition, two anomaly diagnosis algorithms, a statistical based method and an autoencoder based method, are presented. Numerical results show that time-delay reform can improve the anomaly detection accuracy compared to the conventional autoencoder. Data pre-processing can further improve the anomaly detection accuracy. Moreover, we confirm that our anomaly diagnosis algorithms outperform traditional method that does not perform data pre-processing and time-delay reform.

Robust machine learning formulations have emerged to address the prevalent vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial examples. Our work draws the connection between optimal robust learning and the privacy-utility tradeoff problem, which is a generalization of the rate-distortion problem. The saddle point of the game between a robust classifier and an adversarial perturbation can be found via the solution of a maximum conditional entropy problem. This information-theoretic perspective sheds light on the fundamental tradeoff between robustness and clean data performance, which ultimately arises from the geometric structure of the underlying data distribution and perturbation constraints.

Adversarial examples have recently exposed the severe vulnerability of neural network models. However, most of the existing attacks require some form of target model information (i.e., weights/model inquiry/architecture) to improve the efficacy of the attack. We leverage the information-theoretic connections between robust learning and generalized rate-distortion theory to formulate a universal adversarial example (UAE) generation algorithm. Our algorithm trains an offline adversarial generator to minimize the mutual information between the label and perturbed data. At the inference phase, our UAE method can efficiently generate effective adversarial examples without high computation cost. These adversarial examples in turn allow for developing universal defenses through adversarial training. Our experiments demonstrate promising gains in improving the training efficiency of conventional adversarial training.

Human computer interaction (HCI) involves a multidisciplinary fusion of technologies, through which the control of external devices could be achieved by monitoring physiological status of users. However, physiological biosignals often vary across users and recording sessions due to unstable physical/mental conditions and task-irrelevant activities. To deal with this challenge, we propose a method of adversarial feature encoding with the concept of a Rateless Autoencoder (RAE), in order to exploit disentangled, nuisance-robust, and universal representations. We achieve a good trade-off between user-specific and task-relevant features by making use of the stochastic disentanglement of the latent representations by adopting additional adversarial networks. The proposed model is applicable to a wider range of unknown users and tasks as well as different classifiers. Results on cross-subject transfer evaluations show the advantages of the proposed framework, with up to an 11.6% improvement in the average subject-transfer classification accuracy.

Modern face alignment methods have become quite accurate at predicting the locations of facial landmarks, but they do not typically estimate the uncertainty of their predicted locations nor predict whether landmarks are visible. In this paper, we present a novel framework for jointly predicting landmark locations, associated uncertainties of these predicted locations, and landmark visibilities. We model these as mixed random variables and estimate them using a deep network trained using our proposed Location, Uncertainty, and Visibility Likelihood (LUVLi) loss. In addition, we release an entirely new labeling of a large face alignment dataset with over 19,000 face images in a full range of head poses. Each face is manually labeled with the ground-truth locations of 68 landmarks, with the additional information of whether each landmarks is visible, self-occluded (due to extreme head poses), or externally occluded. Not only does our joint estimation yield accurate estimates of the uncertainty of predicted landmark locations, but it also yields state-of-the-art estimates for the landmark locations themselves on mulitple standard face alignment datasets. Our method's estimates of the uncertainty of predicted landmark locations could be used to automatically identify input images on which face alignment fails, which can be critical for downstream tasks.

In this paper, we propose a new polar coding scheme with molecular programming, which is capable of highly parallel implementation at a nano-scale without the need for electrical power sources. We designed chemical reaction networks (CRN) to employ either successive cancellation (SC) or maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding schemes for short polar codes. From differential equation analysis of the proposed CRNs, we demonstrate that SC and ML decoding achieve accurate computations across fully-parallel chemical reactions. In terms of the number of required chemical reactions, we verify the superiority of ML decoding over SC decoding for very short block lengths.

The deep learning trend has recently impacted a variety of fields, including communication systems, where various approaches have explored the application of neural networks in place of traditional designs. Neural networks flexibly allow for data-driven optimization, but are often employed as black boxes detached from direct application of domain knowledge. Our work considers learning-based approaches to end-to-end design of modulation and signal detection for the non-coherent multi-input multi-output (MIMO) channels. We demonstrate that simulation-driven optimization can outperform traditional Grassmann designs. Additionally, we show the feasibility of non-coherent MIMO communications over extremely short channel coherence time, with as few as two time slots, which have never been explored in existing literature due to design hardness.

We propose a new concept of rateless auto-encoders (RL-AEs) that enable a flexible latent dimensionality, which can be seamlessly adjusted for varying distortion. In the proposed RL-AEs, instead of a deterministic bottleneck architecture, we use an over-complete representation that is stochastically regularized with weighted dropouts. Our RL-AEs employ monotonically increasing dropout rates across the latent representation nodes such that the latent variables become sorted by importance like in principal component analysis (PCA). This is motivated by the rateless property of conventional PCA, where the least important principal components can be discarded to realize variable rate dimensionality reduction that gracefully degrades the distortion. Our proposed stochastic bottleneck framework enables seamless rate adaptation with high reconstruction performance, without requiring predetermined latent dimensionality at training. We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed RL-AEs can achieve variable dimensionality reduction while retaining nearly optimal distortion compared to conventional AEs.

We propose a self-supervised approach to improve the training of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) via inducing the discriminator to examine the structural consistency of images. Although natural image samples provide ideal examples of both valid structure and valid texture, learning to reproduce both together remains an open challenge. In our approach, we augment the training set of natural images with modified examples that have degraded structural consistency. These degraded examples are automatically created by randomly exchanging pairs of patches in an image’s convolutional feature map. We call this approach feature exchange. With this setup, we propose a novel GAN formulation, termed Feature eXchange GAN (FX-GAN), in which the discriminator is trained not only to distinguish real versus generated images, but also to perform the auxiliary task of distinguishing between real images and structurally corrupted (feature-exchanged) real images. This auxiliary task causes the discriminator to learn the proper feature structure of natural images, which in turn guides the generator to produce images with more realistic structure. Compared with strong GAN baselines, our proposed self-supervision approach improves generated image quality, diversity, and training stability for both the unconditional and class-conditional settings.

Recent developments in biosignal processing have enabled users to exploit their physiological status for manipulating devices in a reliable and safe manner. One major challenge of physiological sensing lies in the variability of biosignals across different users and tasks. To address this issue, we propose an adversarial feature extractor for transfer learning to exploit disentangled universal representations. We consider the trade-off between task-relevant features and user-discriminative information by introducing additional adversary and nuisance networks in order to manipulate the latent representations such that the learned feature extractor is applicable to unknown users and various tasks. Results on cross-subject transfer evaluations exhibit the benefits of the proposed framework, with up to 8.8% improvement in average accuracy of classification, and demonstrate adaptability to a broader range of subjects.

The central challenge in supporting massive IoT connectivity is the uncoordinated, random access by sporadically active devices. The random access protocol and activity detection have been widely studied, while the auxiliary procedures, such as synchronization, channel estimation and equalization, have received much less attention. However, once the protocol is fixed, the access performance can only be improved by a more effective receiver, through more accurate execution of the auxiliary procedures. This motivates the pursuit of joint synchronization and channel estimation, rather than the traditional approach of handling them separately. The prohibitive complexity of the conventional analytical solutions leads us to employ the tools of deep learning in this paper. Specifically, the proposed method is applied to the random access protocol of Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), preserving its standard preamble structure. We obtain excellent performance in estimating Time-of-Arrival (ToA), Carrier-Frequency Offset (CFO), channel gain and collision multiplicity from a received mixture of transmissions. The proposed estimator achieves a ToA Root-Mean-Square Error (RMSE) of 0.99 us and a CFO RMSE of 1.61 Hz at 10 dB Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), whereas a conventional estimator using two cascaded stages have RMSEs of 15.85 us and 8.05 Hz, respectively.

This paper studies a new application of deep learning (DL) for optimizing constellations in two-way relaying with physical-layer network coding (PNC), where deep neural network (DNN)-based modulation and demodulation are employed at each terminal and relay node. We train DNNs such that the cross entropy loss is directly minimized, and thus it maximizes the likelihood, rather than considering the Euclidean distance of the constellations. The proposed scheme can be extended to higher level constellations with slight modification of the DNN structure. Simulation results demonstrate a significant performance gain in terms of the achievable sum rate over conventional relaying schemes. Furthermore, since our DNN demodulator directly outputs bit-wise probabilities, it is straightforward to concatenate with soft-decision channel decoding.

Motivated by the recent advancement of quantum processors, we investigate quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) to employ quasi-maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding of classical channel codes. QAOA is a hybrid quantum-classical variational algorithm, which is advantageous for the near-term noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, where the fidelity of quantum gates is limited by noise and de-coherence. We first describe how to construct Ising Hamiltonian model to realize quasi-ML decoding with QAOA. For level-1 QAOA, we derive the systematic way to generate theoretical expressions of cost expectation for arbitrary binary linear codes. Focusing on [7], [4] Hamming code as an example, we analyze the impact of the degree distribution in associated generator matrix on the quantum decoding performance. The excellent performance of higher-level QAOA decoding is verified when Pauli rotation angles are optimized through meta-heuristic variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). Furthermore, we demonstrate the QAOA decoding performance in a real quantum device.

Deep learning methods for person identification based on electroencephalographic (EEG) brain activity encounters the problem of exploiting the temporally correlated structures or recording session specific variability within EEG. Furthermore, recent methods have mostly trained and evaluated based on single session EEG data. We address this problem from an invariant representation learning perspective. We propose an adversarial inference approach to extend such deep learning models to learn session-invariant person-discriminative representations that can provide robustness in terms of longitudinal usability. Using adversarial learning within a deep convolutional network, we empirically assess and show improvements with our approach based on longitudinally collected EEG data for person identification from half-second EEG epochs.

Ultra-reliable forward error correction (FEC) codes approaching the Shannon limit have played an important role in increasing spectral efficiency of wireless communications. In addition to the error correction performance, both low-power and low-latency decoding are demanded for the fifth generation (5G) wireless applications. In this paper, we introduce turbo product codes (TPC) consisting of multiple polar codes to enable highly parallel decoding for high- throughput and low-latency FEC. With turbo iterative decoding, the proposed polar-TPC can outperform the conventional BCH-based TPC by 0.5 dB, and can approach the performance of the corresponding long polar code within 0.2 dB with a capability of 256- times faster decoding. In addition, we apply irregular polar codes, whose polarization units are pruned, to further reduce the computational complexity by 50% and decoding latency by 80% without sacrificing performance. We analyze the impact of list size, turbo iteration count, and fading channels to demonstrate the potential of the polar-TPC for 5G wireless systems.

Recent advancements in polar coding have achieved practical performance competitive with other capacity-achieving codes such as low-density parity-check codes. In this paper, we propose a new family called irregular polar codes, where polarlization units are irregularly inactivated to achieve additional degrees of freedom for code design. We first discuss the code construction for irregular polar-coded modulation by taking non-uniform bit-reliability into consideration. We then apply the proposed polar codes to wireless massive multiple-input multiple- output (MIMO) communication channels. Simulation results show that the irregular polar codes can significantly reduce encoding/decoding complexity up to 50% while also yielding a marginal improvement in error rate performance.

Household energy monitoring via smart-meters motivates the problem of disaggregating the total energy usage signal into the component energy usage and operating patterns of individual appliances. While energy disaggregation enables useful analytics, it also raises privacy concerns because sensitive household information may also be revealed. Our goal is to preserve analytical utility while mitigating privacy concerns by processing the total energy usage signal. We consider processing methods that attempt to remove the contribution of a set of sensitive appliances from the total energy signal. We show that while a simple model-based approach is effective against an adversary making the same model assumptions, it is much less effective against a stronger adversary employing neural networks in an inference attack. We also investigate the performance of employing neural networks to estimate and remove the energy usage of sensitive appliances. The experiments used the publicly available UK-DALE dataset that was collected from actual households.

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications play an important role for applications that involve connections between a massive number of heterogeneous devices in home and industrial networks. For M2M networks, realizing low latency and high reliability is of great importance. In this paper, we show the great potential of polar-coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) to fulfill those requirements. We show that polar codes with list decoding plus cyclic redundancy check (CRC) can outperform state-of-the-art low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes at short block lengths. In addition, we introduce an efficient interleaver and constellation shaping for polar-coded high-order modulations, where a coded sequence is carefully mapped across subcarriers and modulation bits to exploit non-uniform reliability for higher diversity gains. Through computer simulations, we demonstrate that a significant gain greater than 2 dB can be achieved by quadratic polynomial permutation (QPP) interleaver with optimized parameters in comparison to the conventional random interleaver for high-order 256-ary quadrature-amplitude modulation (QAM) OFDM transmission in frequency-selective wireless channels.

The problem in which one of three pairwise interacting parties is required to securely compute a function of the inputs held by the other two, when one party may arbitrarily deviate from the computation protocol (active behavioral model), is studied. An information-theoretic characterization of unconditionally secure computation protocols under the active behavioral model is provided. A protocol for Hamming distance computation is provided and shown to be unconditionally secure under both active and passive behavioral models using the information-theoretic characterization. The difference between the notions of security under the active and passive behavioral models is illustrated by examining a protocol for computing quadratic and Hamming distances that is secure under the passive model, but is insecure under the active model.

We present a theoretical framework for the analysis of privacy and security trade-offs in secure biometric authentication systems. We use this framework to conduct a comparative information-theoretic analysis of two biometric systems that are based on linear error correction codes, namely fuzzy commitment and secure sketches. We derive upper bounds for the probability of false rejection$(P_{FR})$and false acceptance$(P_{FA})$for these systems. We use mutual information to quantify the information leaked about a user's biometric identity, in the scenario where one or multiple biometric enrollments of the user are fully or partially compromised. We also quantify the probability of successful attack$(P_{SA})$based on the compromised information. Our analysis reveals that fuzzy commitment and secure sketch systems have identical$P_{FR}$,$P_{FA}$,$P_{SA}$, and information leakage, but secure sketch systems have lower storage requirements. We analyze both single-factor (keyless) and two-factor (key-based) variants of secure biometrics, and consider the most general scenarios in which a single user may provide noisy biometric enrollments at several access control devices, some of which may be subsequently compromised by an attacker. Our analysis highlights the revocability and reusability properties of key-based systems and exposes a subtle design trade-off between reducing information leakage from compromised systems and preventing successful attacks on systems whose data have not been compromised.

In the problem of secure multi-party sampling, n parties wish to securely sample an n-variate joint distribution, with each party receiving a sample of one of the correlated variables. The objective is to correctly produce the samples using a distributed message passing protocol, while maintaining privacy against a coalition of passively cheating parties. In the two-party case, we fully characterize the joint distributions that can be securely sampled under perfect correctness and privacy requirements as well as under weakened correctness and privacy requirements. Furthermore, we show that the distributions that can be securely sampled can be produced with a protocol that only uses one round of unidirectional communication. For the n-party case, any distribution can be securely sampled with privacy against a strict minority coalition, due to well-known results in secure multi-party computation. However, when privacy against a majority coalition is required, not all distributions can be securely sampled. We give necessary conditions and sufficient conditions for distributions that can be securely sampled. However, the exact characterization of the distributions that can be securely sampled remains open.

We propose an information theoretic framework for the secure two-party function computation (SFC) problem and introduce the notion of SFC capacity. We study and extend string oblivious transfer (OT) tosample-wiseOT. We propose an efficient,perfectlyprivateOT protocol utilizing the binary erasure channel or source. We also propose thebootstrapstring OT protocol which provides disjoint (weakened) privacy while achieving a multiplicative increase in rate, thus trading off security for rate. Finally, leveraging our OT protocol, we construct a protocol for SFC and establish a general lower bound on SFC capacity of the binary erasure channel and source.

We consider the problem of reconstructing a deterministic data field from binary quantized noisy observations of sensors randomly deployed over the field domain. Our focus is on the extremes of lack of control in the sensor deployment, arbitrariness and lack of knowledge of the noise distribution, and low-precision and unreliability in the sensors. These adverse conditions are motivated by possible real-world scenarios where a large collection of low-cost, crudely manufactured sensors are mass-deployed in an environment where little can be assumed about the ambient noise. We propose a simple estimator that reconstructs the entire data field from these unreliable, binary quantized, noisy observations. Under the assumption of a bounded amplitude field, we prove almost sure and mean-square convergence of the estimator to the actual field as the number of sensors tends to infinity. For fields with bounded-variation, Sobolev differentiable, or finite-dimensionality properties, we derive specific mean squared error (MSE) decay rates. The analysis techniques used herein expose the effects of field "smoothness" properties, location randomness, and noise on the MSE scaling behavior.