MemberGuard: Protecting Machine Learning Privacy from Membership Inference. Machine Learning has become a core part of many real-world applications. However, machine learning models are vulnerable to membership inference attacks. In these attacks, an adversary can infer if a given data record has been part of the model's training data. In this project, the team aims to develop new techniques that can be used to counter these attacks, such as 1) new analytical models for membership leakage, 2) ne ....MemberGuard: Protecting Machine Learning Privacy from Membership Inference. Machine Learning has become a core part of many real-world applications. However, machine learning models are vulnerable to membership inference attacks. In these attacks, an adversary can infer if a given data record has been part of the model's training data. In this project, the team aims to develop new techniques that can be used to counter these attacks, such as 1) new analytical models for membership leakage, 2) new methods for susceptibility diagnosis, 3) new defences that leverage privacy and utility. Data-oriented services are estimated to be valuable assets in the future. These techniques can help Australia gain cutting edge advantage in machine learning security and privacy and protect its intellectual property on these services.Read moreRead less
Improving Modern Programming Language Performance: A Memory-Conscious Approach. The performance of modern programming languages such as Java and C# lags that of imperative languages such as C and Fortran. A significant source of the performance gap is poor memory behavior, which future computer architectures will exacerbate. This project addresses the problem of poor memory behavior in modern programming languages such as Java and C# through an integrated attack that incorporates new garbage c ....Improving Modern Programming Language Performance: A Memory-Conscious Approach. The performance of modern programming languages such as Java and C# lags that of imperative languages such as C and Fortran. A significant source of the performance gap is poor memory behavior, which future computer architectures will exacerbate. This project addresses the problem of poor memory behavior in modern programming languages such as Java and C# through an integrated attack that incorporates new garbage collection algorithms, run-time techniques that optimize running programs, and new compiler analyses with both static and dynamic optimizations. The project will give Australia an
international presence in a research area of great academic and commercial importance.
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Rigorous Privacy Compliance in Modern Application Ecosystems. Modern network applications such as mobile applications and browser extensions have become the primary gateways for consumers to access the Internet in today’s digital landscape. This project aims to address privacy issues in these ecosystems by developing a new privacy-compliance assessment framework. The framework will evaluate the current privacy practices of application ecosystems, enabling users and developers in Australia and wo ....Rigorous Privacy Compliance in Modern Application Ecosystems. Modern network applications such as mobile applications and browser extensions have become the primary gateways for consumers to access the Internet in today’s digital landscape. This project aims to address privacy issues in these ecosystems by developing a new privacy-compliance assessment framework. The framework will evaluate the current privacy practices of application ecosystems, enabling users and developers in Australia and worldwide to reliably identify potential privacy risks and issues on their applications. The intended outcomes should endow data controllers with the capability of evidencing their compliance of data protection legislations such as Australia Privacy Act 1988 and EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).Read moreRead less
Verified concurrent memory management on modern processors. This project aims to formally verify automatic memory managers in the presence of concurrency and the weakly ordered memory of modern processors. A new framework for verifying memory managers, reusable for a wide range of managed programming languages, target hardware, policies, and algorithms will be developed. Expected technical outcomes include improved techniques to ensure trustworthiness of the foundations on which critical softwar ....Verified concurrent memory management on modern processors. This project aims to formally verify automatic memory managers in the presence of concurrency and the weakly ordered memory of modern processors. A new framework for verifying memory managers, reusable for a wide range of managed programming languages, target hardware, policies, and algorithms will be developed. Expected technical outcomes include improved techniques to ensure trustworthiness of the foundations on which critical software infrastructures are built. This will significantly enhance the security of public and private cyber assets, and deliver applications that are more robust and trustworthy, across a range of critical infrastructure such as transportation, communication, energy and defence.Read moreRead less
Learning to Pinpoint Emerging Software Vulnerabilities. This project aims to develop learning-based software vulnerability detection techniques to improve the reliability and security of modern software systems. The existing techniques relying on conventional yet rigid software analysis and testing techniques are ineffective and/or inefficient when detecting a wide variety of emerging software vulnerabilities. The outcomes of this project will be a deep-learning-based detection approach and an ....Learning to Pinpoint Emerging Software Vulnerabilities. This project aims to develop learning-based software vulnerability detection techniques to improve the reliability and security of modern software systems. The existing techniques relying on conventional yet rigid software analysis and testing techniques are ineffective and/or inefficient when detecting a wide variety of emerging software vulnerabilities. The outcomes of this project will be a deep-learning-based detection approach and an open-source tool that can capture precision correlations between deep code features and diverse vulnerabilities to pinpoint emerging vulnerabilities without the need for bug specifications. Significant benefits include greatly improved quality, reliability and security for modern software systems.Read moreRead less
Privacy-preserving Biometrics based Authentication and Security. Password based authentication systems cannot verify genuine users. Biometric authentication can address this issue. However, the booming IoT applications and cloud computing require that the biometric authentication must be conducted in the privacy-protected setting in order to comply with privacy protection legal regulations. Latest reports show that current biometric authentication systems, under protected setting, exhibit poor ....Privacy-preserving Biometrics based Authentication and Security. Password based authentication systems cannot verify genuine users. Biometric authentication can address this issue. However, the booming IoT applications and cloud computing require that the biometric authentication must be conducted in the privacy-protected setting in order to comply with privacy protection legal regulations. Latest reports show that current biometric authentication systems, under protected setting, exhibit poor authentication performance, which is not commercially applicable. This project aims to investigate innovative solutions to this issue. The intended deliverables will include deep learning based biometric feature extractor, cancellable biometrics and cloud oriented biometrics security protocols. Read moreRead less
Privacy-preserving data processing on the cloud. This project aims to address the current lack of privacy of user data processed by common cloud computing web servers, including email, business data, and confidential files. This project aims to develop new techniques in cryptography. The anticipated outcome is a suite of practical tools enabling common cloud computing processing operations such as search, statistical analysis, and multi-user access control, to be performed efficiently while pres ....Privacy-preserving data processing on the cloud. This project aims to address the current lack of privacy of user data processed by common cloud computing web servers, including email, business data, and confidential files. This project aims to develop new techniques in cryptography. The anticipated outcome is a suite of practical tools enabling common cloud computing processing operations such as search, statistical analysis, and multi-user access control, to be performed efficiently while preserving the data privacy. These tools should provide significant benefits to the privacy of cloud users, as well as financial and reputation benefits to the IT industry, by significantly reducing the likelihood of massive user data privacy breaches in the event of a cyber-hacking attack on the cloud server.Read moreRead less
User-task co-adaptation for effective interactive simulation environments. This project aims to deliver smart interactive simulation environments in which users and simulation tasks work together. This project aims to create novel adaptive algorithms to automatically discover those user and task features that vary together to smartly adapt users and simulation tasks to work together harmoniously, seamlessly and effectively. Interactive simulation environments are the backbone for evaluating conc ....User-task co-adaptation for effective interactive simulation environments. This project aims to deliver smart interactive simulation environments in which users and simulation tasks work together. This project aims to create novel adaptive algorithms to automatically discover those user and task features that vary together to smartly adapt users and simulation tasks to work together harmoniously, seamlessly and effectively. Interactive simulation environments are the backbone for evaluating concepts, designs, products and advanced training systems in industry and government organisations. By bringing the user naturally inside the simulation as a task's component, users can improve their experience while task performance is simultaneously optimised. Intended outcomes include novel dynamic user-task profiling algorithms and new adaptive algorithms for user-task co-adaptation. Practical outcomes may include robust and highly effective simulation environments.Read moreRead less
Finding and exploiting interesting paths in multidimensional information spaces. This project will invent a new approach for searching within a large complex information space, finding interesting paths between points within the space, visualising the results, and supporting rich, human-centric user interaction with queries and results. This project will embody these techniques in a novel, internet-scale framework to support rapid development of large path search and visualisation applications. ....Finding and exploiting interesting paths in multidimensional information spaces. This project will invent a new approach for searching within a large complex information space, finding interesting paths between points within the space, visualising the results, and supporting rich, human-centric user interaction with queries and results. This project will embody these techniques in a novel, internet-scale framework to support rapid development of large path search and visualisation applications. Evaluation will be via development of several exemplar applications. The techniques and framework will be applicable to a broad range of economically important problems in areas as diverse as health, travel, scientific publication search, product marketing and software engineering.Read moreRead less
Provable elimination of information leakage through timing channels. This project aims to develop techniques to solve the issue in information security of unauthorised information flow resulting from competition for shared hardware resources. The project will combine operating systems design, formal hardware models, information-flow reasoning and theorem proving to achieve a goal that is widely considered infeasible. The project is expected to result in a system that prevents leakage of critical ....Provable elimination of information leakage through timing channels. This project aims to develop techniques to solve the issue in information security of unauthorised information flow resulting from competition for shared hardware resources. The project will combine operating systems design, formal hardware models, information-flow reasoning and theorem proving to achieve a goal that is widely considered infeasible. The project is expected to result in a system that prevents leakage of critical information, such as encryption keys, through timing channels. This should prevent sophisticated attacks on public clouds, mobile devices and military-grade cross-domain devices.Read moreRead less