pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Scalable and Ethical Insider Threat Detection through Data Synthesis and Analysis by LLMs
Authors: Haywood Gelman, John D. Hastings
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Synthetic Data Generation

Insider threats wield an outsized influence on organizations, disproportionate to their small numbers. This is due to the internal access insiders have to systems, information, and infrastructure. %One example of this influence is where anonymous respondents submit web-based job search site reviews, an insider threat risk to organizations. Signals for such risks may be found in anonymous submissions to public web-based job search site reviews. This research studies the potential for large language models (LLMs) to analyze and detect insider threat sentiment within job site reviews. Addressing ethical data collection concerns, this research utilizes synthetic data generation using LLMs alongside existing job review datasets. A comparative analysis of sentiment scores generated by LLMs is benchmarked against expert human scoring. Findings reveal that LLMs demonstrate alignment with human evaluations in most cases, thus effectively identifying nuanced indicators of threat sentiment. The performance is lower on human-generated data than synthetic data, suggesting areas for improvement in evaluating real-world data. Text diversity analysis found differences between human-generated and LLM-generated datasets, with synthetic data exhibiting somewhat lower diversity. Overall, the results demonstrate the applicability of LLMs to insider threat detection, and a scalable solution for insider sentiment testing by overcoming ethical and logistical barriers tied to data acquisition.
Automated Consistency Analysis of LLMs
Authors: Aditya Patwardhan, Vivek Vaidya, Ashish Kundu
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00

Generative AI (Gen AI) with large language models (LLMs) are being widely adopted across the industry, academia and government. Cybersecurity is one of the key sectors where LLMs can be and/or are already being used. There are a number of problems that inhibit the adoption of trustworthy Gen AI and LLMs in cybersecurity and such other critical areas. One of the key challenge to the trustworthiness and reliability of LLMs is: how consistent an LLM is in its responses? In this paper, we have analyzed and developed a formal definition of consistency of responses of LLMs. We have formally defined what is consistency of responses and then develop a framework for consistency evaluation. The paper proposes two approaches to validate consistency: self-validation, and validation across multiple LLMs. We have carried out extensive experiments for several LLMs such as GPT4oMini, GPT3.5, Gemini, Cohere, and Llama3, on a security benchmark consisting of several cybersecurity questions: informational and situational. Our experiments corroborate the fact that even though these LLMs are being considered and/or already being used for several cybersecurity tasks today, they are often inconsistent in their responses, and thus are untrustworthy and unreliable for cybersecurity.
DROP: Poison Dilution via Knowledge Distillation for Federated Learning
Authors: Georgios Syros, Anshuman Suri, Farinaz Koushanfar, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Alina Oprea
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Poisoning, Federated Learning, Knowledge Distillation

Federated Learning is vulnerable to adversarial manipulation, where malicious clients can inject poisoned updates to influence the global model's behavior. While existing defense mechanisms have made notable progress, they fail to protect against adversaries that aim to induce targeted backdoors under different learning and attack configurations. To address this limitation, we introduce DROP (Distillation-based Reduction Of Poisoning), a novel defense mechanism that combines clustering and activity-tracking techniques with extraction of benign behavior from clients via knowledge distillation to tackle stealthy adversaries that manipulate low data poisoning rates and diverse malicious client ratios within the federation. Through extensive experimentation, our approach demonstrates superior robustness compared to existing defenses across a wide range of learning configurations. Finally, we evaluate existing defenses and our method under the challenging setting of non-IID client data distribution and highlight the challenges of designing a resilient FL defense in this setting.
Is API Access to LLMs Useful for Generating Private Synthetic Tabular Data?
Authors: Marika Swanberg, Ryan McKenna, Edo Roth, Albert Cheu, Peter Kairouz
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Synthetic Data Generation

Differentially private (DP) synthetic data is a versatile tool for enabling the analysis of private data. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have inspired a number of algorithm techniques for improving DP synthetic data generation. One family of approaches uses DP finetuning on the foundation model weights; however, the model weights for state-of-the-art models may not be public. In this work we propose two DP synthetic tabular data algorithms that only require API access to the foundation model. We adapt the Private Evolution algorithm (Lin et al., 2023; Xie et al., 2024) -- which was designed for image and text data -- to the tabular data domain. In our extension of Private Evolution, we define a query workload-based distance measure, which may be of independent interest. We propose a family of algorithms that use one-shot API access to LLMs, rather than adaptive queries to the LLM. Our findings reveal that API-access to powerful LLMs does not always improve the quality of DP synthetic data compared to established baselines that operate without such access. We provide insights into the underlying reasons and propose improvements to LLMs that could make them more effective for this application.
Generating Privacy-Preserving Personalized Advice with Zero-Knowledge Proofs and LLMs
Authors: Hiroki Watanabe, Motonobu Uchikoshi
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in domains such as finance, healthcare, and interpersonal relationships to provide advice tailored to user traits and contexts. However, this personalization often relies on sensitive data, raising critical privacy concerns and necessitating data minimization. To address these challenges, we propose a framework that integrates zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology, specifically zkVM, with LLM-based chatbots. This integration enables privacy-preserving data sharing by verifying user traits without disclosing sensitive information. Our research introduces both an architecture and a prompting strategy for this approach. Through empirical evaluation, we clarify the current constraints and performance limitations of both zkVM and the proposed prompting strategy, thereby demonstrating their practical feasibility in real-world scenarios.
Robust Watermarks Leak: Channel-Aware Feature Extraction Enables Adversarial Watermark Manipulation
Authors: Zhongjie Ba, YiTao Zhang, Peng Cheng, Bin Gong, Xinyu Zhang, Qinglong Wang, Kui Ren
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00

Watermarking plays a key role in the provenance and detection of AI-generated content. While existing methods prioritize robustness against real-world distortions (e.g., JPEG compression and noise addition), we reveal a fundamental tradeoff: such robust watermarks inherently improve the redundancy of detectable patterns encoded into images, creating exploitable information leakage. To leverage this, we propose an attack framework that extracts leakage of watermark patterns through multi-channel feature learning using a pre-trained vision model. Unlike prior works requiring massive data or detector access, our method achieves both forgery and detection evasion with a single watermarked image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a 60\% success rate gain in detection evasion and 51\% improvement in forgery accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining visual fidelity. Our work exposes the robustness-stealthiness paradox: current "robust" watermarks sacrifice security for distortion resistance, providing insights for future watermark design.
Enhanced Hybrid Deep Learning Approach for Botnet Attacks Detection in IoT Environment
Authors: A. Karthick kumar, S. Rathnamala, T. Vijayashanthi, M. Prabhananthakumar, Alavikunhu Panthakkan, Shadi Atalla, Wathiq Mansoor
Date: 2025-02-10 00:00:00

Cyberattacks in an Internet of Things (IoT) environment can have significant impacts because of the interconnected nature of devices and systems. An attacker uses a network of compromised IoT devices in a botnet attack to carry out various harmful activities. Detecting botnet attacks poses several challenges because of the intricate and evolving nature of these threats. Botnet attacks erode trust in IoT devices and systems, undermining confidence in their security, reliability, and integrity. Deep learning techniques have significantly enhanced the detection of botnet attacks due to their ability to analyze and learn from complex patterns in data. This research proposed the stacking of Deep convolutional neural networks, Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM), Bi-Directional Gated Recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU), and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) for botnet attacks detection. The UNSW-NB15 dataset is utilized for botnet attacks detection. According to experimental results, the proposed model accurately provides for the intricate patterns and features of botnet attacks, with a testing accuracy of 99.76%. The proposed model also identifies botnets with a high ROC-AUC curve value of 99.18%. A performance comparison of the proposed method with existing state-of-the-art models confirms its higher performance. The outcomes of this research could strengthen cyber security procedures and safeguard against new attacks.
Benchmarking Prompt Engineering Techniques for Secure Code Generation with GPT Models
Authors: Marc Bruni, Fabio Gabrielli, Mohammad Ghafari, Martin Kropp
Date: 2025-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Code Generation, Prompt Engineering

Prompt engineering reduces reasoning mistakes in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its effectiveness in mitigating vulnerabilities in LLM-generated code remains underexplored. To address this gap, we implemented a benchmark to automatically assess the impact of various prompt engineering strategies on code security. Our benchmark leverages two peer-reviewed prompt datasets and employs static scanners to evaluate code security at scale. We tested multiple prompt engineering techniques on GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4o, and GPT-4o-mini. Our results show that for GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini, a security-focused prompt prefix can reduce the occurrence of security vulnerabilities by up to 56%. Additionally, all tested models demonstrated the ability to detect and repair between 41.9% and 68.7% of vulnerabilities in previously generated code when using iterative prompting techniques. Finally, we introduce a "prompt agent" that demonstrates how the most effective techniques can be applied in real-world development workflows.
A Conditional Tabular GAN-Enhanced Intrusion Detection System for Rare Attacks in IoT Networks
Authors: Safaa Menssouri, El Mehdi Amhoud
Date: 2025-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Intrusion Detection

Internet of things (IoT) networks, boosted by 6G technology, are transforming various industries. However, their widespread adoption introduces significant security risks, particularly in detecting rare but potentially damaging cyber-attacks. This makes the development of robust IDS crucial for monitoring network traffic and ensuring their safety. Traditional IDS often struggle with detecting rare attacks due to severe class imbalances in IoT data. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage system called conditional tabular generative synthetic minority data generation with deep neural network (CTGSM-DNN). In the first stage, a conditional tabular generative adversarial network (CTGAN) is employed to generate synthetic data for rare attack classes. In the second stage, the SMOTEENN method is applied to improve dataset quality. The full study was conducted using the CSE-CIC-IDS2018 dataset, and we assessed the performance of the proposed IDS using different evaluation metrics. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed multiclass classifier, achieving an overall accuracy of 99.90% and 80% accuracy in detecting rare attacks.
Cyri: A Conversational AI-based Assistant for Supporting the Human User in Detecting and Responding to Phishing Attacks
Authors: Antonio La Torre, Marco Angelini
Date: 2025-02-09 00:00:00

This work introduces Cyri, an AI-powered conversational assistant designed to support a human user in detecting and analyzing phishing emails by leveraging Large Language Models. Cyri has been designed to scrutinize emails for semantic features used in phishing attacks, such as urgency, and undesirable consequences, using an approach that unifies features already established in the literature with others by Cyri features extraction methodology. Cyri can be directly plugged into a client mail or webmail, ensuring seamless integration with the user's email workflow while maintaining data privacy through local processing. By performing analyses on the user's machine, Cyri eliminates the need to transmit sensitive email data over the internet, reducing associated security risks. The Cyri user interface has been designed to reduce habituation effects and enhance user engagement. It employs dynamic visual cues and context-specific explanations to keep users alert and informed while using emails. Additionally, it allows users to explore identified malicious semantic features both through conversation with the agent and visual exploration, obtaining the advantages of both modalities for expert or non-expert users. It also allows users to keep track of the conversation, supports the user in solving additional questions on both computed features or new parts of the mail, and applies its detection on demand. To evaluate Cyri, we crafted a comprehensive dataset of 420 phishing emails and 420 legitimate emails. Results demonstrate high effectiveness in identifying critical phishing semantic features fundamental to phishing detection. A user study involving 10 participants, both experts and non-experts, evaluated Cyri's effectiveness and usability. Results indicated that Cyri significantly aided users in identifying phishing emails and enhanced their understanding of phishing tactics.
Protecting Intellectual Property of EEG-based Neural Networks with Watermarking
Authors: Ahmed Abdelaziz, Ahmed Fathi, Ahmed Fares
Date: 2025-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, EEG, Medical Diagnosis, Transfer Learning

EEG-based neural networks, pivotal in medical diagnosis and brain-computer interfaces, face significant intellectual property (IP) risks due to their reliance on sensitive neurophysiological data and resource-intensive development. Current watermarking methods, particularly those using abstract trigger sets, lack robust authentication and fail to address the unique challenges of EEG models. This paper introduces a cryptographic wonder filter-based watermarking framework tailored for EEG-based neural networks. Leveraging collision-resistant hashing and public-key encryption, the wonder filter embeds the watermark during training, ensuring minimal distortion ($\leq 5\%$ drop in EEG task accuracy) and high reliability (100\% watermark detection). The framework is rigorously evaluated against adversarial attacks, including fine-tuning, transfer learning, and neuron pruning. Results demonstrate persistent watermark retention, with classification accuracy for watermarked states remaining above 90\% even after aggressive pruning, while primary task performance degrades faster, deterring removal attempts. Piracy resistance is validated by the inability to embed secondary watermarks without severe accuracy loss ( $>10\%$ in EEGNet and CCNN models). Cryptographic hashing ensures authentication, reducing brute-force attack success probabilities. Evaluated on the DEAP dataset across models (CCNN, EEGNet, TSception), the method achieves $>99.4\%$ null-embedding accuracy, effectively eliminating false positives. By integrating wonder filters with EEG-specific adaptations, this work bridges a critical gap in IP protection for neurophysiological models, offering a secure, tamper-proof solution for healthcare and biometric applications. The framework's robustness against adversarial modifications underscores its potential to safeguard sensitive EEG models while maintaining diagnostic utility.
Privacy-Preserving Dataset Combination
Authors: Keren Fuentes, Mimee Xu, Irene Chen
Date: 2025-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Mortality Prediction, Privacy Preserving

Access to diverse, high-quality datasets is crucial for machine learning model performance, yet data sharing remains limited by privacy concerns and competitive interests, particularly in regulated domains like healthcare. This dynamic especially disadvantages smaller organizations that lack resources to purchase data or negotiate favorable sharing agreements. We present SecureKL, a privacy-preserving framework that enables organizations to identify beneficial data partnerships without exposing sensitive information. Building on recent advances in dataset combination methods, we develop a secure multiparty computation protocol that maintains strong privacy guarantees while achieving >90\% correlation with plaintext evaluations. In experiments with real-world hospital data, SecureKL successfully identifies beneficial data partnerships that improve model performance for intensive care unit mortality prediction while preserving data privacy. Our framework provides a practical solution for organizations seeking to leverage collective data resources while maintaining privacy and competitive advantages. These results demonstrate the potential for privacy-preserving data collaboration to advance machine learning applications in high-stakes domains while promoting more equitable access to data resources.
Mitigating Sensitive Information Leakage in LLMs4Code through Machine Unlearning
Authors: Ruotong Geng, Mingyang Geng, Shangwen Wang, Haotian Wang, Zhipeng Lin, Dezun Dong
Date: 2025-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Machine Unlearning, Memorization

Large Language Models for Code (LLMs4Code) excel at code generation tasks, yielding promise to release developers from huge software development burdens. Nonetheless, these models have been shown to suffer from the significant privacy risks due to the potential leakage of sensitive information embedded during training, known as the memorization problem. Addressing this issue is crucial for ensuring privacy compliance and upholding user trust, but till now there is a dearth of dedicated studies in the literature that focus on this specific direction. Recently, machine unlearning has emerged as a promising solution by enabling models to "forget" sensitive information without full retraining, offering an efficient and scalable approach compared to traditional data cleaning methods. In this paper, we empirically evaluate the effectiveness of unlearning techniques for addressing privacy concerns in LLMs4Code.Specifically, we investigate three state-of-the-art unlearning algorithms and three well-known open-sourced LLMs4Code, on a benchmark that takes into consideration both the privacy data to be forgotten as well as the code generation capabilites of these models. Results show that it is feasible to mitigate the privacy concerns of LLMs4Code through machine unlearning while maintain their code generation capabilities at the same time. We also dissect the forms of privacy protection/leakage after unlearning and observe that there is a shift from direct leakage to indirect leakage, which underscores the need for future studies addressing this risk.
Mobile Application Threats and Security
Authors: Timur Mirzoev, Mark Miller, Shamimara Lasker, Michael Brannon
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00

The movement to mobile computing solutions provides flexibility to different users whether it is a business user, a student, or even providing entertainment to children and adults of all ages. Due to these emerging technologies mobile users are unable to safeguard private information in a very effective way and cybercrimes are increasing day by day. This manuscript will focus on security vulnerabilities in the mobile computing industry, especially focusing on tablets and smart phones. This study will dive into current security threats for the Android & Apple iOS market, exposing security risks and threats that the novice or average user may not be aware of. The purpose of this study is to analyze current security risks and threats, and provide solutions that may be deployed to protect against such threats.
Adversarial Machine Learning: Attacks, Defenses, and Open Challenges
Authors: Pranav K Jha
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00

Adversarial Machine Learning (AML) addresses vulnerabilities in AI systems where adversaries manipulate inputs or training data to degrade performance. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of evasion and poisoning attacks, formalizes defense mechanisms with mathematical rigor, and discusses the challenges of implementing robust solutions in adaptive threat models. Additionally, it highlights open challenges in certified robustness, scalability, and real-world deployment.
Dual Defense: Enhancing Privacy and Mitigating Poisoning Attacks in Federated Learning
Authors: Runhua Xu, Shiqi Gao, Chao Li, James Joshi, JianXin Li
Date: 2025-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Federated Learning, Model Poisoning

Federated learning (FL) is inherently susceptible to privacy breaches and poisoning attacks. To tackle these challenges, researchers have separately devised secure aggregation mechanisms to protect data privacy and robust aggregation methods that withstand poisoning attacks. However, simultaneously addressing both concerns is challenging; secure aggregation facilitates poisoning attacks as most anomaly detection techniques require access to unencrypted local model updates, which are obscured by secure aggregation. Few recent efforts to simultaneously tackle both challenges offen depend on impractical assumption of non-colluding two-server setups that disrupt FL's topology, or three-party computation which introduces scalability issues, complicating deployment and application. To overcome this dilemma, this paper introduce a Dual Defense Federated learning (DDFed) framework. DDFed simultaneously boosts privacy protection and mitigates poisoning attacks, without introducing new participant roles or disrupting the existing FL topology. DDFed initially leverages cutting-edge fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) to securely aggregate model updates, without the impractical requirement for non-colluding two-server setups and ensures strong privacy protection. Additionally, we proposes a unique two-phase anomaly detection mechanism for encrypted model updates, featuring secure similarity computation and feedback-driven collaborative selection, with additional measures to prevent potential privacy breaches from Byzantine clients incorporated into the detection process. We conducted extensive experiments on various model poisoning attacks and FL scenarios, including both cross-device and cross-silo FL. Experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate that DDFed successfully protects model privacy and effectively defends against model poisoning threats.