Related papers: Multi-user guesswork and brute force security
In the bounded storage model introduced by Maurer, the adversary is computationally unbounded and has a bounded storage capacity. In this model, information-theoretic secrecy is guaranteed by using a publicly available random string whose…
Many studies have shown that there are regularities in the way human beings make decisions. However, our ability to obtain models that capture such regularities and can accurately predict unobserved decisions is still limited. We tackle…
This paper studies the tradeoff in privacy and utility in a single-trial multi-terminal guessing (estimation) framework using a system model that is inspired by index coding. There are $n$ independent discrete sources at a data curator.…
Given the vast reservoirs of data stored worldwide, efficient mining of data from a large information store has emerged as a great challenge. Many databases like that of intrusion detection systems, web-click records, player statistics,…
We estimate the security of dictionary-based PINs (Personal Identification Numbers) that a user selects from his/her memory without any additional aids. The estimates take into account the distribution of words in source language. We use…
A quantum key distribution network enables pairs of users to generate independent secret keys by leveraging the principles of quantum physics. For end-to-end secure communication, a user pair's secret key must remain secure against any…
Although it is common for users to select bad passwords that can be easily cracked by attackers, password-based authentication remains the most widely-used method. To encourage users to select good passwords, enterprises often enforce…
We study the problem of mismatched guesswork, where we evaluate the number of symbols $y \in \mathcal{Y}$ which have higher likelihood than $X \sim \mu$ according to a mismatched distribution $\nu$. We discuss the role of the…
Secure aggregation is a fundamental primitive in privacy-preserving distributed learning systems, where an aggregator aims to compute the sum of users' inputs without revealing individual data. In this paper, we study a multi-server secure…
The paper considers the problem of global optimization in the setup of stochastic process bandits. We introduce an UCB algorithm which builds a cascade of discretization trees based on generic chaining in order to render possible his…
In many applications, it is desirable to extract only the relevant information from complex input data, which involves making a decision about which input features are relevant. The information bottleneck method formalizes this as an…
In this paper, we consider the authentication problem where a candidate measurement presented by an unidentified user is compared to a previously stored measurement of the legitimate user, the enrollment, with respect to a certain…
The unconditional security of continuous-variable quantum key distribution is established for all schemes based on the estimation of the channel loss and excess noise. It is proved that, in the limit of large keys, Gaussian attacks are…
The deployment of monoculture software stacks can cause a devastating damage even by a single exploit against a single vulnerability. Inspired by the resilience benefit of biological diversity, the concept of software diversity has been…
According to recent empirical studies, a majority of users have the same, or very similar, passwords across multiple password-secured online services. This practice can have disastrous consequences, as one password being compromised puts…
At face value, this essay is about understanding a fairly esoteric governance tool called compute thresholds. However, in order to grapple with whether these thresholds will achieve anything, we must first understand how they came to be. To…
In dynamic programming and reinforcement learning, the policy for the sequential decision making of an agent in a stochastic environment is usually determined by expressing the goal as a scalar reward function and seeking a policy that…
We investigate the secrecy performance of a multiuser diversity scheme for an interference-limited wireless network with a base-station (BS), $N$ legitimate users and an eavesdropper, in the presence of a single dominant interferer.…
Password security plays a crucial role in cybersecurity, yet traditional password strength meters, which rely on static rules like character-type requirements, often fail. Such methods are easily bypassed by common password patterns (e.g.,…
Nowadays, advanced security mechanisms exist to protect data, systems, and networks. Most of these mechanisms are effective, and security experts can handle them to achieve a sufficient level of security for any given system. However, most…