Voice of America interview on ChatGPT
I was interviewed for a Voice of America story (in Russian) on the impact of chatGPT and similar tools.
Full story: https://youtu.be/dFuunAFX9y4
Uh-oh, there's a new way to poison code models
Jack Clark’s Import AI, 16 Jan 2023 includes a nice description of our work on TrojanPuzzle: #################################################### Uh-oh, there's a new way to poison code models - and it's really hard to detect: …TROJANPUZZLE is a clever way to trick your code model into betraying you - if you can poison the undelrying dataset… Researchers with the University of California, Santa Barbara, Microsoft Corporation, and the University of Virginia have come up with some clever, subtle ways to poison the datasets used to train code models.Trojan Puzzle attack trains AI assistants into suggesting malicious code
Bleeping Computer has a story on our work (in collaboration with Microsoft Research) on poisoning code suggestion models: Trojan Puzzle attack trains AI assistants into suggesting malicious code By Bill Toulas Researchers at the universities of California, Virginia, and Microsoft have devised a new poisoning attack that could trick AI-based coding assistants into suggesting dangerous code. Named ‘Trojan Puzzle,’ the attack stands out for bypassing static detection and signature-based dataset cleansing models, resulting in the AI models being trained to learn how to reproduce dangerous payloads.How to Hide a Backdoor
The Register has an article on our recent work on Stealthy Backdoors as Compression Artifacts: Thomas Claburn, How to hide a backdoor in AI software — Neural networks can be aimed to misbehave when squeezed, The Register, 5 May 2021.
Fact-checking Donald Trump’s tweet firing Christopher Krebs
I was a source for thie “Pants on Fire!” fact check by PolitiFact on Donald Trump’s tweet that fired Christopher Krebs claiming that “The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud - including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, “glitches” in the voting machines which changed…” PolitiFact: Fact-checking Donald Trump’s tweet firing Christopher Krebs, 18 November 2020Voting Security
I was interviewed for a local news story by Daniel Grimes on election security: UVA cybersecurity expert: Virginia is one of the safer states to cast a ballot, NBC 29 News, 21 October 2020.
How AI could save lives without spilling medical secrets
I’m quoted in this article by Will Knight focused on the work Oasis Labs (Dawn Song’s company) is doing on privacy-preserving medical data analysis: How AI could save lives without spilling medical secrets, MIT Technology Review, 14 May 2019. “The whole notion of doing computation while keeping data secret is an incredibly powerful one,” says David Evans, who specializes in machine learning and security at the University of Virginia. When applied across hospitals and patient populations, for instance, machine learning might unlock completely new ways of tying disease to genomics, test results, and other patient information.A Plan to Eradicate Stalkerware
Sam Havron (BSCS 2017) is quoted in an article in Wired on eradicating stalkerware: The full extent of that stalkerware crackdown will only prove out with time and testing, says Sam Havron, a Cornell researcher who worked on last year’s spyware study. Much more work remains. He notes that domestic abuse victims can also be tracked with dual-use apps often overlooked by antivirus firms, like antitheft software Cerberus. Even innocent tools like Apple’s Find My Friends and Google Maps’ location-sharing features can be abused if they don’t better communicate to users that they may have been secretly configured to share their location.Deep Fools
New Electronics has an article that includes my Deep Learning and Security Workshop talk: Deep fools, 21 January 2019.
A better version of the image Mainuddin Jonas produced that they use (which they screenshot from the talk video) is below:
