INFOCOM 2022 论文列表

Enormous mobile applications (apps) now support voice functionality for convenient user-device interaction. However, these voice-enabled apps may spitefully invoke microphone to realize voice eavesdropping with arousing security risks and privacy concerns. To explore the issue of voice eavesdropping, in this work, we first design eavesdropping apps through native development and injection development to conduct eavesdropping attacks on a series of smart devices. The results demonstrate that eavesdropping could be carried out freely without any hint. To thwart voice eavesdropping, we propose a valid eavesdropping detection (EarDet) scheme based on the discovery that the activation of voice function in most apps requires authorization from the user by touching a specific voice icon. In the scheme, we construct a request-response time model using the Unix time stamps of touching the voice icon and microphone invoked. Through numerical analysis and hypothesis testing to effectively verify the pattern of the app’s normal access under user authorization to the microphone, we could detect eavesdropping attacks by sensing whether there is a touch operation. Finally, we apply the scheme to different smart devices and test several apps. The experimental results show that the proposed EarDet scheme can achieve a high detection accuracy.

Mobile chargers (MCs) are usually dispatched to deliver energy to sensors in wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs) due to its flexibility and easy maintenance. This paper concerns the fundamental issue of charging path DEsign with the Minimized energy cOst (DEMO), i.e., given a set of rechargeable sensors, we appropriately design the MC’s charging path to minimize the energy cost which is due to the wireless charging and the MC’s movement, such that the different charging demand of each sensor is satisfied. Solving DEMO is NP-hard and involves handling the tradeoff between the charging efficiency and the moving cost. To address DEMO, we first develop a computational geometry-based algorithm to deploy multiple charging positions where the MC stays to charge nearby sensors. We prove that the designed algorithm has the approximation ratio of O(lnN), where N is the number of sensors. Then we construct the charging path by calculating the shortest Hamiltonian cycle passing through all the deployed charging positions within the network. Extensive evaluations validate the effectiveness of our path design in terms of the MC’s energy cost minimization.

Backdoor injection attack is an emerging threat to the security of neural networks, however, there still exist limited effective defense methods against the attack. In this paper, we propose BAERASER, a novel method that can erase the backdoor injected into the victim model through machine unlearning. Specifically, BAERASER mainly implements backdoor defense in two key steps. First, trigger pattern recovery is conducted to extract the trigger patterns infected by the victim model. Here, the trigger pattern recovery problem is equivalent to the one of extracting an unknown noise distribution from the victim model, which can be easily resolved by the entropy maximization based generative model. Subsequently, BAERASER leverages these recovered trigger patterns to reverse the backdoor injection procedure and induce the victim model to erase the polluted memories through a newly designed gradient ascent based machine unlearning method. Compared with the previous machine unlearning solutions, the proposed approach gets rid of the reliance on the full access to training data for retraining and shows higher effectiveness on backdoor erasing than existing fine-tuning or pruning methods. Moreover, experiments show that BAERASER can averagely lower the attack success rates of three kinds of state-of-the-art backdoor attacks by 99% on four benchmark datasets.

Network traffic engineering and anomaly detection rely heavily on network traffic measurement. Due to the lack of infrastructure to measure all points of interest, the high measurement cost, and the unavoidable transmission loss, network monitoring systems suffer from the problem that the network traffic data are incomplete with only a subset of paths or time slots measured. Recent studies show that tensor completion can be applied to infer the missing traffic data from partial measurements. Although promising, the interaction model adopted in current tensor completion algorithms can only capture linear and simple correlations in the traffic data, which compromises the recovery performance. To solve the problem, we propose a new tensor completion scheme based on Lightweight Trilinear Pooling, which designs (1) a Trilinear Pooling, a new multi-modal fusion method to model the interaction function to capture the complex correlations, (2) a low-rank decomposition based neural network compression method to reduce the storage and computation complexity, (3) an attention enhanced LSTM to encode and incorporate the temporal patterns in the tensor completion scheme. The extensive experiments on three real-world network traffic datasets demonstrate that our scheme can significantly reduce the error in missing data recovery with fast speed using small storage.

This paper introduces a new theoretical framework for optimizing second-order behaviors of wireless networks. Unlike existing techniques for network utility maximization, which only consider first-order statistics, this framework models every random process by its mean and temporal variance. The inclusion of temporal variance makes this framework well-suited for modeling stateful fading wireless channels and emerging network performance metrics such as age-of-information (AoI). Using this framework, we sharply characterize the second-order capacity region of wireless access networks. We also propose a simple scheduling policy and prove that it can achieve every interior point in the second-order capacity region. To demonstrate the utility of this framework, we apply it for an important open problem: the optimization of AoI over Gilbert-Elliott channels. We show that this framework provides a very accurate characterization of AoI. Moreover, it leads to a tractable scheduling policy that outperforms other existing work.

Federated learning (FL) algorithms usually sample a fraction of clients in each round (partial participation) when the number of participants is large and the server’s communication bandwidth is limited. Recent works on the convergence analysis of FL have focused on unbiased client sampling, e.g., sampling uniformly at random, which suffers from slow wall-clock time for convergence due to high degrees of system heterogeneity and statistical heterogeneity. This paper aims to design an adaptive client sampling algorithm that tackles both system and statistical heterogeneity to minimize the wall-clock convergence time. We obtain a new tractable convergence bound for FL algorithms with arbitrary client sampling probabilities. Based on the bound, we analytically establish the relationship between the total learning time and sampling probabilities, which results in a non-convex optimization problem for training time minimization. We design an efficient algorithm for learning the unknown parameters in the convergence bound and develop a low-complexity algorithm to approximately solve the non-convex problem. Experimental results from both hardware prototype and simulation demonstrate that our proposed sampling scheme significantly reduces the convergence time compared to several baseline sampling schemes. Notably, our scheme in hardware prototype spends 73% less time than the uniform sampling baseline for reaching the same target loss.

With the continuous growing level of dynamicity, heterogeneity, and complexity of traffic data, anomaly detection remains one of the most critical tasks to ensure an efficient and flexible management of a network. Recently, driven by their empirical success in many domains, especially bioinformatics and computer vision, graph kernels have attracted increasing attention. Our work aims at investigating their discrimination power for detecting vulnerabilities and distilling traffic in the field of networking.In this paper, we propose Nadege, a new graph-based learning framework which aims at preventing anomalies from disrupting the network while providing assistance for traffic monitoring. Specifically, we design a graph kernel tailored for network profiling by leveraging propagation schemes which regularly adapt to contextual patterns. Moreover, we provide provably efficient algorithms and consider both offline and online detection policies. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of kernel-based models by conducting extensive experiments on a wide variety of network environments. Under different usage scenarios, Nadege significantly outperforms all baseline approaches.

Private protocols, whose specifications are agnostic, are widely used in the Industrial Internet. While providing customized service, they also raise essential security concerns as well, due to their agnostic nature. The Protocol Reverse Analysis (PRA) techniques are developed to infer the specifications of private protocols. However, the conventional PRA techniques are far from perfection for the following reasons: (i) Error propagation: Canonical solutions strictly follow the "from keyword extraction to message clustering" serial structure, which deteriorates the performance for ignoring the interplay between the sub-tasks, and the error will flow and accumulate through the sequential workflow. (ii) Increasing diversity: As the protocols’ diversities of characteristics increase, tailoring for specific types of protocols becomes infeasible. To address these issues, we design a novel dual-track framework SPRA, and propose Share Learning, a new concept of protocol reverse analysis. Particularly, based on the share layer for protocol learning, SPRA builds a parallel workflow to co-optimize both the generative model for keyword extraction and the probability-based model for message clustering, which delivers automatic and robust syntax inference across diverse protocols and greatly improves the performance. Experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed SPRA achieves better performance compared with the state-of-art PRA methods.

Next-generation wireless technology and machine-to-machine technology can provide the ability to connect and share data at any time among IoT smart devices. However, the traditional centralized data sharing/trading mechanism lacks trust guarantee and cannot satisfy the real-time requirement. Distributed systems, especially blockchain, provide us with promising solutions. In this paper, we propose a blockchain based non-repudiation scheme for IoT data trading to resolve the credibility and real-time limits. The proposed scheme has two parts, i.e., a trading scheme and an arbitration scheme. The trading scheme employs a divide-and-conquer method and two commitment methods to support efficient IoT data trading, which runs in a two-round manner. The arbitration scheme first leverages a smart contract to solve disputes on-chain in real time. In case of on-chain arbitration dissatisfaction, the arbitration scheme also employs an off-line arbitration to make a final resolution. Short-term and long-term analysis show that the proposed scheme enforces non-repudiation among the data trading parties and runs efficiently for rational data owners and buyers. We implemented the proposed scheme. Experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme has an orders-of-magnitude performance speedup than the state-of-the-art scheme.

The rapid growth of mobile video traffic and user demand poses a more stringent requirement for efficient bandwidth allocation in mobile networks where multiple users may share a bottleneck link. This provides content providers an opportunity to optimize multiple users’ experiences jointly, but users often suffer short connection durations and frequent handoffs because of their high mobility. This paper proposes an end-to-end scheme, VSiM, to support mobile video streaming applications in heterogeneous wireless networks. The key idea is allocating bottleneck bandwidth among multiple users based on their mobility profiles and Quality of Experience (QoE)-related knowledge to achieve max-min QoE fairness. Besides, the QoE of buffer-sensitive clients is further improved by the novel server push strategy based on HTTP/3 protocol without affecting the existing bandwidth allocation approach or sacrificing other clients’ view quality. We evaluated VSiM experimentally in both simulations and a lab testbed on top of the HTTP/3 protocol. We find that the clients’ QoE fairness of VSiM achieves more than 40% improvement compared with state-of-the-art solutions, i.e., the viewing quality of clients in VSiM can be improved from 720p to 1080p in resolution. Meanwhile, VSiM provides about 20% improvement on average of the averaged QoE.

5G-NR is beginning to be widely deployed in the mmWave frequencies in urban areas in the US and around the world. Due to the directional nature of mmWave signal propagation, improving performance of such deployments heavily relies on beam management and deployment configurations. We perform detailed measurements of mmWave 5G deployments by two major commercial 5G operators in the US in two diverse environments: an open field with a baseball park (BP) and a downtown urban canyon region (DT), using smartphone-based tools that collect detailed measurements across several layers (PHY, MAC and up) such as beam-specific metrics like signal strength, beam switch times, and throughput per beam. Our measurement analysis shows that the parameters of the two deployments differ in a number of aspects: number of beams used, number of channels aggregated, and density of deployments, which reflect on the throughput performance. Our measurement-driven propagation analysis demonstrates that narrower beams experience a lower path-loss exponent than wider beams, which combined with up to eight frequency channels aggregated on up to eight beams can deliver a peak throughput of 1.2 Gbps at distances greater than 100m.

Self-adjusting networks (SANs) utilize novel optical switching technologies to support dynamic physical network topology reconfiguration. SANs rely on online algorithms to exploit this topological flexibility to reduce the cost of serving network traffic, leveraging locality in the demand. While prior work has shown the potential of SANs, the theoretical guarantees rely on a simplified cost model in which traversing and adjusting a single link has uniform cost.We initiate the study of online algorithms for SANs in a more realistic cost model, the Matching Model (MM), in which the network topology is given by the union of a constant number of bipartite matchings (realized by optical switches), and in which changing an entire matching incurs a fixed cost α. The cost of routing is given by the number of hops packets need to traverse.Our main result is a lazy topology adjustment method for designing efficient online SAN algorithms in the MM. We design and analyze online SAN algorithms for line, tree, and bounded degree networks in the MM, with cost ${\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt \alpha )$ times the cost of reference algorithms in the uniform cost model. We report on empirical results considering publicly available datacenter network traces, that verify the theoretical bounds.

User-perceived latency is important for the quality of experience (QoE) of wide-area real-time communications (RTC). This paper explores a futuristic yet important problem facing the RTC community: can we exploit emerging mega-constellations to facilitate low-latency RTC globally? We carry out our quest in three steps. First, through a measurement study associated with a large number of geo-distributed RTC users, we quantitatively expose that the meandering routes in the client-cloud and inter-cloud-site segment of existing cloud-based RTC architecture are critical culprits for the high latency issue suffered by wide-area RTC sessions. Second, we propose SPACERTC, a satellite-cloud cooperative framework that adaptively selects relay servers upon satellites and cloud sites to build an overlay network which enables diverse close-to-optimal paths, and then judiciously allocates RTC flows upon the network to facilitate low-latency interactions. Finally, we implement our SPACERTC prototype on an experimental environment based on public constellation information and RTC trace, and extensive experiments demonstrate that SPACERTC can deliver near-optimal interactive latency, with up to 64.9% latency reduction as compared to other state-of-the-art cloud-based solutions under representative videoconferencing traffic.

Multi-armed bandit frameworks, including combinatorial semi-bandits and sleeping bandits, are commonly employed to model problems in communication networks and other engineering domains. In such problems, feedback to the learning agent is often delayed (e.g. communication delays in a wireless network or conversion delays in online advertising). Moreover, arms in a bandit problem often represent entities required to be treated fairly, i.e. the arms should be played at least a required fraction of the time. In contrast to the previously studied asymptotic fairness, many real-time systems require such fairness guarantees to hold even in the short-term (e.g. ensuring the credibility of information flows in an industrial Internet of Things (IoT) system). To that end, we develop the Learning with Delays under Fairness (LDF) algorithm to solve combinatorial semi-bandit problems with sleeping arms and delayed feedback, which we prove guarantees strong (short-term) fairness. While previous theoretical work on bandit problems with delayed feedback typically derive instance-dependent regret bounds, this approach proves to be challenging when simultaneously considering fairness. We instead derive a novel instance-independent regret bound in this setting which agrees with state-of-the-art bounds. We verify our theoretical results with extensive simulations using both synthetic and real-world datasets.

A practical challenge common to state-of-the-art acoustic gesture recognition techniques is to adaptively respond to intended gestures rather than unintended motions during the real-time tracking on human motion flow. Besides, other disadvantages of under-expanded sensing space and vulnerability against mobile interference jointly impair the pervasiveness of acoustic sensing. Instead of struggling along the bottlenecked routine, we innovatively open up an independent sensing dimension of acoustic 2-D hand-shape imaging. We first deductively demonstrate the feasibility of acoustic imaging through multiple viewpoints dynamically generated by hand movement. Amaging, hand-shape imaging triggered gesture recognition, is then proposed to offer adaptive gesture responses. Digital Dechirp is novelly performed to largely reduce computational cost in demodulation and pulse compression. Mobile interference is filtered by Moving Target Indication. Multi-frame macro-scale imaging with Joint Time-Frequency Analysis is performed to eliminate image blur while maintaining adequate resolution. Amaging features revolutionary multiplicative expansion on sensing capability and dual dimensional parallelism for both hand-shape and gesture-trajectory recognition. Extensive experiments and simulations demonstrate Amaging’s distinguishing hand-shape imaging performance, independent from diverse hand movement and immune against mobile interference. 96% hand-shape recognition rate is achieved with ResNet18 and 60× augmentation rate.

Recently, it has been recognized that there is a serious limitation with the original Age of Information (AoI) metric in terms of quantifying true freshness of information content. A new metric, called Age of Incorrect Information (AoII), has been proposed. By further refining this new metric with practical considerations, we introduce Age of Outdated Information (Ao2I) metric. In this paper, we investigate a scheduling problem for minimizing Ao2I in an IoT data collection network. We derive a theoretical lower bound for the minimum Ao2I that any scheduler can achieve. Then we present Heh—a low-complexity online scheduler. The design of Heh is based on the estimation of a novel offline scheduling priority metric in the absence of knowledge of the future. We prove that at each time, transmitting one source with the largest offline scheduling priority metric minimizes Ao2I. Through extensive simulations, we show that the lower bound is very tight and that the Ao2I obtained by Heh is close-to-optimal.

Recently, the developed techniques such as magnetic resonant coupling (MRC) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission have significantly improved the charging efficiency and distance for wireless power transfer (WPT) systems. However, the electromagnetic radiation (EMR) safety of wireless charging is critical in practice while mostly ignored. In this work, we take the EMR safety into account in MIMO MRC-WPT systems. We propose a safety ensured high-efficient scheduling algorithm for magnetic MIMO wireless power transfer system (called Shield). Technically, we firstly devise a simple but accurate Z-axis rotational symmetrical EMR model along with a magnetic-field-line-based meshing scheme. Further, we express the EMR safety requirement in the continuous physical space with a limited number of constraints via random sampling and rule-based filtering. Finally, we build up a system prototype for Shield and conduct extensive experiments. With the given power budget and resonant frequency, the results reveal that the EMR safety requirement only influences the charging performance of an MRC-WPT system within a certain range. Furthermore, Shield can dramatically improve the payload power transfer efficiency (PTE) by up to 66.60% compared with state-of-the-art baselines while guaranteeing the EMR safety.

As a key component in dynamic wavelength-routing optical networks (WRONs), the contention performance at add/drop (A/D) ports of ROADMs has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. For the first time, this paper derives the close-form solutions of the blocking probability (BP) of A/D requests to characterize the fundamental tradeoff between A/D flexibility and system complexity in the ROADM. We show that the ROADM with fiber cross-connect (FXC) can decide whether a request can be satisfied based on global transceiver-usage information, and thus an exact expression of BP can be obtained. In comparison, the ROADM without FXC needs detail transceiver-usage information to make decision, and thus is hard to be analyzed. To circumvent the difficulty in analysis, we describe the evolution of the number of busy transceivers using a one-dimensional Markov chain, where the state transition rates are estimated from global transceiver-usage information. Based on this model, we obtain an approximate BP the accuracy of which is high enough for currently commercialized ROADMs and increases with the number of drop ports. Our analytical results provide an interesting insight into the tradeoff between A/D flexibility and system complexity, based on which we give some suggestions for system design.

IPv6 target generation is the critical step for fast IPv6 scanning for Internet-wide surveys. Existing techniques, however, commonly suffer from low hit rates due to inappropriate space partition caused by the outlier addresses and short-sighted splitting indicators. To address the problem, we propose 6Forest, an ensemble learning-based approach for IPv6 target generation that is from a global perspective and resilient to outlier addresses. Given a set of known addresses, 6Forest first considers it as an initial address region and then iteratively divides the IPv6 address space into smaller regions using a maximum-covering splitting indicator. Before a round of space partition, it builds a forest structure for each region and exploits an enhanced isolation forest algorithm to remove the outlier addresses. Finally, it pre-scans samples from the divided address regions and based on the results generates IPv6 addresses. Experiments on eight large-scale candidate datasets indicate that, compared with the state-of-the-art methods in IPv6 worldwide scanning, 6Forest can achieve up to 116.5% improvement for low-budget scanning and 15× improvement for high-budget scanning.