We have a strong showing at the DSN conference, the premier conference in dependability. Five graduate students are attending with me, happening now in Charlotte, North Carolina. The students presented their works that cover a wide gamut of topics on reliability and security:
- Kavindu: Backdoor attacks in decentralized learning; Full-length paper and DSML workshop paper
- Giorgio: Android security through virtualization; Full-length paper
- Dev and Arpan: Correlation of autonomous vehicle disengagements and crashes based on CA Department of Transportation data; Poster paper
- Joseph: Sandboxing for agentic skills for security; RASACC workshop paper
- Fouad: Distributed trust for decentralized computation; RASACC workshop paper
We were there in each other’s sessions supporting the members. I enjoyed introducing them — none of them except Giorgio had attended DSN before — to members of our technical community. We had fun hanging out in the evening outside the conference, discovering some hidden lanes and bylanes of Charlotte, during which we learned that unlike West Lafayette, there are some areas that you are wise to avoid at night, and then sharing stories over dinner at the aptly named Optimist Hill.
We come to conferences and get a boost of energy re-connecting with familiar friends and colleagues and discovering new ones. But also somewhat hidden is the camaraderie that it builds within your own team. This conference is an outlier, a happy one, where there are 5 students; typical is one or two students. A near-future conference stop with students that I am looking forward to is Malmo, Sweden for ECCV.
If you want to look up the exact papers, here are the full cites. The paper with Giorgio as the lead is unusual in that it involves authors from 3 countries: France, Italy, and the US. Marcello, our collaborator from Naples, Italy, is also here.
1. DSN Main Research Track paper: “Beyond Corner Patches: Semantics-Aware Backdoor Attack in Federated Learning,” by K. Herath, J. Zhao, S. Bagchi
2. DSN Main Research Track paper: “AnBridge: Protecting On-Device AI with Android Virtualization Framework,” by G. Farina, R. Corte, A. Machiry, M. Cinque, S. Bagchi
3. DSML Workshop paper: “Color Matters: Trigger Color Affects Success in Federated Backdoor Attack,” by Kavindu Herath, Joshua Zhao, and Saurabh Bagchi
4. RASACC Workshop paper: “DisTrust: Adaptive Trust-Based Verification for Resilient Distributed Computation,” by Fouad Afiouni, Saurabh Bagchi, and Aravind Machiry
5. RASACC Workshop paper: “NinjaShell: Skill-Aware Defense Against Malicious Agentic Skills,” by Haddy Alchaer, Joseph Ghanem, and Saurabh Bagchi
6. DSN Poster paper: “Investigating the Relationship Between Autonomous Driving System Disengagements and Crashes,” by Dev Patel, Arpan Swaroop, and Saurabh Bagchi