By 2025 the total amount of data created, captured and consumed is predicted to reach 175 zettabytes. However, much of that data’s value is being wasted due to distrust, as there is fear that the data would be exposed when used, computed on or shared with collaborators, possibly leading to trade secrets being leaked or data protection legislation fines.
I found this nice twitter thread from Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of the Ethereum blockchain: Doing a random twitter experiment just on this day. Only the 268 people I follow can reply to this tweet. Feel free to ask things and I'll talk about anything crypto or non-crypto related. — vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 1, 2021 (…)
The certificate linked to the virus will not be available before June in Switzerland. Until then, here are twelve answers linked to questions of security, data and accessibility concerning what some call the “Immunity Passport”. In particular, Jean-Pierre Hubaux, C4DT Academic Director, provides insights on the questions linked to data.
French-language news paper ‘Le Temps’ published an opinion piece by C4DT’s Academic Director and Head of the LDS lab at EPFL, Jean-Pierre Hubaux, on trusting the SwissCovid app. Prof. Hubaux raises the point that the excessive focus on privacy protection has cast doubt on a tool which makes it possible to defend other rights. Read the article in French on ‘www.letemps.ch’ by clicking the following link.
Increasingly, reports warn that state-sponsored actors use social media to spread fake news/disinformation in order to sow distrust and create panic during pandemics and create discord and polarized opinions among people on political issues during democratic elections. Adding to this, social media platforms’ algorithms “add salt to the wound” by feeding their users posts which are aligned with their opinion in order to increase their screen time. How serious and how massive is the problem? What are its implications? And what can/should be done about it?
During this forum, organized jointly by the Center for Digital Trust (C4DT), the CyberPeace Institute and the Graduate Institute’s Centre for Trade and Economic Integration (CTEI) in Geneva, we will discuss not only the technological aspects of this phenomena, but also the regulatory role executive and legislative branches of governments should play. Societal, economical and geopolitical implications will also be debated. This event is open to the general public.
For more information please click below
Following the webinar SwissCovid (DP^3T project) – a proximity-tracing app against COVID-19: building trust in a technology solution organized today by C4DT, the explanations of journalist Marielle Savoy on the question of the population’s support for the Swisscovid application.
Click below to listen to the full report
Thursday 26 September 2019 saw the launch of the CyberPeace Institute, an independent NGO that will address the growing impact of major cyberattacks, assist vulnerable communities, promote transparency, and advance global discussions on acceptable behavior in cyberspace. EPFL President Martin Vetterli will be sitting on the Executive Board, and the Center for Digital Trust is named as a scientific partner.
The C4DT is looking forward to working with the @cyberpeaceinst led by @DuguinStephane and @MarietjeSchaake and supporting its mission to enhance the stability of #cyberspace. Please click below to access the official announcement.
In this talk, Dan Bogdanov will start by introducing secure computing technologies and their potential in enterprise and government use. He will then look at a focus group study of the barriers of adopting such technologies based on interviews in many industries.
September 4, 2019 @ 14:15 in BC 410
by Prof. Ben Zhao, Univ. of Chicago
The lack of transparency in today’s deep learning systems has paved the way for a new type of threats, commonly referred to as backdoor or Trojan attacks. In this talk, Ben Zhao will describe two recent results on detecting and understanding backdoor attacks on deep learning systems.
September 24th, 2019 @ 14:15, room BC 420
Kasra Edalatnejad presents DataShare, a decentralized and privacy-preserving global search system that enables journalists worldwide to find documents via a dedicated network of peers. This work stems from the need of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) for securing their search and discovery platform.
Wednesday, July 3rd 2019 @16:15, room BC 410
By Prof. Wei Meng, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Click is the prominent way that users interact with web applications. Attackers aim to intercept genuine user clicks to either send malicious commands to another application on behalf of the user or fabricate realistic ad click traffic. In this talk, Prof. Wei Meng investigates the click interception practices on the Web.
Tuesday July 23rd, 2019 @10:00, room BC 420
EPFL’s IC School invites you to the 2019 edition of the IC Summer Research Institute (SuRI), held in Lausanne (EPFL, BC 420) on June 13-14. The conference brings together renowned researchers and experts from academia and industry who will present their latest research in cybersecurity, privacy, and cryptography. The event is open to everyone and attendance is free of charge. For more information and to register please click here…
Evaluate the needs for Digiinov to comply to CRA concerning their existing Human Machine Interface (HMI) product. Research how to interface this HMI with an LLM, what security implications it has, and how local and cloud-based LLMs fare wrt performance, security, and CRA.
Deployed cyber and cyber-physical systems need to evolve to respond to newly discovered threats and maintain confidentiality, integrity, and availability. In many cases, this evolution takes the form of patches: small changes to an already-deployed system. Timely patching is crucial, but dangerous: bad patches can weaken or break a system. In high-criticality systems, full system (…)
Modern vision–language models (VLMs) such as CLIP, BLIP-2, and LLaVA have shown remarkable capabilities in understanding images and text jointly. However, these multimodal AI systems face critical security vulnerabilities along two intertwined dimensions: robustness and privacy. In high-stakes applications like cyber-defence, such vulnerabilities could be disastrous. An adversary might subtly perturb an image to mislead (…)
The project will evaluate and validate visual AI methods for interpreting diagrams, figures, and charts in scientific documents. It aims to strengthen technology-monitoring and early-warning capabilities by detecting emerging innovations, research trends, and weak signals that text-based analysis may miss. The work includes developing a capability map of existing methods and piloting a selected method (…)
The project developed and matured an automated security-testing solution for IoT software that combines firmware rehosting with feedback-guided fuzzing. By decoupling embedded software from its physical hardware, the solution creates standardized, scalable virtual testing environments that can automatically explore software behavior, identify security-relevant anomalies, and provide concrete inputs that help engineers reproduce and fix vulnerabilities. (…)
Building a modular and extensible framework designed to harden consumer drone firmware against attacks. The framework targets five key areas: firmware rehosting for analysis, peripheral modeling to simulate drone hardware, communication protocol evaluation and hardening, verification of trusted firmware components and execution environments, and analysis of Android-based controller applications. Together, these components establish a comprehensive (…)
This project aims to develop scalable and principled methods for forecasting, interpolation, and anomaly detection in dynamic networks and multivariate time series by combining optimal transport (OT), graph structure learning, and spatiotemporal neural models.
The Trump administration continues its crusade against European sovereignty and the rule of law. By intervening before the EU’s General Court to support X Corp. and Elon Musk’s bid to annul the first fine ever imposed under the DSA (€120 million), the US government has crossed a new threshold. By doing so, it seems that (…)
L’affaire Thélyson Orélien révèle les limites de ces systèmes censés distinguer les textes humains des productions d’IA. Entre faux positifs et variations entre logiciels, la fiabilité reste relative. Un expert de l’EPFL livre son analyse.
#BlackAlps26 program has been prepared by an independent, neutral committee of internationally recognized experts. The program committee reviewed many proposals and selected the most appropriate and interesting talks for the conference (except the keynotes and rumps).
This makes a refreshing change from the usual LLM apocalypse: your data is still valuable, especially when there is so much of it! Once again it shows that collecting and storing data long-term is a bad idea. There needs to be strict control on how long personally identifiable information (PII) can be retained, after which (…)
Barely registering above the din of AI doomsayers are the voices reminding the public that legal and regulatory mechanisms, like consumer protection laws and anti-competition regimes, already exist to address many of the damages and harms caused by AI. The article offers hypotheses for why this line of conversation isn’t more front and center. But (…)
