diff --git a/description.md b/description.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..327d486 --- /dev/null +++ b/description.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +Security and Privacy are emerging as very important research areas. +Vulnerabilities in software are found and exploited almost everyday +and with disastrous consequences (e.g., the Equifax massive data +breach). Moreover, our private data is increasingly at risk and thus +techniques that enhance privacy of sensitive data (known as +privacy-enhancing technologies (PETS)) are becoming increasingly +important. Also, machine-learning (ML) is increasingly being utilized to +make decisions in critical sectors (e.g., health care, automation, and +finance). However, in deploying these algorithms presence of malicious +adversaries is generally ignored. + +This advanced topics class will tackle techniques related to all these +themes. We will investigate techniques to make software more secure. +Techniques for ensuring privacy of sensitive data will also be +covered. Adversarial ML (what happens to ML algorithms in the +presence of adversaries?) will be also be discussed. List of some +topics that we will cover (obviously not complete) are given below. + +Software Security + - Secure information flow + - Finding vulnerabilities + - Defensive measures and mitigations + +Differential Privacy + - Basic mechanisms + - Local Differential Privacy + +Cryptographic Techniques + - Zero-knowledge proofs + - Secure multi-party computation + - Verifiable computation + +Adversarial Machine Learning + - Training-time attacks + - Test-time attacks + - Model theft attacks + +Grading will be based on three components: + - Reading research papers and writing reviews + - Homeworks + - Class project