Abstract

Tornado Cash is a decentralized application (dApp) that runs on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible networks to enhance users’ privacy in terms of user transaction history over the blockchain. This dApp achieves its goal by enabling users to deposit currencies into designated pools and subsequently withdraw them, severing the link between depositor and withdrawer addresses. At deposit time, Tornado Cash communicates to users the level of privacy they will benefit from (anonymity set) by depositing currencies into one of its pools. Existing analyses have indicated discrepancies between the claimed anonymity set and the actual level of privacy provided, primarily attributed to users’ incorrect utilization of the dApp. This paper explores the road towards a new way to challenge the dApp’s proposed anonymity set by examining wallet fingerprints, a factor not directly related to user behavior within the application. The findings of this research shed light on the potential for creating links between clusters of users in TC according to the new proposed approach and raise a privacy concern within the Ethereum network, resulting in 13203 transactions, over 66948, linkable to the wallet used to initialize them.

Abstract

Moving Target Defense (MTD) has emerged as a proactive and dynamic framework to counteract evolving cyber threats. Traditional MTD approaches often rely on assumptions about the attacker’s knowledge and behavior. However, real-world scenarios are inherently more complex, with adaptive attackers and limited prior knowledge of their payoffs and intentions. This paper introduces a novel approach to MTD using a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model that does not rely on predefined attacker payoffs. Our framework integrates the attacker’s real-time responses into the defender’s MDP using a dynamic Bayesian Network. By employing a factored MDP model, we provide a comprehensive and realistic representation of the system and its dependencies. We also incorporate incremental updates to an attack response predictor as new data emerges, ensuring an adaptive and robust defense mechanism. Additionally, we consider the costs of switching configurations in MTD, integrating them into the reward structure to balance execution and defense costs. We first highlight the challenges of the problem through a theoretical negative result on regret. However, our empirical evaluations, conducted in network and web application settings, demonstrate the framework’s effectiveness in environments characterized by high uncertainty and dynamically changing attack surfaces.

Abstract

Text driven diffusion models have shown remarkable capabilities in editing images. However, when editing 3D scenes, existing works mostly rely on training a NeRF for 3D editing. Recent NeRF editing methods leverages edit operations by deploying 2D diffusion models and project these edits into 3D space. They require strong positional priors alongside text prompt to identify the edit location. These methods are operational on small 3D scenes and are more generalized to particular scene. They require training for each specific edit and cannot be exploited in real-time edits. To address these limitations, we propose a novel method, FreeEdit, to make edits in training free manner using mesh representations as a substitute for NeRF. Training-free methods are now a possibility because of the advances in foundation model’s space. We leverage these models to bring a training-free alternative and introduce solutions for insertion, replacement and deletion. We consider insertion, replacement and deletion as basic blocks for performing intricate edits with certain combinations of these operations. Given a text prompt and a 3D scene, our model is capable of identifying what object should be inserted/replaced or deleted and location where edit should be performed. We also introduce a novel algorithm as part of FreeEdit to find the optimal location on grounding object for placement. We evaluate our model by comparing it with baseline models on a wide range of scenes using quantitative and qualitative metrics and showcase the merits of our method with respect to others.

Abstract

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Abstract

The implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is essential for the advancement of smart healthcare within a highly digital environment. However, the development of medical CPS (MCPS) poses various challenges, particularly in terms of dependability and security. The complex nature of medical IoT components encompasses both computational and physical aspects including secure reliability. To mitigate these issues, this article introduces a cyber engineering, an innovative approach, that combines principles from complex system design in order to establish a systematic framework for combining the cyber and physical layers of IoT and MCPS together. This integration aims to provide an unified system designing approach that can produce more secure and robust systems. By embracing the cyber engineering ideology, the healthcare industry can overcome reliability challenges and pave the way for the development of secure and dependable smart healthcare solutions, while ensuring security by design perspective. The approach also provides ideal future possibilities to the upcoming researchers.

Abstract

This paper contributes to the expanding research on toxicity in online games, exploring the relationship between game design and player behaviours in India. Using an ethnographic approach and in-depth interviews with gamers, we capture firsthand accounts of toxic gaming experiences, delving into game design, game mechanics, and player interactions intersecting to shape player behaviours. While previous research on toxicity in gaming environments has largely focused on the role of game design, aspects of gender and, to a lesser extent, race, primarily within the context of the Global North, our study shifts the focus to India and, by extension, the Global South. We seek to uncover broader dimensions of gaming toxicity that go beyond design and gender. Our analysis examines the underlying factors contributing to the prevalence and persistence of toxic behaviours in Indian gaming environments by highlighting the influence of cultural and contextual elements in producing toxic behaviours. Expanding the scope of research to include these overlooked aspects, our study aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities of toxicity in online gaming spaces within the Indian context.

Abstract

Bidding in a periodic double auction (PDA) is challenging due to its sequential nature, where one needs to consider current as well as future auctions to decide the bids. Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), which is a state-of-the-art online planning algorithm for tackling sequential problems, seems a perfect fit for bidding in PDAs. However, the success stories of MCTS are largely limited to discrete action spaces, and its efficacy diminishes when dealing with continuous actions. Conventional methods often resort to overly simplistic discretizations that limit exploration and fail to provide valuable insights into unexplored actions. In this work, we propose a novel bidding strategy for PDAs, Regression-MCTS, that is built upon MCTS for a continuous action space of bid prices. Unlike conventional methods, our novel MCTS method leverages information obtained from explored actions to enhance the understanding of the larger action set within the continuous domain to place bids in the auctions, thus generalizing the information about action quality between a wider action space for faster learning. To test the efficacy of our proposed method, we design an efficient PDA simulator that closely resembles real-world PDAs. Our analysis verifies that the increase in the number of rollouts improves its performance. Furthermore, our experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing MCTS-based bidding strategies and the majority of state-of-the-art PDA bidding strategies, showcasing its superior performance in PDAs.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools to perform various tasks in the legal domain, ranging from generating summaries to predicting judgments. Despite their immense potential, these models have been proven to learn and exhibit societal biases and make unfair predictions. Hence, it is essential to evaluate these models prior to deployment. In this study, we explore the ability of LLMs to perform Binary Statutory Reasoning in the Indian legal landscape across various societal disparities. We present a novel metric, β-weighted Legal Safety Score (LSS_β), to evaluate the legal usability of the LLMs. Additionally, we propose a finetuning pipeline, utilising specialised legal datasets, as a potential method to reduce bias. Our proposed pipeline effectively reduces bias in the model, as indicated by improved LSS_β.This highlights the potential of our approach to enhance fairness in LLMs, making them more reliable for legal tasks in socially diverse contexts.

Abstract

This article presents ‘Teledrive’, a telepresence robotic system with embodied AI features that empowers an operator to navigate the telerobot in any unknown remote place with minimal human intervention. We conceive Teledrive in the context of democratizing remote ‘care-giving’ for elderly citizens as well as for isolated patients, affected by contagious diseases. In particular, this paper focuses on the problem of navigating to a rough target area (like ‘bedroom’ or ‘kitchen’) rather than pre-specified point destinations. This ushers in a unique ‘AreaGoal’ based navigation feature, which has not been explored in depth in the contemporary solutions. Further, we describe an edge computing-based software system built on a WebRTC-based communication framework to realize the aforementioned scheme through an easy-to-use speech-based human-robot interaction. Moreover, to enhance the ease of operation for the remote caregiver, we incorporate a ‘person following’ feature, whereby a robot follows a person on the move in its premises as directed by the operator. Moreover, the system presented is loosely coupled with specific robot hardware, unlike the existing solutions. We have evaluated the efficacy of the proposed system through baseline experiments, user study, and real-life deployment.

Abstract

This paper presents a meticulous and well structured approach to annotating a corpus of Hindi spoken data. We deployed 4 annotators to augment the spoken section of the EMILLE Hindi corpus by marking the various linguistic phenomena observed in spoken data. Then we analyzed various phonological (sound deletion), morphological (code-mixing and reduplication) and syntactic phenomena (case markers and ambiguity), not attested in written data. Code mixing and switching constitute the majority of the phenomena we annotated, followed by orthographic errors related to symbols in the Devanagiri script. In terms of divergences from written form of Hindi, case marker usage, missing auxiliary verbs and agreement patterns are markedly distinct for spoken Hindi. The annotators also assigned a quality rating to each sentence in the corpus. Our analysis of the quality ratings revealed that most of the sentences in the spoken data corpus are of moderate to high quality. Female speakers produced a greater percentage of high quality sentences compared to their male counterparts. While previous efforts in corpus annotation have been largely focused on creating resources for engineering applications, we illustrate the utility of our dataset for scientific hypothesis testing. Inspired from the Surprisal Theory of language comprehension (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), we validate the hypothesis that sentences with high values of lexical surprisal are rated low in terms of quality by native speakers, even when controlling for sentence length and word frequencies in a sentence.