Robert Obryk

Jan Wassenberg, Robert Obryk, Jyrki Alakuijala et al.

Algorithms that rely on a pseudorandom number generator often lose their performance guarantees when adversaries can predict the behavior of the generator. To protect non-cryptographic applications against such attacks, we propose 'strong' pseudorandom generators characterized by two properties: computationally indistinguishable from random and backtracking-resistant. Some existing cryptographically secure generators also meet these criteria, but they are too slow to be accepted for general-purpose use. We introduce a new open-sourced generator called 'Randen' and show that it is 'strong' in addition to outperforming Mersenne Twister, PCG, ChaCha8, ISAAC and Philox in real-world benchmarks. This is made possible by hardware acceleration. Randen is an instantiation of Reverie, a recently published robust sponge-like random generator, with a new permutation built from an improved generalized Feistel structure with 16 branches. We provide new bounds on active s-boxes for up to 24 rounds of this construction, made possible by a memory-efficient search algorithm. Replacing existing generators with Randen can protect randomized algorithms such as reservoir sampling from attack. The permutation may also be useful for wide-block ciphers and hashing functions.

Hannah Alsdurf, Edmond Belliveau, Yoshua Bengio et al.

The SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic has caused significant strain on public health institutions around the world. Contact tracing is an essential tool to change the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Manual contact tracing of Covid-19 cases has significant challenges that limit the ability of public health authorities to minimize community infections. Personalized peer-to-peer contact tracing through the use of mobile apps has the potential to shift the paradigm. Some countries have deployed centralized tracking systems, but more privacy-protecting decentralized systems offer much of the same benefit without concentrating data in the hands of a state authority or for-profit corporations. Machine learning methods can circumvent some of the limitations of standard digital tracing by incorporating many clues and their uncertainty into a more graded and precise estimation of infection risk. The estimated risk can provide early risk awareness, personalized recommendations and relevant information to the user. Finally, non-identifying risk data can inform epidemiological models trained jointly with the machine learning predictor. These models can provide statistical evidence for the importance of factors involved in disease transmission. They can also be used to monitor, evaluate and optimize health policy and (de)confinement scenarios according to medical and economic productivity indicators. However, such a strategy based on mobile apps and machine learning should proactively mitigate potential ethical and privacy risks, which could have substantial impacts on society (not only impacts on health but also impacts such as stigmatization and abuse of personal data). Here, we present an overview of the rationale, design, ethical considerations and privacy strategy of `COVI,' a Covid-19 public peer-to-peer contact tracing and risk awareness mobile application developed in Canada.

Jyrki Alakuijala, Robert Obryk, Ostap Stoliarchuk et al.

Guetzli is a new JPEG encoder that aims to produce visually indistinguishable images at a lower bit-rate than other common JPEG encoders. It optimizes both the JPEG global quantization tables and the DCT coefficient values in each JPEG block using a closed-loop optimizer. Guetzli uses Butteraugli, our perceptual distance metric, as the source of feedback in its optimization process. We reach a 29-45% reduction in data size for a given perceptual distance, according to Butteraugli, in comparison to other compressors we tried. Guetzli's computation is currently extremely slow, which limits its applicability to compressing static content and serving as a proof- of-concept that we can achieve significant reductions in size by combining advanced psychovisual models with lossy compression techniques.

Jyrki Alakuijala, Robert Obryk, Zoltan Szabadka et al.

We report on pairwise comparisons by human raters of JPEG images from libjpeg and our new Guetzli encoder. Although both files are size-matched, 75% of ratings are in favor of Guetzli. This implies the Butteraugli psychovisual image similarity metric which guides Guetzli is reasonably close to human perception at high quality levels. We provide access to the raw ratings and source images for further analysis and study.