Amirmohammad Ziaei

Mahdi Jafari Siavoshani, Amir Hossein Khajepour, Amirmohammad Ziaei et al.

Protecting users' privacy over the Internet is of great importance; however, it becomes harder and harder to maintain due to the increasing complexity of network protocols and components. Therefore, investigating and understanding how data is leaked from the information transmission platforms and protocols can lead us to a more secure environment. In this paper, we propose a framework to systematically find the most vulnerable information fields in a network protocol. To this end, focusing on the transport layer security (TLS) protocol, we perform different machine-learning-based fingerprinting attacks on the collected data from more than 70 domains (websites) to understand how and where this information leakage occurs in the TLS protocol. Then, by employing the interpretation techniques developed in the machine learning community and applying our framework, we find the most vulnerable information fields in the TLS protocol. Our findings demonstrate that the TLS handshake (which is mainly unencrypted), the TLS record length appearing in the TLS application data header, and the initialization vector (IV) field are among the most critical leaker parts in this protocol, respectively.

Maryam Ramezani, Aryan Ahadinia, Amirmohammad Ziaei et al.

Access to complete data in large-scale networks is often infeasible. Therefore, the problem of missing data is a crucial and unavoidable issue in the analysis and modeling of real-world social networks. However, most of the research on different aspects of social networks does not consider this limitation. One effective way to solve this problem is to recover the missing data as a pre-processing step. In this paper, a model is learned from partially observed data to infer unobserved diffusion and structure networks. To jointly discover omitted diffusion activities and hidden network structures, we develop a probabilistic generative model called "DiffStru." The interrelations among links of nodes and cascade processes are utilized in the proposed method via learning coupled with low-dimensional latent factors. Besides inferring unseen data, latent factors such as community detection may also aid in network classification problems. We tested different missing data scenarios on simulated independent cascades over LFR networks and real datasets, including Twitter and Memtracker. Experiments on these synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed method successfully detects invisible social behaviors, predicts links, and identifies latent features.