Eerke Boiten

Debalina Padariya, Isabel Wagner, Aboozar Taherkhani et al.

Despite the generative model's groundbreaking success, the need to study its implications for privacy and utility becomes more urgent. Although many studies have demonstrated the privacy threats brought by GANs, no existing survey has systematically categorized the privacy and utility perspectives of GANs and VAEs. In this article, we comprehensively study privacy-preserving generative models, articulating the novel taxonomies for both privacy and utility metrics by analyzing 100 research publications. Finally, we discuss the current challenges and future research directions that help new researchers gain insight into the underlying concepts.

Isabel Wagner, Eerke Boiten

Privacy risk assessments aim to analyze and quantify the privacy risks associated with new systems. As such, they are critically important in ensuring that adequate privacy protections are built in. However, current methods to quantify privacy risk rely heavily on experienced analysts picking the "correct" risk level on e.g. a five-point scale. In this paper, we argue that a more scientific quantification of privacy risk increases accuracy and reliability and can thus make it easier to build privacy-friendly systems. We discuss how the impact and likelihood of privacy violations can be decomposed and quantified, and stress the importance of meaningful metrics and units of measurement. We suggest a method of quantifying and representing privacy risk that considers a collection of factors as well as a variety of contexts and attacker models. We conclude by identifying some of the major research questions to take this approach further in a variety of application scenarios.

Eerke Boiten

This paper takes an axiomatic and calculational view of diversity (or "N-version programming"), where multiple implementations of the same specification are executed in parallel to increase dependability. The central notion is "adjudication": once we have multiple, potential different, outcomes, how do we come to a single result? Adjudication operators are explicitly defined and some general properties for these explored.

John Derrick, Eerke Boiten, Steve Reeves

The 16th BCS-FACS Refinement Workshop was co-located with iFM 2013 held in Turku, Finland on June 11th, 2013. This volume contains the 6 papers selected for presentation at the workshop following a peer review process. The papers cover a wide range of topics in the theory and application of refinement. Refinement is one of the cornerstones of a formal approach to software engineering: the process of developing a more detailed design or implementation from an abstract specification through a sequence of mathematically-based steps that maintain correctness with respect to the original specification.