Cong Wu

Cong Wu, Jing Chen, Qianru Fang et al.

Transfer learning, successful in knowledge translation across related tasks, faces a substantial privacy threat from membership inference attacks (MIAs). These attacks, despite posing significant risk to ML model's training data, remain limited-explored in transfer learning. The interaction between teacher and student models in transfer learning has not been thoroughly explored in MIAs, potentially resulting in an under-examined aspect of privacy vulnerabilities within transfer learning. In this paper, we propose a new MIA vector against transfer learning, to determine whether a specific data point was used to train the teacher model while only accessing the student model in a white-box setting. Our method delves into the intricate relationship between teacher and student models, analyzing the discrepancies in hidden layer representations between the student model and its shadow counterpart. These identified differences are then adeptly utilized to refine the shadow model's training process and to inform membership inference decisions effectively. Our method, evaluated across four datasets in diverse transfer learning tasks, reveals that even when an attacker only has access to the student model, the teacher model's training data remains susceptible to MIAs. We believe our work unveils the unexplored risk of membership inference in transfer learning.

Jianfei Sun, Qiang Gao, Cong Wu et al.

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the advent of 6G technologies have introduced computationally intensive tasks that often surpass the processing capabilities of user devices. Efficient and secure resource allocation in serverless multi-cloud edge computing environments is essential for supporting these demands and advancing distributed computing. However, existing solutions frequently struggle with the complexity of multi-cloud infrastructures, robust security integration, and effective application of traditional deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques under system constraints. To address these challenges, we present SARMTO, a novel framework that integrates an action-constrained DRL model. SARMTO dynamically balances resource allocation, task offloading, security, and performance by utilizing a Markov decision process formulation, an adaptive security mechanism, and sophisticated optimization techniques. Extensive simulations across varying scenarios, including different task loads, data sizes, and MEC capacities, show that SARMTO consistently outperforms five baseline approaches, achieving up to a 40% reduction in system costs and a 41.5% improvement in energy efficiency over state-of-the-art methods. These enhancements highlight SARMTO's potential to revolutionize resource management in intricate distributed computing environments, opening the door to more efficient and secure IoT and edge computing applications.