Researcher profile

Derek Abbott

Derek Abbott contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate

Trust snapshot

Quick read

Trust 21 - EmergingVerification L1Unclaimed author
7works
0followers
6topics
4close collaborators

Actions

Decide how to stay connected

Follow researcher0

Identity and collaboration

How to connect with this researcher

Claiming links this public author record to a researcher profile and unlocks direct collaboration workflows.

Log in to claim

Direct collaboration

Open a focused conversation when the fit is right

Claim this author entity first to unlock direct invitations.

Research graph

See the researcher in context

Open full explorer

Inspect adjacent work, topics, institutions and collaborators without jumping out to a separate graph page.

Building this graph slice

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.

Published work

7 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Repurposing and Evaluating the (In)Feasibility of Dataset Poisoning enabled Watermarking for Contrastive Learning

Contrastive learning (CL) reduces annotation cost via auto-derived supervisory signals. Since large-scale in-house CL datasets are infeasible, reliance on third-party or internet data is common. Recent studies show CL models are vulnerable to data-poisoning backdoor attacks, but their generalization and robustness are underexplored. We systematically evaluate existing data-poisoning backdoor attacks on CL, revealing limitations: poor dataset adaptability, low success rates, limited portability, and restrictive assumptions (e.g., downstream task knowledge). Interestingly, trigger samples exhibit distinguishable statistical divergence from clean samples, which inspires repurposing it as a watermark for dataset IP protection. Direct repurposing is challenging due to low success rates; we overcome this by statistical verification using a unified density metric. We further propose a multi-level watermarking scheme adapting to feature-level, soft-label, or hard-label outputs in CL. Experiments show some backdoor attacks can be repurposed as effective watermarks with trade-offs among fidelity, verifiability, and robustness. This work demonstrates weak backdoor effects become reliable signals for dataset IP protection in challenging CL settings.

preprint2023arXiv

MLMSA: Multi-Label Multi-Side-Channel-Information enabled Deep Learning Attacks on APUF Variants

To improve the modeling resilience of silicon strong physical unclonable functions (PUFs), in particular, the APUFs, that yield a very large number of challenge response pairs (CRPs), a number of composited APUF variants such as XOR-APUF, interpose-PUF (iPUF), feed-forward APUF (FF-APUF),and OAX-APUF have been devised. When examining their security in terms of modeling resilience, utilizing multiple information sources such as power side channel information (SCI) or/and reliability SCI given a challenge is under-explored, which poses a challenge to their supposed modeling resilience in practice. Building upon multi-label/head deep learning model architecture,this work proposes Multi-Label Multi-Side-channel-information enabled deep learning Attacks (MLMSA) to thoroughly evaluate the modeling resilience of aforementioned APUF variants. Despite its simplicity, MLMSA can successfully break large-scaled APUF variants, which has not previously been achieved. More precisely, the MLMSA breaks 128-stage 30-XOR-APUF, (9, 9)- and (2, 18)-iPUFs, and (2, 2, 30)-OAX-APUF when CRPs, power SCI and reliability SCI are concurrently used. It breaks 128-stage 12-XOR-APUF and (2, 2, 9)-OAX-APUF even when only the easy-to-obtain reliability SCI and CRPs are exploited. The 128-stage six-loop FF-APUF and one-loop 20-XOR-FF-APUF can be broken by simultaneously using reliability SCI and CRPs. All these attacks are normally completed within an hour with a standard personalcomputer. Therefore, MLMSA is a useful technique for evaluating other existing or any emerging strong PUF designs.

preprint2022arXiv

Dangerous Cloaking: Natural Trigger based Backdoor Attacks on Object Detectors in the Physical World

Deep learning models have been shown to be vulnerable to recent backdoor attacks. A backdoored model behaves normally for inputs containing no attacker-secretly-chosen trigger and maliciously for inputs with the trigger. To date, backdoor attacks and countermeasures mainly focus on image classification tasks. And most of them are implemented in the digital world with digital triggers. Besides the classification tasks, object detection systems are also considered as one of the basic foundations of computer vision tasks. However, there is no investigation and understanding of the backdoor vulnerability of the object detector, even in the digital world with digital triggers. For the first time, this work demonstrates that existing object detectors are inherently susceptible to physical backdoor attacks. We use a natural T-shirt bought from a market as a trigger to enable the cloaking effect--the person bounding-box disappears in front of the object detector. We show that such a backdoor can be implanted from two exploitable attack scenarios into the object detector, which is outsourced or fine-tuned through a pretrained model. We have extensively evaluated three popular object detection algorithms: anchor-based Yolo-V3, Yolo-V4, and anchor-free CenterNet. Building upon 19 videos shot in real-world scenes, we confirm that the backdoor attack is robust against various factors: movement, distance, angle, non-rigid deformation, and lighting. Specifically, the attack success rate (ASR) in most videos is 100% or close to it, while the clean data accuracy of the backdoored model is the same as its clean counterpart. The latter implies that it is infeasible to detect the backdoor behavior merely through a validation set. The averaged ASR still remains sufficiently high to be 78% in the transfer learning attack scenarios evaluated on CenterNet. See the demo video on https://youtu.be/Q3HOF4OobbY.

preprint2022arXiv

Linear measurements from nonlinear sensors: identifying distortion with incidental noise

Nonlinearity in many systems is heavily dependent on component variation and environmental factors such as temperature. This is often overcome by keeping signals close enough to the device's operating point that it appears approximately linear. But as the signal being measured becomes larger, the deviation from linearity increases, and the device's nonlinearity specification will be exceeded. This limits the range over which the device will produce directly useful measurements, often to far less than the device's safe range of operation.

preprint2022arXiv

MUD-PQFed: Towards Malicious User Detection in Privacy-Preserving Quantized Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL), a distributed machine learning paradigm, has been adapted to mitigate privacy concerns for customers. Despite their appeal, there are various inference attacks that can exploit shared-plaintext model updates to embed traces of customer private information, leading to serious privacy concerns. To alleviate this privacy issue, cryptographic techniques such as Secure Multi-Party Computation and Homomorphic Encryption have been used for privacy-preserving FL. However, such security issues in privacy-preserving FL are poorly elucidated and underexplored. This work is the first attempt to elucidate the triviality of performing model corruption attacks on privacy-preserving FL based on lightweight secret sharing. We consider scenarios in which model updates are quantized to reduce communication overhead in this case, where an adversary can simply provide local parameters outside the legal range to corrupt the model. We then propose the MUD-PQFed protocol, which can precisely detect malicious clients performing attacks and enforce fair penalties. By removing the contributions of detected malicious clients, the global model utility is preserved to be comparable to the baseline global model without the attack. Extensive experiments validate effectiveness in maintaining baseline accuracy and detecting malicious clients in a fine-grained manner

preprint2022arXiv

RBNN: Memory-Efficient Reconfigurable Deep Binary Neural Network with IP Protection for Internet of Things

Though deep neural network models exhibit outstanding performance for various applications, their large model size and extensive floating-point operations render deployment on mobile computing platforms a major challenge, and, in particular, on Internet of Things devices. One appealing solution is model quantization that reduces the model size and uses integer operations commonly supported by microcontrollers . To this end, a 1-bit quantized DNN model or deep binary neural network maximizes the memory efficiency, where each parameter in a BNN model has only 1-bit. In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable BNN (RBNN) to further amplify the memory efficiency for resource-constrained IoT devices. Generally, the RBNN can be reconfigured on demand to achieve any one of M (M>1) distinct tasks with the same parameter set, thus only a single task determines the memory requirements. In other words, the memory utilization is improved by times M. Our extensive experiments corroborate that up to seven commonly used tasks can co-exist (the value of M can be larger). These tasks with a varying number of classes have no or negligible accuracy drop-off on three binarized popular DNN architectures including VGG, ResNet, and ReActNet. The tasks span across different domains, e.g., computer vision and audio domains validated herein, with the prerequisite that the model architecture can serve those cross-domain tasks. To protect the intellectual property of an RBNN model, the reconfiguration can be controlled by both a user key and a device-unique root key generated by the intrinsic hardware fingerprint. By doing so, an RBNN model can only be used per paid user per authorized device, thus benefiting both the user and the model provider.

preprint2022arXiv

Two-player quantum games: When player strategies are via directional choices

We propose a scheme for a quantum game based on performing an EPR type experiment and in which each player's spatial directional choices are considered as their strategies. A classical mixed-strategy game is recovered by restricting the players' choices to specific spatial trajectories. We show that for players' directional choices for which the Bell-CHSH inequality is violated, the players' payoffs in the quantum game have no mapping within the classical mixed-strategy game. The scheme provides a more direct link between classical and quantum games.