Let’s Talk: Cybersecurity and Cryptography!
One of the main challenges within the field of cybersecurity is how to work with others without having to share or reveal sensitive information. We asked experts from the Hariri Institute's Center for Reliable Information Systems and Cybersecurity (RISCS) about the role cryptography plays in preserving data privacy while maintaining... More
How to learn in the presence of untrustworthy intermediaries
By Ari Karchmer -- Alice, a secret hypothesis, and a hostile lab: a fictional story (allegedly) Alice is a graduate student. She studies molecular biology, and her goal is to develop a model for the relationship between a molecule’s structure – i.e., its size, shape, or other attributes – and its activity: whether... More
What must machine learning models memorize?
by Gavin Brown -- Machine learning models serve a variety of purposes in today's society, such as identifying faces in images or helping customers via a chatbot. Many models are trained on vast amounts of (possibly sensitive) data. The models themselves are large: OpenAI's celebrated GPT-3 model for generating text has 175... More
Apple can scan your photos for child abuse and still protect your privacy – if the company keeps its promises
by Mayank Varia, original featured on The Conversation -- The proliferation of child sexual abuse material on the internet is harrowing and sobering. Technology companies send tens of millions of reports per year of these images to the nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The way companies that provide cloud storage... More
The Broken Promise of Apple’s Announced Forbidden-photo Reporting System – And How To Fix It
by Ran Canetti and Gabriel Kaptchuk -- Last week, Apple announced that it would deploy two systems to US iPhones with the release of iOS 15. The announcement promotes these systems as standard bearers for preventing child exploitation while preserving the privacy and liberty of its law-abiding users. The two systems are very... More