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Unit testing is crucial in software engineering for ensuring quality. However, it's not widely used in parallel and high-performance computing software, particularly scientific applications, due to their smaller, diverse user base and complex logic. These factors make unit testing challenging and expensive, as it requires specialized knowledge and existing automated tools are often ineffective. To address this, we propose an automated method for generating unit tests for such software, considering their unique features like complex logic and parallel processing. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in coding and testing. We explored the capabilities of Davinci (text-davinci-002) and ChatGPT (gpt-3.5-turbo) in creating unit tests for C++ parallel programs. Our results show that LLMs can generate mostly correct and comprehensive unit tests, although they have some limitations, such as repetitive assertions and blank test cases.

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) offers a streamlined cloud computing paradigm, but existing centralized systems suffer from vendor lock-in and single points of failure. We propose DeFaaS, a decentralized FaaS system leveraging blockchain technology and decentralized API management. DeFaaS addresses these limitations by establishing a secure, transparent registry of functions on a blockchain and enabling applications to discover and invoke them. This approach fosters scalability, flexibility, enhanced security, and improved reliability. Furthermore, DeFaaS's architecture extends beyond decentralized FaaS, supporting other distributed computing scenarios like dApps, volunteer computing, and multi-cloud service meshes. DeFaaS represents a significant advancement in decentralized computing with the potential to unlock a multitude of novel applications and use cases., Comment: The 39th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing

Artificial General Intelligence falls short when communicating role specific nuances to other systems. This is more pronounced when building autonomous LLM agents capable and designed to communicate with each other for real world problem solving. Humans can communicate context and domain specific nuances along with knowledge, and that has led to refinement of skills. In this work we propose and evaluate a novel method that leads to knowledge distillation among LLM agents leading to realtime human role play preserving unique contexts without relying on any stored data or pretraining. We also evaluate how our system performs better in simulated real world tasks compared to state of the art.

This paper delves into the dynamic landscape of artificial intelligence, specifically focusing on the burgeoning prominence of large language models (LLMs). We underscore the pivotal role of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in augmenting LLMs' rationality and decision-making prowess. By meticulously examining the intricate relationship between human interaction and LLM behavior, we explore questions surrounding rationality and performance disparities between humans and LLMs, with particular attention to the Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. Our research employs comprehensive comparative analysis and delves into the inherent challenges of irrationality in LLMs, offering valuable insights and actionable strategies for enhancing their rationality. These findings hold significant implications for the widespread adoption of LLMs across diverse domains and applications, underscoring their potential to catalyze advancements in artificial intelligence.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has marked a significant milestone in the realm of artificial intelligence, with their capabilities often matching or surpassing human expertise in various domains. Among these achievements, their adeptness in translation tasks stands out, closely mimicking the intricate and preliminary processes undertaken by human translators to ensure the fidelity and quality of the translated content. Despite the advancements in utilizing LLMs for translating programming code across different languages, the domain of smart contract translation, particularly into languages not previously encountered by the LLM, remains largely unexplored. In our research, we present a pioneering approach, SolMover, which harnesses the synergy of two distinct LLMs within a unified framework. This framework is designed to grasp coding principles and apply this understanding to the translation of code into an unfamiliar language. Our study delves into the capacity of LLMs to mimic human learning processes, offering an in-depth evaluation of our methodology for converting smart contracts written in Solidity to Move, a language with limited resources. The framework employs one LLM to decipher coding conventions for the new language, creating a blueprint for the second LLM, which, lacking planning abilities, possesses coding expertise. The empirical evidence from our experiments suggests that SolMover substantially enhances performance compared to gpt-3.5-turbo-1106, and achieves superior results over competitors such as Palm2 and Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct. Additionally, our analysis highlights the efficacy of our bug mitigation strategy in elevating code quality across all models, even outside the SolMover framework.

The introduction of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Google Palm2 for smart contract generation seems to be the first well-established instance of an AI pair programmer. LLMs have access to a large number of open-source smart contracts, enabling them to utilize more extensive code in Solidity than other code generation tools. Although the initial and informal assessments of LLMs for smart contract generation are promising, a systematic evaluation is needed to explore the limits and benefits of these models. The main objective of this study is to assess the quality of generated code provided by LLMs for smart contracts. We also aim to evaluate the impact of the quality and variety of input parameters fed to LLMs. To achieve this aim, we created an experimental setup for evaluating the generated code in terms of validity, correctness, and efficiency. Our study finds crucial evidence of security bugs getting introduced in the generated smart contracts as well as the overall quality and correctness of the code getting impacted. However, we also identified the areas where it can be improved. The paper also proposes several potential research directions to improve the process, quality and safety of generated smart contract codes., Comment: Updated to address issues

Trusted execution environment (TEE) technology has found many applications in mitigating various security risks in an efficient manner, which is attractive for critical infrastructure protection. First, the natural of critical infrastructure requires it to be well protected from various cyber attacks. Second, performance is usually important for critical infrastructure and it cannot afford an expensive protection mechanism. While a large number of TEE-based critical infrastructure protection systems have been proposed to address various security challenges (e.g., secure sensing and reliable control), most existing works ignore one important feature, i.e., devices comprised the critical infrastructure may be equipped with multiple incompatible TEE technologies and belongs to different owners. This feature makes it hard for these devices to establish mutual trust and form a unified TEE environment. To address these challenges and fully unleash the potential of TEE technology for critical infrastructure protection, we propose DHTee, a decentralized coordination mechanism. DHTee uses blockchain technology to support key TEE functions in a heterogeneous TEE environment, especially the attestation service. A Device equipped with one TEE can interact securely with the blockchain to verify whether another potential collaborating device claiming to have a different TEE meets the security requirements. DHTee is also flexible and can support new TEE schemes without affecting devices using existing TEEs that have been supported by the system., Comment: Appeared in ACM BSCI'23

Polynomials defined on specific rings are heavily involved in various cryptographic schemes, and the corresponding operations are usually the computation bottleneck of the whole scheme. We propose to utilize TPU, an emerging hardware designed for AI applications, to speed up polynomial operations and convert TPU to a cryptographic accelerator. We also conduct preliminary evaluation and discuss the limitations of current work and future plan.

Bribery is a perilous issue in the real world, especially in an economical aspect. This fraudulence is unavoidable, and more importantly, it is more difficult to trace in case smart contracts are utilized for bribing on a distributed public blockchain. In our paper, we propose a new threat to the security of a blockchain system, cross-chain bribery using smart contracts. An arbitrary wealthy briber can utilize cross-chain smart contracts to manipulate a consensus mechanism on a victim's blockchain or to disgrace a victim's blockchain. To better understand this threat, our paper proposes a framework to analyze bribery using cross-chain smart contracts. We analyze the amount of incentive to bribe rational miners in a victim's blockchain and also a full cost of conducting a cross-chain bribery attack. The result is that such attacks can be carried out with a reasonable amount of money or cryptocurrencies.

Since the beginning of the vaccination trial, social media has been flooded with anti-vaccination comments and conspiracy beliefs. As the day passes, the number of COVID- 19 cases increases, and online platforms and a few news portals entertain sharing different conspiracy theories. The most popular conspiracy belief was the link between the 5G network spreading COVID-19 and the Chinese government spreading the virus as a bioweapon, which initially created racial hatred. Although some disbelief has less impact on society, others create massive destruction. For example, the 5G conspiracy led to the burn of the 5G Tower, and belief in the Chinese bioweapon story promoted an attack on the Asian-Americans. Another popular conspiracy belief was that Bill Gates spread this Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) by launching a mass vaccination program to track everyone. This Conspiracy belief creates distrust issues among laypeople and creates vaccine hesitancy. This study aims to discover the conspiracy theory against the vaccine on social platforms. We performed a sentiment analysis on the 598 unique sample comments related to COVID-19 vaccines. We used two different models, BERT and Perspective API, to find out the sentiment and toxicity of the sentence toward the COVID-19 vaccine., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures

Performing neural network inference on encrypted data without decryption is one popular method to enable privacy-preserving neural networks (PNet) as a service. Compared with regular neural networks deployed for machine-learning-as-a-service, PNet requires additional encoding, e.g., quantized-precision numbers, and polynomial activation. Encrypted input also introduces novel challenges such as adversarial robustness and security. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study questions including (i) Whether PNet is more robust against adversarial inputs than regular neural networks? (ii) How to design a robust PNet given the encrypted input without decryption? We propose PNet-Attack to generate black-box adversarial examples that can successfully attack PNet in both target and untarget manners. The attack results show that PNet robustness against adversarial inputs needs to be improved. This is not a trivial task because the PNet model owner does not have access to the plaintext of the input values, which prevents the application of existing detection and defense methods such as input tuning, model normalization, and adversarial training. To tackle this challenge, we propose a new fast and accurate noise insertion method, called RPNet, to design Robust and Private Neural Networks. Our comprehensive experiments show that PNet-Attack reduces at least $2.5\times$ queries than prior works. We theoretically analyze our RPNet methods and demonstrate that RPNet can decrease $\sim 91.88\%$ attack success rate., Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures

Recent successful adversarial attacks on face recognition show that, despite the remarkable progress of face recognition models, they are still far behind the human intelligence for perception and recognition. It reveals the vulnerability of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as state-of-the-art building block for face recognition models against adversarial examples, which can cause certain consequences for secure systems. Gradient-based adversarial attacks are widely studied before and proved to be successful against face recognition models. However, finding the optimized perturbation per each face needs to submitting the significant number of queries to the target model. In this paper, we propose recursive adversarial attack on face recognition using automatic face warping which needs extremely limited number of queries to fool the target model. Instead of a random face warping procedure, the warping functions are applied on specific detected regions of face like eyebrows, nose, lips, etc. We evaluate the robustness of proposed method in the decision-based black-box attack setting, where the attackers have no access to the model parameters and gradients, but hard-label predictions and confidence scores are provided by the target model.

The resilience of a voting system has been a central topic in computational social choice. Many voting rules, like plurality, are shown to be vulnerable as the attacker can target specific voters to manipulate the result. What if a local differential privacy (LDP) mechanism is adopted such that the true preference of a voter is never revealed in pre-election polls? In this case, the attacker can only infer stochastic information about a voter's true preference, and this may cause the manipulation of the electoral result significantly harder. The goal of this paper is to provide a quantitative study on the effect of adopting LDP mechanisms on a voting system. We introduce the metric PoLDP (power of LDP) that quantitatively measures the difference between the attacker's manipulation cost under LDP mechanisms and that without LDP mechanisms. The larger PoLDP is, the more robustness LDP mechanisms can add to a voting system. We give a full characterization of PoLDP for the voting system with plurality rule and provide general guidance towards the application of LDP mechanisms.

Modern computer systems tend to rely on large trusted computing bases (TCBs) for operations. To address the TCB bloating problem, hardware vendors have developed mechanisms to enable or facilitate the creation of a trusted execution environment (TEE) in which critical software applications can execute securely in an isolated environment. Even under the circumstance that a host OS is compromised by an adversary, key security properties such as confidentiality and integrity of the software inside the TEEs can be guaranteed. The promise of integrity and security has driven developers to adopt it for use cases involving access control, PKS, IoT among other things. Among these applications include blockchain-related use cases. The usage of the TEEs doesn't come without its own implementation challenges and potential pitfalls. In this paper, we examine the assumptions, security models, and operational environments of the proposed TEE use cases of blockchain-based applications. The exercise and analysis help the hardware TEE research community to identify some open challenges and opportunities for research and rethink the design of hardware TEEs in general.

With the high prevalence of offensive language against minorities in social media, counter-hate speeches (CHS) generation is considered an automatic way of tackling this challenge. The CHS is supposed to appear as a third voice to educate people and keep the social [red lines bold] without limiting the principles of freedom of speech. In this paper, we review the most important research in the past and present with a main focus on methodologies, collected datasets and statistical analysis CHS's impact on social media. The CHS generation is based on the optimistic assumption that any attempt to intervene the hate speech in social media can play a positive role in this context. Beyond that, previous works ignored the investigation of the sequence of comments before and after the CHS. However, the positive impact is not guaranteed, as shown in some previous works. To the best of our knowledge, no attempt has been made to survey the related work to compare the past research in terms of CHS's impact on social media. We take the first step in this direction by providing a comprehensive review on related works and categorizing them based on different factors including impact, methodology, data source, etc., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1909.04251, arXiv:2009.08392, arXiv:2006.01974, arXiv:2004.04216, arXiv:1812.02712 by other authors

With the rise of voice chat rooms, a gigantic resource of data can be exposed to the research community for natural language processing tasks. Moderators in voice chat rooms actively monitor the discussions and remove the participants with offensive language. However, it makes the hate speech detection even more difficult since some participants try to find creative ways to articulate hate speech. This makes the hate speech detection challenging in new social media like Clubhouse. To the best of our knowledge all the hate speech datasets have been collected from text resources like Twitter. In this paper, we take the first step to collect a significant dataset from Clubhouse as the rising star in social media industry. We analyze the collected instances from statistical point of view using the Google Perspective Scores. Our experiments show that, the Perspective Scores can outperform Bag of Words and Word2Vec as high level text features.

Hate speech detection has become a hot topic in recent years due to the exponential growth of offensive language in social media. It has proven that, state-of-the-art hate speech classifiers are efficient only when tested on the data with the same feature distribution as training data. As a consequence, model architecture plays the second role to improve the current results. In such a diverse data distribution relying on low level features is the main cause of deficiency due to natural bias in data. That's why we need to use high level features to avoid a biased judgement. In this paper, we statistically analyze the Perspective Scores and their impact on hate speech detection. We show that, different hate speech datasets are very similar when it comes to extract their Perspective Scores. Eventually, we prove that, over-sampling the Perspective Scores of a hate speech dataset can significantly improve the generalization performance when it comes to be tested on other hate speech datasets., Comment: Accepted paper in International IJCAI Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Social Good 2021