IEEE INFOCOM 2024

Session Opening: Opening, Awards, and Keynote
Session Break-1-1: Coffee Break Session Break-1-2: Coffee Break
Session A-1: A-1: Network Privacy Session A-2: A-2: Blockchains Session A-3: A-3: Video Streaming
Session B-1: B-1: Radio Access Networks Session B-2: B-2: MIMO and Beamforming Session B-3: B-3: Satellite networks
Session C-1: C-1: UAV networking Session C-2: C-2: Wireless Security Session C-3: C-3: Intrusion-Detection Systems
Session D-1: D-1: Federated Learning 1 Session D-2: D-2: Multi-Armed Bandits Session D-3: D-3: Federated Learning 2
Session E-1: E-1: Network Measurement Session E-2: E-2: Scheduling 1 Session E-3: E-3: Scheduling 2
Session F-1: F-1: Network Security 1 Session F-2: F-2: Network Security 2 Session F-3: F-3: Network Security 3
Session Lunch-1: Conference Lunch (for Registered Attendees)
Session Reception: Welcome Reception (for Registered Attendees)

Session A-1

A-1: Network Privacy

Conference
11:00 AM — 12:30 PM PDT
Local
May 21 Tue, 1:00 PM — 2:30 PM CDT
Location
Regency A

X-Stream: A Flexible, Adaptive Video Transformer for Privacy-Preserving Video Stream Analytics

Dou Feng (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China); Lin Wang (Paderborn University, Germany); Shutong Chen (Guangxi University, China); Lingching Tung and Fangming Liu (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China)

0
Video stream analytics (VSA) systems fuel many exciting applications that facilitate people's lives, but also raise critical concerns about exposing too much individuals' privacy. To alleviate these concerns, various frameworks have been presented to enhance the privacy of VSA systems. Yet, existing solutions suffer two limitations: (1) being scenario-customized, thus limiting the generality of adapting to multifarious scenarios, (2) requiring complex, imperative programming, and tedious process, thus largely reducing the usability of such systems. In this paper, we present X-Stream, a privacy-preserving video transformer that achieves flexibility and efficiency for a large variety of VSA tasks. X-Stream features three major novel designs: (1) a declarative query interface that provides a simple yet expressive interface for users to describe both their privacy protection and content exposure requirements, (2) an adaptation mechanism that dynamically selects the most suitable privacy-preserving techniques and their parameters based on the current video context, and (3) an efficient execution engine that incorporates optimizations for multi-task deduplication and inter-frame inference. We implement X-Stream and evaluate it with representative VSA tasks and public video datasets. The results show that X-Stream achieves significantly improved privacy protection quality and performance over the state-of-the-art, while being simple to use.
Speaker Shutong Chen (Guangxi University)

Shutong Chen is an Assistant Professor at Guangxi University in China. She received Ph.D. degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include edge computing and green computing.

Privacy-Preserving Data Evaluation via Functional Encryption, Revisited

Xinyuan Qian and Hongwei Li (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China); Guowen Xu (City University of Hong Kong, China); Haoyong Wang (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China); Tianwei Zhang (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore); Xianhao Chen (University of Hong Kong, China); Yuguang Fang (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

0
In cloud-based data marketplaces, the cardinal objective lies in facilitating interactions between data shoppers and sellers. This engagement allows shoppers to augment their internal datasets with external data, consequently leading to significant enhancements in their machine learning models. Nonetheless, given the potential diversity of data values, it becomes critical for consumers to assess the value of data before cementing any transactions. Recently, Song et al. introduced Primal (publish in ACSAC), the pioneering cloud-assisted privacy-preserving data evaluation (PPDE) strategy. This strategy relies on variants of functional encryption (FE) as the underlying framework, conferring notable performance advantages over alternative cryptographic primitives such as secure multi-party computation and homomorphic encryption. However, in this paper, we regretfully highlight that Primal is susceptible to inadvertent misuse of FE, and leaves much-desired room for performance amelioration. To combat this, we introduce a novel cryptographic primitive known as labeled function-hiding inner-product encrypted. This new primitive serves as a remedy and forms the foundation for designing the concrete framework for PPDE. Furthermore, experiments conducted on real datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly reduces the overall computation cost of the current state-of-the-art secure PPDE scheme by roughly 10\(math\) and the communication cost for the data seller by about 2\(math\).
Speaker Xinyuan Qian (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China)

Xinyuan Qian is currently a Ph.D. student at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and a visiting researcher in Prof. Fang Yuguang's lab at City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include IBE, ABE, FE, applied cryptography, and privacy-preserving machine learning.

DPBalance: Efficient and Fair Privacy Budget Scheduling for Federated Learning as a Service

Yu Liu, Zibo Wang, Yifei Zhu and Chen Chen (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China)

0
Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a prevalent distributed machine learning scheme that enables collaborative model training without aggregating raw data. Cloud service providers further embrace Federated Learning as a Service (FLaaS), allowing data analysts to execute their FL training pipelines over deferentially-protected data. Due to the intrinsic properties of differential privacy, the enforced privacy level on data blocks can be viewed as a privacy budget that requires careful scheduling to cater to diverse training pipelines. Existing privacy budget scheduling studies prioritize either efficiency or fairness individually. In this paper, we propose DPBalance, a novel privacy budget scheduling mechanism that jointly optimizes both efficiency and fairness. We first develop a comprehensive utility function incorporating data analyst-level dominant shares and FL-specific performance metrics. A sequential allocation mechanism is then designed using the Lagrange multiplier method and effective greedy heuristics. We theoretically prove that DPBalance satisfies Pareto Efficiency, Sharing Incentive, Envy-Freeness, and Weak Strategy Proofness. We also theoretically prove the existence of a fairness-efficiency tradeoff in privacy budgeting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DPBalance outperforms state-of-the-art solutions, achieving an average efficiency improvement of \(1.44 \times \sim 3.49\times \), and an average fairness improvement of \(1.37 \times \sim 24.32 \times \).
Speaker Yu Liu (Shanghai Jiao Tong Univ.)


Optimal Locally Private Data Stream Analytics

Shaowei Wang, Yun Peng and Kongyang Chen (Guangzhou University, China); Wei Yang (University of Science and Technology of China, China)

0
Online data analytics with local privacy protection is widely adopted in real-world applications. Despite numerous endeavors in this field, significant gaps in utility and functionality remain when compared to its offline counterpart. This work demonstrates that private data analytics can be conducted online without excess utility loss, even at a constant factor.

We present an optimal, streamable mechanism for local differentially private sparse vector estimation. The mechanism enables a range of online analytics on streaming binary vectors, including multi-dimensional binary, categorical, or set-valued data. By leveraging the negative correlation of occurrence events in the sparse vector, we attain an optimal error rate under local privacy constraints, only requiring streamable computations during the input's data-dependent phase. Through experiments with both synthetic and real-world datasets, our proposals have been shown to reduce error rates by 40% to 60% compared to SOTA approaches.
Speaker Shaowei Wang (Guangzhou University)


Session Chair

Batyr Charyyev (University of Nevada Reno, USA)

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Session A-2

A-2: Blockchains

Conference
2:00 PM — 3:30 PM PDT
Local
May 21 Tue, 4:00 PM — 5:30 PM CDT
Location
Regency A

A Generic Blockchain-based Steganography Framework with High Capacity via Reversible GAN

Zhuo Chen, Liehuang Zhu and Peng Jiang (Beijing Institute of Technology, China); Jialing He (Chongqing University, China); Zijian Zhang (Beijing Institute of Technology, China)

0
Blockchain-based steganography enables data hiding via encoding the covert data into a specific blockchain transaction field. However, previous works focus on the specific field-embedding methods while lack a consideration on required field-generation embedding. In this paper, we propose GBSF, a generic framework for blockchain-based steganography. The sender generates the required fields, where the additional covert data is embedded to enhance the channel capacity. Based on GBSF, we design R-GAN that utilizes the generative adversarial network (GAN) with a reversible generator to generate the required fields and encode additional covert data into the input noise of the reversible generator. We then explore the performance flaw of R-GAN and introduce CCR-GAN as an improvement. CCR-GAN employs a counter-intuitive data preprocessing mechanism to reduce decoding errors in covert data. It incurs gradient explosion for model convergence and we design a custom activation function. We conduct experiments using the transaction amount of the Bitcoin mainnet as the required field. The results demonstrate that R-GAN and CCR-GAN allow to embed 11-bit (embedding rate of 17.2%) and 24-bit (embedding rate of 37.5%) covert data within a transaction amount, and enhance the channel capacity of state-of-the-art works by 4.30% to 91.67% and 9.38% to 200.00%, respectively.
Speaker Zhuo Chen (Beijing Institute of Technology)

Zhuo Chen received the B.E. degree in information security from the North China Electric Power University, Beijing, China, in 2019. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the School of Cyberspace Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology. His current research interests include blockchain technology and covert communication.

Broker2Earn: Towards Maximizing Broker Revenue and System Liquidity for Sharded Blockchains

Qinde Chen, Huawei Huang and Zhaokang Yin (Sun Yat-Sen University, China); Guang Ye (Sen Yat-Sen University, China); Qinglin Yang (Sun Yat-Sen University, China)

0
Plenty of state-of-the-art blockchain protocols have been proposed to diminish CTXs. For example in BrokerChain, intermediary broker accounts can help turn CTXs into intra-shard transactions through their voluntary liquidity services. However, we found that BrokerChain is impractical for a sharded blockchain because its inventors didn't consider how to recruit a sufficient number of broker accounts, thus blockchain clients don't have motivations to provide token liquidity for others. To address this challenge, we design Broker2Earn, which is an incentive mechanism for blockchain users who could choose to become brokers. Via participating in Broker2Earn, brokers can earn native revenues when they collateralize their tokens to the protocol. Furthermore, Broker2Earn can also benefit the sharded blockchain since it can efficiently provide liquidity to diminish CTXs. We formulate the core module of Broker2Earn into a revenue-maximization problem, which is proven NP-hard. To solve this problem, we design an online approximation algorithm using relax-and-rounding. We also rigorously analyze the approximation ratio of our online algorithm. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments using Ethereum transactions on an open-source blockchain testbed. The evaluation results show that Broker2Earn demonstrates a near-optimal performance that outperforms other baselines in terms of broker revenues and the usage of system liquidity.
Speaker
Speaker biography is not available.

FileDES: A Secure Scalable and Succinct Blockchain-based Decentralized Encrypted Storage Network

Minghui Xu (Shandong University, China); JiaHao Zhang (ShanDong University, China); Hechuan Guo, Xiuzhen Cheng and Dongxiao Yu (Shandong University, China); Qin Hu (IUPUI, USA); Yijun Li and Yipu Wu (BaishanCloud, China)

0
Decentralized Storage Network (DSN) is an emerging technology that challenges traditional cloud-based storage systems by consolidating storage capacities from independent providers and coordinating to provide decentralized storage and retrieval services. However, current DSNs face several challenges associated with data privacy and efficiency of the proof systems. To address these issues, we propose FileDES (\uline{D}ecentralized \uline{E}ncrypted \uline{S}torage), which incorporates three essential elements: privacy preservation, scalable storage proof, and batch verification. FileDES provides encrypted data storage while maintaining data availability, with a scalable Proof of Encrypted Storage (PoES) algorithm that is resilient to Sybil and Generation attacks. Additionally, we introduce a rollup-based batch verification approach to simultaneously verify multiple files using publicly verifiable succinct proofs. We conducted a comparative evaluation on FileDES, Filecoin, Storj and Sia under various conditions, including a WAN composed of up to 120 geographically dispersed nodes. Our protocol outperforms the others in terms of proof generation/verification efficiency, storage costs, and scalability.
Speaker
Speaker biography is not available.

Account Migration across Blockchain Shards using Fine-tuned Lock Mechanism

Huawei Huang, Yue Lin and Zibin Zheng (Sun Yat-Sen University, China)

0
Sharding is one of the most promising techniques for improving blockchain scalability. In blockchain state sharding, account migration across shards is crucial to low ratio of cross-shard transactions and workload balance among shards. Through reviewing state-of-the-art protocols proposed to reconfigure blockchain shards via account shuffling, we find that the account migration plays a significant role. From the literature, we only find a related work which utilizes the lock mechanism to realize account migration. We call this method the SOTA Lock, in which both the target account's state and its associated transactions need to be locked when migrating this account between shards, thereby causing a high makespan for the associated transactions. To address these challenges of account migration, we propose a dedicated Fine-tuned Lock protocol. Unlike SOTA Lock, the proposed Fine-tuned Lock enables real-time processing of the affected transactions during account migration. Thus, the makespan of associated transactions can be lowered. We implement our Fine-tuned Lock protocol on an open-sourced blockchain testbed and deploy it in Tencent Cloud. The experimental results show that the proposed Fine-tuned Lock outperforms the SOTA Lock in terms of transaction makespan. For example, our Fine-tuned Lock achieves around 30% of transaction makespan comparing with SOTA Lock.
Speaker
Speaker biography is not available.
Session Chair

Xiaodong Lin (University of Guelph, Canada)

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Session A-3

A-3: Video Streaming

Conference
4:00 PM — 5:30 PM PDT
Local
May 21 Tue, 6:00 PM — 7:30 PM CDT
Location
Regency A

Gecko: Resource-Efficient and Accurate Queries in Real-Time Video Streams at the Edge

Liang Wang (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China); Xiaoyang Qu (Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd, China); Jianzong Wang (Pingan, China); Guokuan Li and Jiguang Wan (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China); Nan Zhang (Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., China); Song Guo (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong); Jing Xiao (Ping An Insurance Company of China，Ltd., China)

0
Surveillance cameras are ubiquitous nowadays and users' increasing needs for accessing real-world information (e.g., finding abandoned luggage) have urged object queries in real-time videos. While recent real-time video query processing systems exhibit excellent performance, they lack utility in deployment in practice as they overlook some crucial aspects, including multi-camera exploration, resource contention, and content awareness. Motivated by these issues, we propose a framework Gecko, to provide resource-efficient and accurate real-time object queries of massive videos on edge devices. Gecko (i) obtains optimal models from the model zoo and assigns them to edge devices for executing current queries, (ii) optimizes resource usage of the edge cluster at runtime by dynamically adjusting the frame query interval of each video stream and forking/joining running models on edge devices, and (iii) improves accuracy in changing video scenes by fine-grained stream transfer and continuous learning of models. Our evaluation with real-world video streams and queries shows that Gecko achieves up to 2x more resource efficiency gains and increases overall query accuracy by at least 12% compared with prior work, further delivering excellent scalability for practical deployment.
Speaker Liang Wang (Huazhong University of Science and Technology)

Liang Wang is a third-year Master's student in the PDSL group at Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, advised by Prof. Jiguang Wan. His current research interests focus on computing and storage systems in cloud and edge environments. Before joining HUST, he earned a Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering from Wuhan University in 2021. Liang has also completed internships at PingCAP, Huawei Cloud, and Ping An Technology.

Rosevin: Employing Resource- and Rate-Adaptive Edge Super-Resolution for Video Streaming

Xiaoxi Zhang (Sun Yat-sen University, China); Haoran Xu (Sun Yat-Sen University, China); Longhao Zou (Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen & Southern University of Science and Technology, China); Jingpu Duan (Peng Cheng Laboratory, China); Chuan Wu (The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong); Yali Xue and ZuoZhou Chen (Peng Cheng Laboratory, China); Xu Chen (Sun Yat-sen University, China)

0
Today's video streaming service providers have exploited cloud-edge collaborative networks for geo-distributed video delivery. The existing content delivery network (CDN) scheduling and adaptive bitrate algorithms may not fully utilize edge resources or lack a global control to optimize resource sharing. The emerging super-resolution (SR) approach can unleash the potential of leveraging computation resources to compensate for bandwidth consumption, by producing high-quality videos from low-resolution contents. Yet the uncertain SR resource sensitivity and its interplay with bitrate adaptation are under-explored. In this work, we propose \textit{Rosevin}, the first resource scheduler that jointly decides the bitrates and fine-grained resource allocation to perform SR at the edge, which can learn to optimize the long-term QoE for distributed end users. To handle the time-varying and complex space of decisions as well as a non-smooth objective function, \textit{Rosevin} realizes a novel online combinatorial learning algorithm, which nicely integrates convex optimization theories and online learning techniques. In addition to theoretically analyzing its performance, we implement an SR-assisted video streaming prototype of \textit{Rosevin} and demonstrate its advantages over several video delivery benchmarks.
Speaker
Speaker biography is not available.

TBSR: Tile-Based 360° Video Streaming with Super-Resolution on Commodity Mobile Devices

Lei Zhang and Haobin Zhou (Shenzhen University, China); Haiyang Wang (University of Minnesota at Duluth, USA); Laizhong Cui (Shenzhen University, China)

0
Streaming 360° videos demands excessive bandwidth. Tile-based streaming and super-resolution are two widely studied approaches to alleviate bandwidth shortage and enhance user experience in such real-time video streaming systems. The former prioritizes the transmission of a fraction of the 360° video according to the user viewport, while the latter enhances the streamed video in higher resolutions through computations. However, these two approaches bring substantial complexity and computation overhead and thus suffer from resource bottlenecks due to the constrained mobile hardware. This paper proposes TBSR, a practical mobile 360° video streaming system that incorporates in-time super-resolution with tile-based streaming on commodity mobile devices.
We present the designs of three key mechanisms, including a rate adaptation method with macro tile grouping to reduce decoding computations, a decoding and SR scheduler for different types of tasks to achieve the best cost efficiency, and the workload adjustment method to control the amount of tasks given the available capabilities. We further implement the TBSR prototype. Our performance evaluation shows that TBSR outperforms the existing methods, improving QoE quality by up to 32\% and bandwidth savings by 26\%.
Speaker
Speaker biography is not available.

Smart Data-Driven Proactive Push to Edge Network for User-Generated Videos

Xiaoteng Ma (Tsinghua University, China); Qing Li (Peng Cheng Laboratory, China); Junkun Peng (Tsinghua University, China); Gareth Tyson (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology & Queen Mary University of London, Hong Kong); Ziwen Ye and Shisong Tang (Tsinghua University, China); Qian Ma (ByteDance Technology Co., Ltd., China); Shengbin Meng (ByteDance Inc., China); Gabriel-Miro Muntean (Dublin City University, Ireland)

0
Video Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have started incorporating lightweight edge nodes to save costs, e.g., WiFi access points. Thus, it is necessary for CDNs to intelligently select which video files should be placed at their core data centers vs. these edge nodes. This is more complex than traditional CDN management, as lightweight edge nodes are far more numerous and unstable than data centers. With this in mind, we present SDPush -- a system for managing content placement in edge CDNs. SDPush tackles two problems. First, SDPush should select which files to proactive push. We build a file popularity prediction model that effectively identifies video files that will go on to receive many views. Second, SDPush should determine how many replicas per file to push. We design a model to predict the benefits of pushing particular files (regarding traffic savings) and then formulate the replica decision problem as a lightweight problem, which is solvable within seconds, even for platforms with millions of daily active users. Through a trace-driven evaluation and a live deployment on a real video platform, we validate SDPush's effectiveness, offloading peak-period traffic by 12.1% to 23.9% from the data center to edge nodes, thereby reducing the CDN costs.
Speaker Xiaoteng Ma

Xiaoteng Ma received his B.Eng. degree in 2017 and his Ph.D. in 2024. His research interests include edge-assisted multimedia delivery and resource allocation in hybrid cloud-edge-client networks.

Session Chair

Lin Wang (Paderborn University, Germany)

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