With the proliferation of inexpensive video surveillance and face recognition technologies, it is increasingly possible to track and match people as they move through public spaces. To protect the privacy of subjects visible in video sequences, prior research suggests using ad hoc obfuscation methods, such as blurring or pixelation of the face. However, there has been little investigation into ...

Sorensen (1985) has argued that ‘vague’ is itself a vague predicate; it is just as sorites-prone as its positive instances. This result has been exploited by Hyde (1994) in an ingenious attempt to establish that vague predicates must necessarily suffer from higher-order vagueness. More precisely, Hyde has argued that the vagueness of ‘vague’ ensures that the “paradigmatic conception”, according...

We construct trapdoor permutations based on (sub-exponential) indistinguishability obfuscation and oneway functions, thereby providing the first candidate that is not based on the hardness of factoring. Our construction shows that even highly structured primitives, such as trapdoor permutations, can be potentially based on hardness assumptions with noisy structures such as those used in candida...

We report on the first large-scale evaluation of author obfuscation approaches built to attack authorship verification approaches: the impact of 3 obfuscators on the performance of a total of 44 authorship verification approaches has been measured and analyzed. The best-performing obfuscator successfully impacts the decision-making process of the authorship verifiers on average in about 47% of ...

Malicious software, also known as malware, represents the profitable art of destruction, as it is able to do any kind of harm to a system in a stealthy manner as well as to hide its existence. Furthermore, its rise has prevailed and there is no end in sight. Its most valuable tool, obfuscation, is mainly responsible for this achievement. Obfuscation techniques are applied to protect assets of m...

A circuit obfuscator is an algorithm that translates logic circuits into functionally-equivalent similarlysized logic circuits that are hard to understand. While ad hoc obfuscators exist, theoretical progress has mainly been limited to no-go results. In this work, we propose a new notion of circuit obfuscation, which we call partial indistinguishability. We then prove that, in contrast to previ...

By obfuscation we mean any efficient semantic-preserving transformation of computer programs aimed at bringing a program into such a form, which impedes the understanding of its algorithm and data structures or prevents the extracting of some valuable information from the plaintext of a program. The main difficulty in designing an effective program obfuscator is to guarantee security, i.e. to p...

Privacy hazard to Web-based information services represents an important obstacle to the growth and diffusion of the personalized services. Data obfuscation methods were proposed for enhancing the users’ privacy in recommender systems based on collaborative filtering. Data obfuscation can provide statistically measurable privacy gains. However, these are measured using metrics that may not be n...

We propose a novel semantic analysis of the mass/count distinction, within a new framework combining the theory of mereology with Probabilistic Type Theory with Records, Prob-TTR (Cooper et al. 2014)). While the notions akin to VAGUENESS (Chierchia 2010) and OVERLAP (Landman 2011) are needed to ground this distinction, neither on its own is sufficient to accommodate the whole range of data, esp...

Almost every theory of vagueness shares at least one feature: it uses, and in most cases heavily relies on, some kind of normative predicate (or predicates) in its metalanguage. Metalinguistic normative predicates are discussed chiefly by supervaluationists and other defenders of higher-order vagueness. According to this group of theorists, the existence of higher-order vagueness depends on and...