🎩 Top 5 Security and AI Reads - Week #13

Encrypted traffic SoK, unlearning vulnerabilities survey, privacy-guaranteed synthetic data, side-channel weight recovery, and LLM thought tracing

Welcome to the thirteenth installment of the Stats and Bytes Top 5 Security and AI Reads weekly newsletter. This week has inadvertently turned into a special Long-Form and Systemisation of Knowledge edition! We're kicking off with a comprehensive SoK paper decoding encrypted network traffic classifiers, highlighting critical issues in this field from poor data practices to non-existent open research standards. Next, we explore the fascinating intersection of machine unlearning techniques and ML attacks, mapping how forgetting mechanisms impact backdoors, membership inference, adversarial examples, and model inversion attacks. We then dive into synthetic data generation with formal privacy guarantees, examining the trade-offs between utility and privacy in current approaches. Following that, we investigate a novel side-channel attack that recovers neural network weights by exploiting activation function implementations in secure enclaves. We conclude with Anthropic's latest work on mec…