Bogdan Kulynych

Graduate student at EPFL Security and Privacy Engineering Lab (SPRING). Former intern at Google and CERN.

I am interested in the intersection of privacy, security, and machine learning.

Projects and publications

Provable security and privacy for machine learning

• Provably minimal-effort evasion attacks in constrained discrete domains.

  Bogdan Kulynych, Jamie Hayes, Nikita Samarin, Carmela Troncoso. Evading classifiers in discrete domains with provable optimality guarantees. NeurIPS 2018 Workshop on Security in Machine Learning, December 7, 2018, Montreal, Canada.

• mia—an open-source library for evaluating Keras or PyTorch models against attacks on privacy of the training data: membership inference attacks.

• Power indices for machine learning models—game-theoretic tools that can be used to prove that certain features can not influence a classifier’s decision.

  Bogdan Kulynych, Carmela Troncoso. Feature importance scores and lossless feature pruning using Banzhaf power indices. NeurIPS (then NIPS) 2017 Symposium on Interpretable Machine Learning, December 7, 2017, Long Beach, CA, USA.

Protective optimization technologies

• Protective optimization technologies (POTs)—a concept of developing technologies that counteract harmful optimization systems from outside.

  Rebekah Overdorf, Bogdan Kulynych, Ero Balsa, Carmela Troncoso, Seda Gürses. POTs: Protective Optimization Technologies. Under submission.

  See accompanying code that implements poisoning attacks and adversarial examples against a ML-based credit scoring system.

  Rebekah Overdorf, Bogdan Kulynych, Ero Balsa, Carmela Troncoso, Seda Gürses. Questioning the assumptions behind fairness solutions. Critiquing and Correcting Trends in Machine Learning (NeurIPS 2018 Workshop), December 7, 2018, Montreal, Canada.

• textfool—a tool for evading text classifiers, with the goal of countering privacy-invasive classifiers.

Privacy-preserving cryptographic data structures

• ClaimChain–a system and data structure for decentralized privacy-preserving public key distribution. It has a working prototype, and is being tested by the Autocrypt opportunistic email encryption initiative.

  Bogdan Kulynych, Wouter Lueks, Marios Isaakidis, George Danezis, and Carmela Troncoso. ClaimChain: Improving the Security and Privacy of In-band Key Distribution for Messaging. In 2018 Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES’18), October 15, 2018, Toronto, ON, Canada.

• hippiepug—an open-source library for efficient key-value Merkle trees and skipchains, that can be easily offloaded to untrusted storage.

Academic service

• External reviewer at Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Symposium 2019
• Program committee member at the Internet Science Conference Workshop on Encryption, Blockchains, and Personal Data, 2018