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My question is simple: What steps should you take to protect research from the vast amount of spyware or insecure applications on a given device?

Background:

I do research into developing new models for machine learning applications. Security of this research is of high importance. This is because developing a new model can be a difficult, time consuming task. However once a new model is understood, all of the coding necessary to leverage the research is often trivial. So it can be stolen very easily.

It seems very possible that data mining could be used to identify researchers. After which spyware (which may well already be on a device) can be used to steal research.

My Solution so far:

I've been doing all of my testing on a newly wiped system that is entirely not connected nor ever connected to the internet (network card removed)

Other than that, I have encrypted all of the source as well as the entire hard drive separately using 7zip.

I'm not sure if this is enough.

poodledot
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1 Answers1

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You are doing more than is prudent.

Machine learning models are cool and nifty, but without data to actually train them they're of little use to most people (read: 99.999999% of humanity). And without data to train them, it's really hard to tell if this research model is meaningfully better than things that are readily available - super hard if you don't have any expertise in the area.

The odds of you coming up with a hugely more effective model than state of the art is not very high (no offense, science in general tends to be more incremental than most people realize). The odds of someone targeting you specifically are fairly low, and using spyware as the attack vector is also not great. Combine that all, and this situation seems vanishingly small.

If your research was so valuable, I'd be more worried about some corporation showing up at your door with a car full of money and promises of glory. And honestly, if you're really worried about security, MegaCorps are really good at that too.

Telastyn
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