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Training social event detection models through federated learning (FedSED) aims to improve participants' performance on the task. However, existing federated learning paradigms are inadequate for achieving FedSED's objective and exhibit limitations in handling the inherent heterogeneity in social data. This paper proposes a personalized federated learning framework with a dual aggregation mechanism for social event detection, namely DAMe. We present a novel local aggregation strategy utilizing Bayesian optimization to incorporate global knowledge while retaining local characteristics. Moreover, we introduce a global aggregation strategy to provide clients with maximum external knowledge of their preferences. In addition, we incorporate a global-local event-centric constraint to prevent local overfitting and ``client-drift''. Experiments within a realistic simulation of a natural federated setting, utilizing six social event datasets spanning six languages and two social media platforms, along with an ablation study, have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Further robustness analyses have shown that DAMe is resistant to injection attacks., Comment: CIKM 2024

The use of a single image restoration framework to achieve multi-task image restoration has garnered significant attention from researchers. However, several practical challenges remain, including meeting the specific and simultaneous demands of different tasks, balancing relationships between tasks, and effectively utilizing task correlations in model design. To address these challenges, this paper explores a multi-expert adaptive selection mechanism. We begin by designing a feature representation method that accounts for both the pixel channel level and the global level, encompassing low-frequency and high-frequency components of the image. Based on this method, we construct a multi-expert selection and ensemble scheme. This scheme adaptively selects the most suitable expert from the expert library according to the content of the input image and the prompts of the current task. It not only meets the individualized needs of different tasks but also achieves balance and optimization across tasks. By sharing experts, our design promotes interconnections between different tasks, thereby enhancing overall performance and resource utilization. Additionally, the multi-expert mechanism effectively eliminates irrelevant experts, reducing interference from them and further improving the effectiveness and accuracy of image restoration. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method is both effective and superior to existing approaches, highlighting its potential for practical applications in multi-task image restoration.

Federated learning allows several clients to train one machine learning model jointly without sharing private data, providing privacy protection. However, traditional federated learning is vulnerable to poisoning attacks, which can not only decrease the model performance, but also implant malicious backdoors. In addition, direct submission of local model parameters can also lead to the privacy leakage of the training dataset. In this paper, we aim to build a privacy-preserving and Byzantine-robust federated learning scheme to provide an environment with no vandalism (NoV) against attacks from malicious participants. Specifically, we construct a model filter for poisoned local models, protecting the global model from data and model poisoning attacks. This model filter combines zero-knowledge proofs to provide further privacy protection. Then, we adopt secret sharing to provide verifiable secure aggregation, removing malicious clients that disrupting the aggregation process. Our formal analysis proves that NoV can protect data privacy and weed out Byzantine attackers. Our experiments illustrate that NoV can effectively address data and model poisoning attacks, including PGD, and outperforms other related schemes.

Recent booming development of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has facilitated an emerging model commercialization for the purpose of reinforcement on model performance, such as licensing or trading Deep Neural Network (DNN) models. However, DNN model trading may trigger concerns of the unauthorized replications or misuses over the model, so that the benefit of the model ownership will be violated. Model identity auditing is a challenging issue in protecting intellectual property of DNN models and verifying the integrity and ownership of models for guaranteeing trusts in transactions is one of the critical obstacles. In this paper, we focus on the above issue and propose a novel Accumulator-enabled Auditing for Distributed Identity of DNN Model (A2-DIDM) that utilizes blockchain and zero-knowledge techniques to protect data and function privacy while ensuring the lightweight on-chain ownership verification. The proposed model presents a scheme of identity records via configuring model weight checkpoints with corresponding zero-knowledge proofs, which incorporates predicates to capture incremental state changes in model weight checkpoints. Our scheme ensures both computational integrity of DNN training process and programmability, so that the uniqueness of the weight checkpoint sequence in a DNN model is preserved, ensuring the correctness of the model identity auditing. In addition, A2-DIDM also addresses privacy protections in distributed identity via a proposed method of accumulators. We systematically analyze the security and robustness of our proposed model and further evaluate the effectiveness and usability of auditing DNN model identities.

Segmentation of organs of interest in medical CT images is beneficial for diagnosis of diseases. Though recent methods based on Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (F-CNNs) have shown success in many segmentation tasks, fusing features from images with different scales is still a challenge: (1) Due to the lack of spatial awareness, F-CNNs share the same weights at different spatial locations. (2) F-CNNs can only obtain surrounding information through local receptive fields. To address the above challenge, we propose a new segmentation framework based on attention mechanisms, named MFA-Net (Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Attention Network). The proposed framework can learn more meaningful feature maps among multiple scales and result in more accurate automatic segmentation. We compare our proposed MFA-Net with SOTA methods on two 2D liver CT datasets. The experimental results show that our MFA-Net produces more precise segmentation on images with different scales., Comment: Paper accepted in Human-Centric Representation Learning workshop at AAAI 2024

Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) enable a wide range of applications but raise ethical concerns regarding illegal utilization.Adding watermarks to generative model outputs is a vital technique employed for copyright tracking and mitigating potential risks associated with AI-generated content. However, post-hoc watermarking techniques are susceptible to evasion. Existing watermarking methods for LDMs can only embed fixed messages. Watermark message alteration requires model retraining. The stability of the watermark is influenced by model updates and iterations. Furthermore, the current reconstruction-based watermark removal techniques utilizing variational autoencoders (VAE) and diffusion models have the capability to remove a significant portion of watermarks. Therefore, we propose a novel technique called DiffuseTrace. The goal is to embed invisible watermarks in all generated images for future detection semantically. The method establishes a unified representation of the initial latent variables and the watermark information through training an encoder-decoder model. The watermark information is embedded into the initial latent variables through the encoder and integrated into the sampling process. The watermark information is extracted by reversing the diffusion process and utilizing the decoder. DiffuseTrace does not rely on fine-tuning of the diffusion model components. The watermark is embedded into the image space semantically without compromising image quality. The encoder-decoder can be utilized as a plug-in in arbitrary diffusion models. We validate through experiments the effectiveness and flexibility of DiffuseTrace. DiffuseTrace holds an unprecedented advantage in combating the latest attacks based on variational autoencoders and Diffusion Models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized open-domain dialogue agents but encounter challenges in multi-character role-playing (MCRP) scenarios. To address the issue, we present Neeko, an innovative framework designed for efficient multiple characters imitation. Unlike existing methods, Neeko employs a dynamic low-rank adapter (LoRA) strategy, enabling it to adapt seamlessly to diverse characters. Our framework breaks down the role-playing process into agent pre-training, multiple characters playing, and character incremental learning, effectively handling both seen and unseen roles. This dynamic approach, coupled with distinct LoRA blocks for each character, enhances Neeko's adaptability to unique attributes, personalities, and speaking patterns. As a result, Neeko demonstrates superior performance in MCRP over most existing methods, offering more engaging and versatile user interaction experiences. Code and data are available at https://github.com/weiyifan1023/Neeko.

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VIReID) primarily deals with matching identities across person images from different modalities. Due to the modality gap between visible and infrared images, cross-modality identity matching poses significant challenges. Recognizing that high-level semantics of pedestrian appearance, such as gender, shape, and clothing style, remain consistent across modalities, this paper intends to bridge the modality gap by infusing visual features with high-level semantics. Given the capability of CLIP to sense high-level semantic information corresponding to visual representations, we explore the application of CLIP within the domain of VIReID. Consequently, we propose a CLIP-Driven Semantic Discovery Network (CSDN) that consists of Modality-specific Prompt Learner, Semantic Information Integration (SII), and High-level Semantic Embedding (HSE). Specifically, considering the diversity stemming from modality discrepancies in language descriptions, we devise bimodal learnable text tokens to capture modality-private semantic information for visible and infrared images, respectively. Additionally, acknowledging the complementary nature of semantic details across different modalities, we integrate text features from the bimodal language descriptions to achieve comprehensive semantics. Finally, we establish a connection between the integrated text features and the visual features across modalities. This process embed rich high-level semantic information into visual representations, thereby promoting the modality invariance of visual representations. The effectiveness and superiority of our proposed CSDN over existing methods have been substantiated through experimental evaluations on multiple widely used benchmarks. The code will be released at \url{https://github.com/nengdong96/CSDN}.

Distributed machine learning enables parallel training of extensive datasets by delegating computing tasks across multiple workers. Despite the cost reduction benefits of distributed machine learning, the dissemination of final model weights often leads to potential conflicts over model ownership as workers struggle to substantiate their involvement in the training computation. To address the above ownership issues and prevent accidental failures and malicious attacks, verifying the computational integrity and effectiveness of workers becomes particularly crucial in distributed machine learning. In this paper, we proposed a novel binary linear tree commitment-based ownership protection model to ensure computational integrity with limited overhead and concise proof. Due to the frequent updates of parameters during training, our commitment scheme introduces a maintainable tree structure to reduce the costs of updating proofs. Distinguished from SNARK-based verifiable computation, our model achieves efficient proof aggregation by leveraging inner product arguments. Furthermore, proofs of model weights are watermarked by worker identity keys to prevent commitments from being forged or duplicated. The performance analysis and comparison with SNARK-based hash commitments validate the efficacy of our model in preserving computational integrity within distributed machine learning.

Blockchain smart contracts have emerged as a transformative force in the digital realm, spawning a diverse range of compelling applications. Since solidity smart contracts across various domains manage trillions of dollars in virtual coins, they become a prime target for attacks. One of the primary challenges is keeping abreast of the latest techniques and tools for developing secure smart contracts and examining those already deployed. In this paper, we seek to address these challenges from four aspects: (1) We begin by examining ten automatic tools, specifically focusing on their methodologies and their ability to identify vulnerabilities in solidity smart contracts. (2) We propose a novel criterion for evaluating these tools, based on the ISO/IEC 25010 standard. (3) To facilitate the evaluation of the selected tools, we construct a benchmark that encompasses two distinct datasets: a collection of 389 labelled smart contracts and a scaled set of 20,000 unique cases from real-world contracts. (4) We provide a comparison of the selected tools, offering insights into their strengths and weaknesses and highlighting areas where further improvements are needed. Through this evaluation, we hope to provide developers and researchers with valuable guidance on selecting and using smart contract analysis tools and contribute to the ongoing efforts to improve the security and reliability of smart contracts., Comment: 24 pages, 6 figure, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials

With the increasing adoption of smart contracts, ensuring their security has become a critical concern. Numerous vulnerabilities and attacks have been identified and exploited, resulting in significant financial losses. In response, researchers have developed various tools and techniques to identify and prevent vulnerabilities in smart contracts. In this survey, we present a systematic overview of the quality assurance of smart contracts, covering vulnerabilities, attacks, defenses, and tool support. By classifying vulnerabilities based on known attacks, we can identify patterns and common weaknesses that need to be addressed. Moreover, in order to effectively protect smart contracts, we have created a labeled dataset to evaluate various vulnerability detection tools and compare their effectiveness., Comment: 35 pages, 6 figures, ACM Computing Surveys

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, the usage of machine learning models is gradually becoming part of our daily lives. High-quality models rely not only on efficient optimization algorithms but also on the training and learning processes built upon vast amounts of data and computational power. However, in practice, due to various challenges such as limited computational resources and data privacy concerns, users in need of models often cannot train machine learning models locally. This has led them to explore alternative approaches such as outsourced learning and federated learning. While these methods address the feasibility of model training effectively, they introduce concerns about the trustworthiness of the training process since computations are not performed locally. Similarly, there are trustworthiness issues associated with outsourced model inference. These two problems can be summarized as the trustworthiness problem of model computations: How can one verify that the results computed by other participants are derived according to the specified algorithm, model, and input data? To address this challenge, verifiable machine learning (VML) has emerged. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of zero-knowledge proof-based verifiable machine learning (ZKP-VML) technology. We first analyze the potential verifiability issues that may exist in different machine learning scenarios. Subsequently, we provide a formal definition of ZKP-VML. We then conduct a detailed analysis and classification of existing works based on their technical approaches. Finally, we discuss the key challenges and future directions in the field of ZKP-based VML.

Vertical federated learning has garnered significant attention as it allows clients to train machine learning models collaboratively without sharing local data, which protects the client's local private data. However, existing VFL methods face challenges when dealing with heterogeneous local models among participants, which affects optimization convergence and generalization. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel approach called Vertical federated learning for training multiple Heterogeneous models (VFedMH). VFedMH focuses on aggregating the local embeddings of each participant's knowledge during forward propagation. To protect the participants' local embedding values, we propose an embedding protection method based on lightweight blinding factors. In particular, participants obtain local embedding using local heterogeneous models. Then the passive party, who owns only features of the sample, injects the blinding factor into the local embedding and sends it to the active party. The active party aggregates local embeddings to obtain global knowledge embeddings and sends them to passive parties. The passive parties then utilize the global embeddings to propagate forward on their local heterogeneous networks. However, the passive party does not own the sample labels, so the local model gradient cannot be calculated locally. To overcome this limitation, the active party assists the passive party in computing its local heterogeneous model gradients. Then, each participant trains their local model using the heterogeneous model gradients. The objective is to minimize the loss value of their respective local heterogeneous models. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that VFedMH can simultaneously train multiple heterogeneous models with heterogeneous optimization and outperform some recent methods in model performance.

Web 3.0 is the new generation of the Internet that is reconstructed with distributed technology, which focuses on data ownership and value expression. Also, it operates under the principle that data and digital assets should be owned and controlled by users rather than large corporations. In this survey, we explore the current development state of Web 3.0 and the application of AI Technology in Web 3.0. Through investigating the existing applications and components of Web 3.0, we propose an architectural framework for Web 3.0 from the perspective of ecological application scenarios. We outline and divide the ecology of Web 3.0 into four layers. The main functions of each layer are data management, value circulation, ecological governance, and application scenarios. Our investigation delves into the major challenges and issues present in each of these layers. In this context, AI has shown its strong potential to solve existing problems of Web 3.0. We illustrate the crucial role of AI in the foundation and growth of Web 3.0. We begin by providing an overview of AI, including machine learning algorithms and deep learning techniques. Then, we thoroughly analyze the current state of AI technology applications in the four layers of Web 3.0 and offer some insights into its potential future development direction.

Threshold signatures are a fundamental cryptographic primitive used in many practical applications. As proposed by Boneh and Komlo (CRYPTO'22), TAPS is a threshold signature that is a hybrid of privacy and accountability. It enables a combiner to combine t signature shares while revealing nothing about the threshold t or signing quorum to the public and asks a tracer to track a signature to the quorum that generates it. However, TAPS has three disadvantages: it 1) structures upon a centralized model, 2) assumes that both combiner and tracer are honest, and 3) leaves the tracing unnotarized and static. In this work, we introduce Decentralized, Threshold, dynamically Accountable and Private Signature (DeTAPS) that provides decentralized combining and tracing, enhanced privacy against untrusted combiners (tracers), and notarized and dynamic tracing. Specifically, we adopt Dynamic Threshold Public-Key Encryption (DTPKE) to dynamically notarize the tracing process, design non-interactive zero knowledge proofs to achieve public verifiability of notaries, and utilize the Key-Aggregate Searchable Encryption to bridge TAPS and DTPKE so as to awaken the notaries securely and efficiently. In addition, we formalize the definitions and security requirements for DeTAPS. Then we present a generic construction and formally prove its security and privacy. To evaluate the performance, we build a prototype based on SGX2 and Ethereum.

Since the concern of privacy leakage extremely discourages user participation in sharing data, federated learning has gradually become a promising technique for both academia and industry for achieving collaborative learning without leaking information about the local data. Unfortunately, most federated learning solutions cannot efficiently verify the execution of each participant's local machine learning model and protect the privacy of user data, simultaneously. In this article, we first propose a Zero-Knowledge Proof-based Federated Learning (ZKP-FL) scheme on blockchain. It leverages zero-knowledge proof for both the computation of local data and the aggregation of local model parameters, aiming to verify the computation process without requiring the plaintext of the local data. We further propose a Practical ZKP-FL (PZKP-FL) scheme to support fraction and non-linear operations. Specifically, we explore a Fraction-Integer mapping function, and use Taylor expansion to efficiently handle non-linear operations while maintaining the accuracy of the federated learning model. We also analyze the security of PZKP-FL. Performance analysis demonstrates that the whole running time of the PZKP-FL scheme is approximately less than one minute in parallel execution.

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) aims to decompose aggregated electrical usage signal into appliance-specific power consumption and it amounts to a classical example of blind source separation tasks. Leveraging recent progress on deep learning techniques, we design a new neural NILM model Multi-State Dual CNN (MSDC). Different from previous models, MSDC explicitly extracts information about the appliance's multiple states and state transitions, which in turn regulates the prediction of signals for appliances. More specifically, we employ a dual-CNN architecture: one CNN for outputting state distributions and the other for predicting the power of each state. A new technique is invented that utilizes conditional random fields (CRF) to capture state transitions. Experiments on two real-world datasets REDD and UK-DALE demonstrate that our model significantly outperform state-of-the-art models while having good generalization capacity, achieving 6%-10% MAE gain and 33%-51% SAE gain to unseen appliances.

Considerable attention has been paid to dynamic searchable symmetric encryption (DSSE) which allows users to search on dynamically updated encrypted databases. To improve the performance of real-world applications, recent non-interactive multi-client DSSE schemes are targeted at avoiding per-query interaction between data owners and data users. However, existing non-interactive multi-client DSSE schemes do not consider forward privacy or backward privacy, making them exposed to leakage abuse attacks. Besides, most existing DSSE schemes with forward and backward privacy rely on keeping a keyword operation counter or an inverted index, resulting in a heavy storage burden on the data owner side. To address these issues, we propose a non-interactive multi-client DSSE scheme with small client storage, and our proposed scheme can provide both forward privacy and backward privacy. Specifically, we first design a lightweight storage chain structure that binds all keywords to a single state to reduce the storage cost. Then, we present a Hidden Key technique, which preserves non-interactive forward privacy through time range queries, ensuring that data with newer timestamps cannot match earlier time ranges. We conduct extensive experiments to validate our methods, which demonstrate computational efficiency. Moreover, security analysis proves the privacy-preserving property of our methods.

Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) supports keyword search over outsourced symmetrically encrypted data. Dynamic searchable symmetric encryption (DSSE), a variant of SSE, further enables data updating. Most DSSE works with conjunctive keyword search primarily consider forward and backward privacy. Ideally, the server should only learn the result sets involving all keywords in the conjunction. However, existing schemes suffer from keyword pair result pattern (KPRP) leakage, revealing the partial result sets containing two of query keywords. We propose the first DSSE scheme to address aforementioned concerns that achieves strong privacy-preserving conjunctive keyword search. Specifically, our scheme can maintain forward and backward privacy and eliminate KPRP leakage, offering a higher level of security. The search complexity scales with the number of documents stored in the database in several existing schemes. However, the complexity of our scheme scales with the update frequency of the least frequent keyword in the conjunction, which is much smaller than the size of the entire database. Besides, we devise a least frequent keyword acquisition protocol to reduce frequent interactions between clients. Finally, we analyze the security of our scheme and evaluate its performance theoretically and experimentally. The results show that our scheme has strong privacy preservation and efficiency.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been increasingly used in face recognition (FR) systems. Recent studies, however, show that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which can potentially mislead the FR systems using DNNs in the physical world. Existing attacks on these systems either generate perturbations working merely in the digital world, or rely on customized equipments to generate perturbations and are not robust in varying physical environments. In this paper, we propose FaceAdv, a physical-world attack that crafts adversarial stickers to deceive FR systems. It mainly consists of a sticker generator and a transformer, where the former can craft several stickers with different shapes and the latter transformer aims to digitally attach stickers to human faces and provide feedbacks to the generator to improve the effectiveness of stickers. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of FaceAdv on attacking 3 typical FR systems (i.e., ArcFace, CosFace and FaceNet). The results show that compared with a state-of-the-art attack, FaceAdv can significantly improve success rate of both dodging and impersonating attacks. We also conduct comprehensive evaluations to demonstrate the robustness of FaceAdv.

To develop Smart City, the growing popularity of Machine Learning (ML) that appreciates high-quality training datasets generated from diverse IoT devices raises natural questions about the privacy guarantees that can be provided in such settings. Privacy-preserving ML training in an aggregation scenario enables a model demander to securely train ML models with the sensitive IoT data gathered from personal IoT devices. Existing solutions are generally server-aided, cannot deal with the collusion threat between the servers or between the servers and data owners, and do not match the delicate environments of IoT. We propose a privacy-preserving ML training framework named Heda that consists of a library of building blocks based on partial homomorphic encryption (PHE) enabling constructing multiple privacy-preserving ML training protocols for the aggregation scenario without the assistance of untrusted servers and defending the security under collusion situations. Rigorous security analysis demonstrates the proposed protocols can protect the privacy of each participant in the honest-but-curious model and defend the security under most collusion situations. Extensive experiments validate the efficiency of Heda which achieves the privacy-preserving ML training without losing the model accuracy.

KNN has the reputation to be the word simplest but efficient supervised learning algorithm used for either classification or regression. KNN prediction efficiency highly depends on the size of its training data but when this training data grows KNN suffers from slowness in making decisions since it needs to search nearest neighbors within the entire dataset at each decision making. This paper proposes a new technique that enables the selection of nearest neighbors directly in the neighborhood of a given observation. The proposed approach consists of dividing the data space into subcells of a virtual grid built on top of data space. The mapping between the data points and subcells is performed using hashing. When it comes to select the nearest neighbors of a given observation, we firstly identify the cell the observation belongs by using hashing, and then we look for nearest neighbors from that central cell and cells around it layer by layer. From our experiment performance analysis on publicly available datasets, our algorithm outperforms the original KNN in time efficiency with a prediction quality as good as that of KNN it also offers competitive performance with solutions like KDtree, Comment: 8 pages,6 figures

The explosive growth of vehicle amount has given rise to a series of traffic problems, such as traffic congestion, road safety, and fuel waste. Collecting vehicles' speed information is an effective way to monitor the traffic condition and avoid vehicles being congested, which however may bring threats to vehicles' location and trajectory privacy. Motivated by the fact that traffic monitoring does not need to know each individual vehicle's speed and the average speed would be sufficient, we propose a privacy-preserving traffic monitoring (PPTM) scheme to aggregate vehicles' speeds at different locations. In PPTM, the roadside unit (RSU) collects vehicles' speed information at multiple road segments, and further cooperates with a service provider to calculate the average speed information for every road segment. To preserve vehicles' privacy, both homomorphic Paillier cryptosystem and super-increasing sequence are adopted. A comprehensive security analysis indicates that the proposed PPTM can preserve vehicles' identities, speeds, locations, and trajectories privacy from being disclosed. In addition, extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed PPTM scheme.

Software Defined Networks offer flexible and intelligent network operations by splitting a traditional network into a centralized control plane and a programmable data plane. The intelligent control plane is responsible for providing flow paths to switches and optimizes network performance. The controller in the control plane is the fundamental element used for all operations of data plane management. Hence, the performance and capabilities of the controller itself are extremely important. Furthermore, the tools used to benchmark their performance must be accurate and effective in measuring different evaluation parameters. There are dozens of controller proposals available in existing literature. However, there is no quantitative comparative analysis for them. In this article, we present a comprehensive qualitative comparison of different SDN controllers, along with a quantitative analysis of their performance in different network scenarios. More specifically, we categorize and classify 34 controllers based on their capabilities, and present a qualitative comparison of their properties. We also discuss in-depth capabilities of benchmarking tools used for SDN controllers, along with best practices for quantitative controller evaluation. This work uses three benchmarking tools to compare nine controllers against multiple criteria. Finally, we discuss detailed research findings on the performance, benchmarking criteria, and evaluation testbeds for SDN controllers.

The recent proliferation of smart devices has given rise to ubiquitous computing, an emerging computing paradigm which allows anytime & anywhere computing possible. In such a ubiquitous computing environment, customers release different computing or sensing tasks, and people, also known as data processors, participate in these tasks and get paid for providing their idle computing and communication resources. Thus, how to select an appropriate and reliable customer while not disclosing processors' privacy has become an interesting problem. In this article, we present a trust-based and privacy-preserving customer selection scheme in ubiquitous computing, called TPCS, to enable potential processors select the customers with good reputation. The basic concept of TPCS is that each data processor holds a trust value, and the reputation score of the customer is calculated based on processors' trust values and feedbacks via a truth discovery process. To preserve processors' privacy, pseudonyms and Paillier cryptosystem are applied to conceal each processor's real identity. In addition, three authentication protocols are designed to ensure that only the valid data processors (i.e., the processors registering in the system, holding the truthful trust values, and joining the computing tasks) can pass the authentication. A comprehensive security analysis is conducted to prove that our proposed TPCS scheme is secure and can defend against several sophisticated attacks. Moreover, extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

The combination of smart home platforms and automation apps introduces much convenience to smart home users. However, this also brings the potential for privacy leakage. If a smart home platform is permitted to collect all the events of a user day and night, then the platform will learn the behavior patterns of this user before long. In this paper, we investigate how IFTTT, one of the most popular smart home platforms, has the capability of monitoring the daily life of a user in a variety of ways that are hardly noticeable. Moreover, we propose multiple ideas for mitigating privacy leakages, which altogether forms a Filter-and-Fuzz (F&F) process: first, it filters out events unneeded by the IFTTT platform; then, it fuzzes the values and frequencies of the remaining events. We evaluate the F&F process, and the results show that the proposed solution makes IFTTT unable to recognize any of the user's behavior patterns.

Machine learning (ML) classifiers are invaluable building blocks that have been used in many fields. High quality training dataset collected from multiple data providers is essential to train accurate classifiers. However, it raises concern about data privacy due to potential leakage of sensitive information in training dataset. Existing studies have proposed many solutions to privacy-preserving training of ML classifiers, but it remains a challenging task to strike a balance among accuracy, computational efficiency, and security. In this paper, we propose Heda, an efficient privacypreserving scheme for training ML classifiers. By combining homomorphic cryptosystem (HC) with differential privacy (DP), Heda obtains the tradeoffs between efficiency and accuracy, and enables flexible switch among different tradeoffs by parameter tuning. In order to make such combination efficient and feasible, we present novel designs based on both HC and DP: A library of building blocks based on partially HC are proposed to construct complex training algorithms without introducing a trusted thirdparty or computational relaxation; A set of theoretical methods are proposed to determine appropriate privacy budget and to reduce sensitivity. Security analysis demonstrates that our solution can construct complex ML training algorithm securely. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme.

With the more and more extensive application of blockchain, blockchain security has been widely concerned by the society and deeply studied by scholars. Moreover, the security of blockchain data directly affects the security of various applications of blockchain. In this survey, we perform a comprehensive classification and summary of the security of blockchain data. First, we present classification of blockchain data attacks. Subsequently, we present the attacks and defenses of blockchain data in terms of privacy, availability, integrity and controllability. Data privacy attacks present data leakage or data obtained by attackers through analysis. Data availability attacks present abnormal or incorrect access to blockchain data. Data integrity attacks present blockchain data being tampered. Data controllability attacks present blockchain data accidentally manipulated by smart contract vulnerability. Finally, we present several important open research directions to identify follow-up studies in this area.

As a popular application, mobile crowd sensing systems aim at providing more convenient service via the swarm intelligence. With the popularity of sensor-embedded smart phones and intelligent wearable devices, mobile crowd sensing is becoming an efficient way to obtain various types of sensing data from individuals, which will make people's life more convenient. However, mobile crowd sensing systems today are facing a critical challenge, namely the privacy leakage of the sensitive information and valuable data, which can raise grave concerns among the participants. To address this issue, we propose an enhanced secure certificateless privacy-preserving verifiable data authentication scheme for mobile crowd sensing, named EPDA. The proposed scheme provides unconditional anonymous data authentication service for mobile crowd sensing, by deploying an improved certificateless ring signature as the cryptogram essential, in which the big sensing data should be signed by one of legitimate members in a specific group and could be verified without exposing the actual identity of the participant. The formal security proof demonstrates that EPDA is secure against existential forgery under adaptive chosen message and identity attacks in random oracle model. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted. The results show that the proposed EPDA efficiently decreases computational cost and time consumption in the sensing data authentication process.

Nowadays, a large amount of user privacy-sensitive data is outsourced to the cloud server in ciphertext, which is provided by the data owners and can be accessed by authorized data users. When accessing data, the user should be assigned with the access permission according to his identities or attributes. In addition, the search capabilities in encrypted outsourced data is expected to be enhanced, i.e., the search results can better pre-sent user's intentions. To address the above issues, ESAS, an Efficient Semantic and Authorized Search scheme over encrypt-ed outsourced data, is proposed. In ESAS, by integrating PRSCG (the privacy-preserving ranked search based on con-ceptual graph) and CP-ABE (ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption), semantic search with file-level fine-grained access authorization can be realized. In addition, search authorization can be done in an offline manner, which can improve search efficiency and reduce the response time. The security analysis indicate that the proposed ESAS meets security requirement.

In the Smart Grid with Renewable Energy Resources (RERs), the Residential Units (RUs) with Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) are considered to be both power consumers and suppliers. Specifically, RUs with excessive renewable generations can trade with the utility in deficit of power supplies for mutual benefits. It causes two challenging issues. First, the trading data of RUs is quite sensitive, which should be only accessed by authorized users with fine-grained policies. Second, the behaviors of the RUs to generate trading data are spontaneous and unpredictable, then the problem is how to guarantee system efficiency and delay tolerance simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a delay-tolerant flexible data access control scheme based on Key Policy Attribute Based Encryption (KP-ABE) for Smart Grid with Renewable Energy Resources (RERs). We adopt the secret sharing scheme (SSS) to realize a flexible access control with encryption delay tolerance. Furthermore, there is no central trusted server to perform the encryption/decryption. We reduce the computation cost on RUs and operators via a semi-trusted model. The analysis shows that the proposed scheme can meet the data security requirement of the Smart Grid with RERs, and it also has less cost compared with other popular models.

Face liveness detection has become a widely used technique with a growing importance in various authentication scenarios to withstand spoofing attacks. Existing methods that perform liveness detection generally focus on designing intelligent classifiers or customized hardware to differentiate between the image or video samples of a real legitimate user and the imitated ones. Although effective, they can be resource-consuming and detection results may be sensitive to environmental changes. In this paper, we take iris movement as a significant liveness sign and propose a simple and efficient liveness detection system named IriTrack. Users are required to move their eyes along with a randomly generated poly-line, and trajectories of irises are then used as evidences for liveness detection. IriTrack allows checking liveness by using data collected during user-device interactions. We implemented a prototype and conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The results show that IriTrack can fend against spoofing attacks with a moderate and adjustable time overhead.

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is one of the fundamental image retrieval primitives. Its applications can be found in various areas, such as art collections and medical diagnoses. With an increasing prevalence of cloud computing paradigm, image owners desire to outsource their images to cloud servers. In order to deal with the risk of privacy leakage of images, images are typically encrypted before they are outsourced to the cloud, which makes CBIR an extremely challenging task. Existing studies focus on the scenario with only a single image owner, leaving the problem of CBIR with multiple image sources (i.e., owners) unaddressed. In this paper, we propose a secure CBIR scheme that supports Multiple Image owners with Privacy Protection (MIPP). We encrypt image features with a secure multi-party computation technique, which allows image owners to encrypt image features with their own keys. This enables efficient image retrieval over images gathered from multiple sources, while guaranteeing that image privacy of an individual image owner will not be leaked to other image owners. We also propose a new method for similarity measurement of images that can avoid revealing image similarity information to the cloud. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that MIPP achieves retrieval accuracy and efficiency simultaneously, while preserving image privacy.

Phrase search allows retrieval of documents containing an exact phrase, which plays an important role in many machine learning applications for cloud-based IoT, such as intelligent medical data analytics. In order to protect sensitive information from being leaked by service providers, documents (e.g., clinic records) are usually encrypted by data owners before being outsourced to the cloud. This, however, makes the search operation an extremely challenging task. Existing searchable encryption schemes for multi-keyword search operations fail to perform phrase search, as they are unable to determine the location relationship of multiple keywords in a queried phrase over encrypted data on the cloud server side. In this paper, we propose P3, an efficient privacy-preserving phrase search scheme for intelligent encrypted data processing in cloud-based IoT. Our scheme exploits the homomorphic encryption and bilinear map to determine the location relationship of multiple queried keywords over encrypted data. It also utilizes a probabilistic trapdoor generation algorithm to protect users search patterns. Thorough security analysis demonstrates the security guarantees achieved by P3. We implement a prototype and conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The evaluation results show that compared with existing multikeyword search schemes, P3 can greatly improve the search accuracy with moderate overheads.