The rapid development of the automotive industry and the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has led to an exponential growth of distributed vehicular data, driving the need for secure and efficient collaborative machine learning solutions. However, existing distributed collaborative machine learning (DCML) approaches, such as federated learning and split learning, face significant challenges in IoV scenarios, including limited training efficiency, centralized aggregation vulnerabilities, and constrained privacy and model protection. To address these issues, we propose a blockchain-based split federated learning (BSFL) scheme for IoV applications. BSFL non-trivially combines federated learning and split learning to enable vehicles with low computational power to participate in parallel training, improving both model accuracy and training efficiency. By utilizing blockchain as a decentralized infrastructure, BSFL eliminates the risks of single points of failure and ensures model consistency through Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus. Furthermore, we design a noise addition mechanism based on differential privacy to safeguard client data privacy and model security. Formal security analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate that BSFL achieves enhanced privacy, security, and training performance. Comparing to related DCML schemes, BSFL reduces computational overhead by up to 88.84% and client training time by up to 29.49% while maintaining comparable accuracy. When training on ResNet-50 based on CIFAR10, BSFL achieved an accuracy of 93.15%. And the verification process for each model’s training results on the blockchain requires 1.49 ms.

Network printers have been widely utilized to print various materials, but they still have security risks, caused by vulnerabilities that can be exploited for malicious attacks. Fuzzing is a popular testing technique that has found many vulnerabilities in various scenarios. However, existing fuzzing approaches are limited in network printer testing, due to important difficulties including unavailable source code of printer firmware, ineffective input generation, etc. In this paper, we design NetPuzz, a feedback-guided fuzzing framework of network printers for automated vulnerability detection. It performs fully black-box testing of network printing protocols, without the requirement of source code, reverse engineering or virtual execution of printer firmware. To achieve good results of vulnerability detection, NetPuzz utilizes two key techniques: (1) asequence-tree-based fuzzing approachthat generates effective input-packet sequences based on sequence tree mutation and printer response sequence guidance; (2) abisection-based strategythat extracts minimal PoC sequences from the original input-packet sequences triggering vulnerabilities. We use NetPuzz to test seven commercial network printers, and it finds 25 new and unique vulnerabilities, 23 of which have been assigned with CVE/CNVD IDs.

In large-scale and complex network environments, frequent security events make security audits increasingly important. Effective audits rely on maintaining a clearer memory of recent security events to support reliable identification and analysis. However, in high-volume data streams, existing methods struggle to ensure more accurate recording of recent time periods under a fixed memory budget while keeping the overall error controllable. To address this, we propose a novel data stream processing structure, the Stair Sketch. The key idea is to organize limited memory into a staircase of atomic sketches, where newer time periods hold more sketches. When memory is exhausted, one sketch is reclaimed from each existing period for the new one, efficiently allocating more memory to recent periods without updating all sketches. To record longer time periods and handle load imbalance, we introduce vertical sampling and horizontal sharing techniques to optimize our method. We theoretically derive the error bounds of Stair Sketch. Extensive experiments show that Stair Sketch improves accuracy by at least one order of magnitude compared with state-of-the-art methods, while reducing memory accesses by up to 50%. All related codes are open-sourced at GitHub.

This work proposes an encrypted controller framework for closed-loop control systems with nonlinear dynamics over fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). Unlike differential privacy and output masking, FHE is a cryptographic primitive that provides assumption-based confidentiality guarantees under standard hardness assumptions. We observe that existing encrypted control frameworks remain largely limited to linear open-loop systems, primarily due to two key challenges: rapid ciphertext noise accumulation in feedback loops and the substantial computational overhead of nonlinear operations. In control systems, feedback is essential for real-time error correction, while nonlinear characteristics are critical for accurately modelling complex system behaviours. To address these challenges, we propose ENClose, a novel encrypted control framework that enables low-latency execution of both feedback control and nonlinear function evaluation. Specifically, ENClose introduces a low-latency homomorphic nonlinear computation framework that accelerates functional bootstrapping (FBS) by combining function segmentation with tree-based encrypted selection. This framework not only mitigates noise accumulation in encrypted feedback loops but also significantly improves the efficiency of FBS under high-precision settings, meeting the computational demands of dynamic control systems. Experimental results show that ENClose achieves a 3× to 20× speedup over state-of-the-art encrypted controllers. We validate ENClose through realworld applications, including multi-vehicle formation, spring–mass–damper control, and anomaly recovery, where the results demonstrate high-precision tracking and successful reconvergence after anomalies.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed devices while preserving data privacy. However, it faces critical security challenges, including centralization risks and poisoning attacks, which degrade robustness and scalability. Existing schemes struggle to simultaneously mitigate targeted and untargeted poisoning attacks, impose restrictive adversary ratio assumptions (poison ratio < 50%), and suffer from privacy-performance trade-offs. To address these limitations, we propose SharBipole, a decentralized FL scheme integrating sharding blockchain with a novel dual-metric defense mechanism, Bipole. SharBipole employs a Byzantine Fault Tolerant-enabled sharding architecture to eliminate single points of failure, reduce communication overhead, and enable parallel model aggregation. Meanwhile, the Bipole module defends against poisoning attacks using two adaptive similarity metrics to filter malicious updates dynamically. Reinforcement learning optimizes threshold adjustments, while noise-aware adaptive clipping balances privacy and model utility. Further, we give convergence analysis to prove the theoretical soundness and scalability of SharBipole. Lastly, extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that SharBipole supports poison ratios exceeding 50% and improves throughput and latency. The model replacement attack with 60% adversaries is entirely ineffective against SharBipole, and the label-flipping attack achieves an attack success rate of only 2.344%. SharBipole establishes a scalable, secure, and privacy-preserving solution for distributed learning in massive environments.

In Ethereum, DevP2P is the fundamental network-layer protocol set that supports consensus mechanisms, transaction propagation and smart contract execution. Due to the importance of DevP2P, its bugs can be exploited by the attacker to cause security problems like denial of service, leading to property loss on Ethereum. However, existing blockchain testing approaches focus on the bug detection of consensus and application layers, causing many serious DevP2P bugs to be missed. In fact, detecting DevP2P bugs has some key challenges, including how to generate effective inputs and how to detect complex bugs. This paper designs D2PFuzz, the first network-layer differential fuzzing approach of bug detection for Ethereum. It consists of two key techniques: (1) aquery-based fuzzing strategythat dynamically generates valid DevP2P messages according to network, chain and node state changes; and (2) amulti-node differential checking methodthat identifies important differences of DevP2P response messages from multiple nodes in the same blockchain to detect semantic bugs. We have evaluated D2PFuzz on five open-source and popular Ethereum node implementations, including Geth, Erigon, Reth, Besu and Nethermind. D2PFuzz in total finds 15 unique bugs, 12 of which are previously unknown. Compared to two state-of-the-art blockchain testing approaches including LOKI and Hive, D2PFuzz improves testing coverage by 3.7x and 21.6x, respectively, and finds 13 bugs missed by these approaches.

Semantic communication (SemCom) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing the efficiency and intelligence of wireless networks. Nevertheless, device het erogeneity, resource constraints, and the vulnerability of deep neural networks in open environments pose significant challenges to its practical deployment. In this paper, we propose a task oriented and lightweight SemCom system with secure aggregation for ensuring efficient and privacy-preserving interactions in distributed networks. First, we design a multi-task SemCom framework that unifies semantic feature extraction from sample based datasets. To accommodate resource-constrained devices, we further introduce a feature distillation mechanism that derives lightweight local models without sacrificing inference accuracy. To preserve the privacy of local datasets while leveraging the generalization capability of distributed devices, we develop a secure model aggregation algorithm based on multiparty homomorphic encryption. Simulation results and comparative experiments validate the effectiveness of our system, which fully utilizes the knowledge embedded in existing high-performance models. Our results demonstrate that the proposed local semantic models outperform the baseline models under limited datasets and reduced parameters. We also analyze the trade-off between computational complexity and security in the proposed aggregation scheme, highlighting its applicability to distributed SemCom scenarios.

Semantic communications are expected to improve the transmission efficiency in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. However, the distributed nature of networks and heterogeneity of devices challenge the secure utilization of semantic communication systems. In this paper, we develop a distributed semantic communication system that achieves the security and efficiency during update and usage phases. A blockchain-based trust scheme for update is designed to continuously train and synchronize the system in dynamic IoT environments. To improve the updating efficiency, we propose a flexible semantic coding method base on compressive semantic knowledge bases. It greatly reduces the amount of data shared among devices for system update, and realizes the flexible adjustment of the size of knowledge bases and the number of transmitted signal symbols in model training and inference stages. In the usage phase, a signature mechanism for lossy semantics is introduced to guarantee the integrity and authenticity of the transmitted semantics in lossy semantic communications. We further design a noise-aware differential privacy mechanism, which introduces optimized noise based on the different channel information available to heterogeneous devices. Experiments on transmission tasks show that the proposed system defends against cross-phase attacks of compromising semantics integrity and reduces the data to be shared in the update phase by about 36% to 90%, and in the usage phase by 60% compared with related works.

Blockchain sharding is a promising approach to enhancing scalability by partitioning the network into smaller, parallel shards. However, existing sharding blockchains that rely on Byzantine fault tolerance protocols require large shard sizes to meet strict security thresholds, limiting scalability, while relaxing security parameters can lead to liveness and safety violations. In this work, we present Camael, a secure sharding blockchain that achieves corrupted-shard tolerance through effective detection and processing mechanisms for both liveness and safety violations. Specifically, fake liveness violations forged by malicious nodes are accurately detected via a two-phase reporting and confirmation mechanism, while concealed safety violations are efficiently identified using a lightweight snapshot mechanism. Furthermore, a state determination process ensures overall system consistency. Malicious nodes are precisely identified through a conviction mechanism, which enables the replacement of the targeted nodes and the reconfiguration of the shards. Notably, Camael ensures security while preserving a global fault tolerance of 1/3 and tolerating corrupted shards, with each shard accommodating up to 2/3 malicious nodes. Extensive experiments conducted on 2000 AWS EC2 nodes across 4 regions demonstrate that Camael improves throughput by 3.56 times compared to the baseline (Kronos, NDSS'25), achieving a throughput of 109.3 ktx/sec, while the violation processing requires only 1.64 sec.

This work proposes a multi-level compiler framework to transform programs with loop structures to efficient algorithms over fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). We observe that, when loops operate over ciphertexts, it becomes extremely challenging to effectively interpret the control structures within the loop and construct operator cost models for the main body of the loop. Consequently, most existing compiler frameworks have inadequate support for programs involving non-trivial loops, undermining the expressiveness of programming over FHE. To achieve both efficient and general program execution over FHE, we propose CHLOE, a new compiler framework with multi-level control-flow analysis for the effective optimization of compound repetition control structures. We observe that loops over FHE can be classified into two categories depending on whether the loop condition is encrypted, namely, the transparent loops and the oblivious loops. For transparent loops, we can directly inspect the control structures and build operator cost models to apply FHE-specific loop segmentation and vectorization in a fine-grained manner. Meanwhile, for oblivious loops, we derive closed-form expressions and static analysis techniques to reduce the number of potential loop paths and conditional branches. In the experiment, we show that CHLOE can compile programs with complex loop structures into efficient executable codes over FHE, where the performance improvement ranges from 1.5× to 54× (up to 105× for programs containing oblivious loops) when compared to programs produced by the-state-of-the-art FHE compilers.

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that allows multiple clients to train models collaboratively without sharing local data. Numerous works have explored security and privacy protection in FL, as well as its integration with blockchain technology. However, existing FL works still face critical issues. i) It is difficult to achieving poisoning robustness and data privacy while ensuring high model accuracy. Malicious clients can launch poisoning attacks that degrade the global model. Besides, aggregators can infer private data from the gradients, causing privacy leakages. Existing privacy-preserving poisoning defense FL solutions suffer from decreased model accuracy and high computational overhead. ii) Blockchain-assisted FL records iterative gradient updates on-chain to prevent model tampering, yet existing schemes are not compatible with practical blockchains and incur high costs for maintaining the gradients on-chain. Besides, incentives are overlooked, where unfair reward distribution hinders the sustainable development of the FL community. In this work, we propose FLock, a robust and privacy-preserving FL scheme based on practical blockchain state channels. First, we propose a lightweight secure Multi-party Computation (MPC)-friendly robust aggregation method through quantization, median, and Hamming distance, which could resist poisoning attacks against up to <50% malicious clients. Besides, we propose communication-efficient Shamir's secret sharing-based MPC protocols to protect data privacy with high model accuracy. Second, we utilize blockchain off-chain state channels to achieve immutable model records and incentive distribution. FLock achieves cost-effective compatibility with practical cryptocurrency platforms, e.g. Ethereum, along with fair incentives, by merging the secure aggregation into a multi-party state channel. In addition, a pipelined Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus is integrated where each aggregator can reconstruct the final aggregated results. Lastly, we implement FLock and the evaluation results demonstrate that FLock enhances robustness and privacy, while maintaining efficiency and high model accuracy. Even with 25 aggregators and 100 clients, FLock can complete one secure aggregation for ResNet in 2 minutes over a WAN. FLock successfully implements secure aggregation with such a large number of aggregators, thereby enhancing the fault tolerance of the aggregation.

Blockchain technology has experienced substantial development and has found extensive applications in the Internet of Things (IoT), which facilitates decentralized communications between devices. Blockchain enables individuals to record transactions, store data, and exchange value within a distributed ledger. However, with the development of blockchain, the performance bottleneck caused by scalability issues has become increasingly prominent. The sharding technique presents an effective solution to the scalability problem of blockchain systems by partitioning a complex blockchain network into multiple smaller node clusters. Each cluster independently maintains a ledger, reducing complexity and enhancing system efficiency. Besides, payment channels allow users to interact off-chain and rely on the security of the main chain for final settlement, accelerating the processing of numerous small transactions. However, existing sharding techniques face challenges with crossshard operations, including high conflict rates and inefficiencies in handling multiple small off-chain transactions. In this work, we propose a tree-based sharding protocol and by designing an ordering mechanism, our protocol could effectively resist front-running attacks. Furthermore, based on the proposed treebased sharding protocol, a cross-shard virtual channel protocol is designed and implemented for high-frequency cross-shard transactions. Finally, we implement a prototype for our protocol in Tendermint, which achieves 6700+ transaction throughput and lower confirmation latency both in intra-shard and cross-shard transactions with 16 shards compared to existing works, and we measure the cost of each phase of the cross-shard virtual channel protocol which takes approximately 250ms to process 300 transactions.

With the approach of the quantum era, public key cryptography (PKC) faces risks, which also presents challenges to blockchain technologies that utilize PKC as a core component. Sharding blockchain is a promising way to realize scalability, yet current research does not consider quantum-resistant sharding blockchains as it is non-trivial to design cross-shard communication and transaction processing method without PKC. Besides, blockchain enables reliability in data transmission and unbreakable communication while current schemes suffer from high overhead and low throughput. In this paper, we propose a quantum-resistant sharding blockchain (QRShar) and a secure data transmission scheme (QRDT) to fill the above gap. Firstly, we design a secure and efficient cross-shard communication pattern utilizing hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) and erasure code to reduce the transmission load and achieve high efficiency. Secondly, we propose the a quantum-resistant sharding blockchain utilizing optimized cross-shard transaction processing method to decrease the consensus execution frequency. Thirdly, we introduce a quantum-resistant key agreement protocol through the verifiable secret sharing on cryptographic hash function and we also offer a data transmission scheme to realize efficient QRDT. Furthermore, we conduct security analysis and performance evaluations for our schemes. The results show that the QRShar throughput can reach up to 34 KTPS and the latency stays below 2 seconds. The key agreement latency is just 43ms.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have achieved remarkable progress in generating realistic images from merely small dimensions, which essentially establishes the latent generating space by rich semantics. GAN inversion thus aims at mapping real-world images back into the latent space, allowing for the access of semantics from images. However, existing GAN inversion methods can only invert images with fixed resolutions; this significantly restricts the representation capability in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose to invert images by patches, thus named as patch inverter, which is the first attempt in terms of block-wise inversion for arbitrary resolutions. More specifically, we develop the padding-free operation to ensure the continuity across patches, and analyse the intrinsic mismatch within the inversion procedure. To relieve the mismatch, we propose a shifted convolution operation, which retains the continuity across image patches and simultaneously enlarges the receptive field for each convolution layer. We further propose the reciprocal loss to regularize the inverted latent codes to reside on the original latent generating space, such that the rich semantics can be maximally preserved. Experimental results have demonstrated that our patch inverter is able to accurately invert images with arbitrary resolutions, whilst representing precise and rich image semantics in real-world scenarios.

Fully Homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables high-level security but with a heavy computation workload, necessitating software-hardware co-design for aggressive acceleration. Recent works on specialized accelerators for HE evaluation have made significant progress in supporting lightweight RNS-CKKS applications, especially those with high-density in-memory computing techniques. To fulfill higher computational demands for more general applications, this article proposes multicluster HE accelerating system (MCHEAS), an accelerating system comprising multiple in-situ HE processing accelerators, each functioning as a cluster to perform large-parameter RNS-CKKS evaluation collaboratively. MCHEAS features optimization strategies including the synchronous, preemptive swap, square-diagonal, and odd-even index separation. Using these strategies to compile the computation and transmission of number theoretic transform (NTT) coefficients, the method optimizes the intercluster data swaps, a major bottleneck in NTT computations. Evaluations show that under 1 GHz, with different intercluster data transfer bandwidths, our approach accelerates NTT computations by 26.40% to 51.75%. MCHEAS also improves computing unit utilization by 10.30% to 33.97%, with a maximum peak utilization rate of up to 99.62%. MCHEAS achieves 17.63% to 34.67% speedups for HE operations involving NTT, and 15.12% to 30.62% speedups for demonstrated applications, while enhancing the computing units’ utilization by 5.18% to 21.87% during application execution. Furthermore, we compare MCHEAS with SOTA designs under a specific intercluster data transfer bandwidth, achieving up to$81.45\times $their area efficiencies in applications.

In the era of digital society, data has emerged as both the cornerstone of computational social systems and the key enabler for social value creation. The development of trustworthy data trading paradigms plays a pivotal role in facilitating data-driven social analysis and collective decision-making processes. Since data can be easily copied, transmitted, and tampered with, data trading has problems such as difficulties in confirming rights, tracing sources, and monitoring. Existing data trading schemes utilize blockchain to trace trading process, decentralized identifier (DID) to achieve autonomous control of user identity, and verifiable credential (VC) to determine data rights. However, existing schemes still have the following problems. First, most of schemes are targeted at small-scale data. Second, the possibility of user identity fraud and abuse still exists. Third, it is difficult to coordinate between VC and data trading. Fourth, existing schemes text colored lack supervision mechanisms. To solve these issues, first, we design a secure data trading (SDT) scheme. The scheme separates data and data rights, which provides a new idea for efficient and reliable trading of larger-scale enterprise data. Second, we design an identity control mechanism. The mechanism effectively improves the credibility of user identity through real-name verification. Third, we design a secure data rights circulation mechanism. The mechanism can quickly determine the rights of trading data and carry out automated verification, which solves the problem of coordination between credential and data trading. Fourth, we design a trading supervision mechanism. The mechanism stores behavioral data on blockchain, which achieves effective rights maintenance of data trading. Finally, based on product carbon footprint scenario, the designed data trading scheme is simulated and verified. The results show that it is secure and feasible to use the data trading scheme proposed for data trading, and it can be used to significantly enhance the quality and reliability of social computing research.

In recent years, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have become essential tools in artificial intelligence research. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offer remarkable flexibility, high performance, and energy efficiency for deploying GANs. However, the open and reprogrammable architecture of FPGAs, despite its advantages, introduces risks of unauthorized access and reverse engineering. To address this challenge, this paper presents a novel approach integrating Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and logos to protect the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of GANs. Our method establishes a closed-loop conversion process where logos are transformed into PUF responses, generating unique identities fed into the GAN to reproduce the original logo. By embedding PUF response information into latent vectors, the generator produces images with embedded logos. Thanks to the uniqueness of PUF, a robust binding of the logo, FPGA, and GANs' IPR is implemented, allowing verification of the IPR with the assistance of a unique FPGA fingerprint, even when a publicly available logo is used. Experimental results show that embedding the logo does not change the performance of the original GANs, and the logo detection rate exceeds 90%. At the same time, the scheme can effectively resist brute force, fine-tuning and pruning attacks.

In Web 3.0’s pursuit of a decentralized and user-autonomous network, traditional access control methods, such as central servers and weak decentralized algorithms, are insufficient regarding security, fault tolerance ability, and scalability. To solve this, we first design a decentralized multi-committee attribute-based encryption, X-ABE, to address the weak decentralization and low fault tolerance in Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Encryption (MA-ABE). X-ABE replaces MA-ABE’s fragile attribute authorities with robust attribute committees, each composed of multiple nodes. By developing dual-wrapped shares techniques, we address the increased dimensionality challenge of secret sharing while maintaining only 1 distributed key generation instance. Also, a formal security definition and proof under the partial adaptive model are given using dual system encryption. Second, X-LOCK, an X-ABE based decentralized access control utilizing consensus plus sharding, is proposed for Web 3.0, to achieve full decentralization, consistency, fault tolerance, user autonomy, and scalability. Third, X-ABE-R is proposed for attribute revocation and is demonstrated in X-LOCK-R with sharding blockchain as an immutable revocation ledger. Fourth, a formal definition and comparative analysis of X-ABE’s fault tolerance abilities are demonstrated, covering aspects of liveness and safety, along with the complexity analysis. Fifth, practical evaluations are conducted, demonstrating that while improving fault tolerance, the overhead remains acceptable.

We propose an encrypted controller framework for linear time-invariant systems with actuator non-linearity based on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). While some existing works explore the use of partially homomorphic encryption (PHE) in implementing linear controller systems, the impacts of the non-linear behaviors of the actuators on the systems are often left unconcerned. In particular, when the inputs to the controller become too small or too large, actuators may burn out due to unstable system state oscillations. To solve this dilemma, we design and implement FHECAP, an FHEbased controller framework that can homomorphically apply non-linear functions to the actuators to rectify the system inputs. In FHECAP, we first design a novel data encoding scheme tailored for efficient gain matrix evaluation. Then, we propose a high-precision homomorphic algorithm to apply non-arithmetic piecewise function to realize the actuator normalization. In the experiments, compared with the existing state-of-the-art encrypted controllers, FHECAP achieves 4×–1000× reduction in computational latency. We evaluate the effectiveness of FHECAP in the real-world application of encrypted control for spacecraft rendezvous. The simulation results show that the FHECAP achieves real-time spacecraft rendezvous with negligible accuracy loss.

Cryptocurrencies and permissionless blockchains allow nodes from all over the world to join, and their rapid development has created enormous blockchain networks with nodes spanning the globe. Blockchain network partitioning attacks split the network into separate node groups through disrupting communication, causing information inconsistency, and facilitating malicious behaviors like double-spending and selfish mining, threatening the blockchain security. Existing research primarily studies concrete partitioning attack methods. However, it is hard to analyze practical post-attack security and efficiency impacts on blockchains and design effective countermeasures. This paper studies practical network partitioning attacks’ impacts on existing proof-of-work-based (Bitcoin) and proof-of-stake-based (Ethereum) permissionless blockchains. We theoretically analyze and experimentally confirm the adverse effects of network partitioning on blockchain performance and security. Network partitioning will cause blockchain throughput to plummet, and cause block generation delay to increase rapidly. In our experiments on Ethereum 2.0, when the bandwidth between the partitioned networks is lower than 768 Kbps, the throughput begins to plummet precipitously until it ultimately falls to 0. What’s worse, network partitioning will significantly increase the success rate of double-spending. In our experiments on Bitcoin, when the bandwidth between the partitioned networks is less than 256 Kbps, the success rate of double-spending reaches 50%. To solve the above issues, we propose countermeasures leveraging a freezing threshold to safeguard the security of permissionless blockchains and resist double-spending attacks. We experimentally validate that the countermeasures enhance the resistance of permissionless blockchains to network partitioning attacks. It reduces the probability of double-spending in partitioned networks, thereby ensuring security and reliability.

The One-Tap Authentication (OTAuth) service enables users to quickly log in or sign up for app accounts using their phone number. OTAuth provides a more secure and convenient alternative to password-based and Short Message Service (SMS)-based authentication schemes. Consequently, the OTAuth service has been adopted by numerous Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) worldwide. However, a high severity vulnerability remains unaddressed in the OTAuth service, which allows an attacker to access a victim’s various app accounts, posing a significant risk to user privacy and data security. In this paper, we present LoadShow, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first security-enhanced OTAuth scheme to address this vulnerability. We propose a novel dynamic application identification technique that aims to address the root cause of this vulnerability, i.e., the inability of MNOs to distinguish between different applications on the same device. Specifically, application identification is based on the hardware load side-channel and captures the unique CPU and GPU load characteristics of applications through the sequence of timing values of fingerprinting functions. We evaluate the effectiveness of LoadShow by accuracy, False Positive Rate (FPR), and True Positive Rate (TPR). We also evaluate its multi-platform compatibility on devices with different architectures and models. LoadShow achieves over 90% accuracy, with a TPR exceeding 90% and an FPR below 1%. The evaluation results demonstrate LoadShow’s capability to effectively differentiate between applications on a device, defend against app impersonation attacks, and reliably identify legitimate applications.

The surge in image sharing on social media platforms escalates private information extraction for commercial use, increasing user demand for privacy protection. However, the dynamics of group communication within online social networks and the image compression imposed by platforms present significant challenges to secure key exchange and reliable image sharing in existing solutions. In this paper, we propose PrivSocial to prevent social media platforms from extracting private information in images shared within group communications. Specifically, we propose two frameworks, a server-based framework and a subscription-based framework, making PrivSocial applicable to different social media platforms and providing users with optional security levels, enhancing the flexibility and efficiency. To achieve intra-group key agreement and ensure image privacy protection, both frameworks integrate optimized continuous group key agreement and a novel image encryption scheme resisting compression. We implement an Android-based Priv-raster application and deploy a prototype on Twitter. Furthermore, we evaluate the proposed encryption scheme, and experimental results show that it has efficient encryption and decryption performance while being resistant to jigsaw puzzle solver attacks. The multi-user simulation experiments also demonstrate that the processing time of a single user is mere milliseconds, and the scheme can efficiently support tens of thousands of groups.

Transformer has been successfully used in practical applications due to its powerful advantages. However, users' input is leaked to the model provider during the service. With people's attention to privacy, privacy-preserving Transformer inference is on the demand of such services. Secure protocols for non-linear functions are crucial in privacy-preserving Transformer inference, which are not well studied. Thus, designing practical secure protocols for non-linear functions is hard but significant to model performance. In this work, we propose a frameworkEastto enable efficient and accurate secure Transformer inference. Firstly, we propose a new oblivious piecewise polynomial evaluation algorithm and apply it to the activation functions, which reduces the runtime and communication of GELU by over 1.5× and 2.5×, compared to prior arts. Secondly, the secure protocols for softmax and layer normalization are carefully designed to faithfully maintain the desired functionality. Thirdly, several optimizations are conducted in detail to enhance the overall efficiency. We appliedEastto BERT and the results show that the inference accuracy remains consistent with the plaintext inference without fine-tuning. Compared to Iron, we achieve about 1.8× lower communication within 1.2× lower runtime.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) based database outsourcing is drawing growing research interests. At its current state, there exist two primary obstacles against FHE-based encrypted databases (EDBs): i) low data precision, and ii) high computational latency. To tackle the precision-performance dilemma, we introduce ArcEDB, a novel FHE-based SQL evaluation infrastructure that simultaneously achieves high data precision and fast query evaluation. Based on a set of new plaintext encoding schemes, we are able to execute arbitrary-precision ciphertext-to-ciphertext homomorphic comparison orders of magnitude faster than existing methods. Meanwhile, we propose efficient conversion algorithms between the encoding schemes to support highly composite SQL statements, including advanced filter-aggregation and multi-column synchronized sorting. We perform comprehensive experiments to study the performance characteristics of ArcEDB. In particular, we show that ArcEDB can be up to 57× faster in homomorphic filtering and up to 20× faster over end-to-end SQL queries when compared to the state-of-the-art FHE-based EDB solutions. Using ArcEDB, a SQL query over a 10K-row time-series EDB with 64-bit timestamps only runs for under one minute.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) heavily rely on number theoretic transform (NTT) to accelerate polynomial multiplication, However, most existing NTT accelerators lack flexibility when the underlying modulus and polynomial lengths change. Current designs often store twiddle factors in on-chip storage, facing a noticeable drawback when frequent parameter changes occur, leading to a potential 50% decrease in computation speed due to the input bandwidth limitations. To address this challenge, we propose ESC-NTT, a fully-pipelined and flexible architecture for handling NTTs with varying parameters. ESC-NTT, a complete custom architecture, continuously performs$N$-point (inverse) NTT, negacyclic NTT (NCN), and inverse NCN (INCN) without introducing bubbles during modulus and NTT length switches. Additionally, we introduce a twiddle factor generator (TFG) module to replace on-chip factor storage and save 68.7% twiddle factors' bandwidth compared to inputting every factor. In the experiment, ESC-NTT is implemented on a Xilinx Alveo U280 FPGA and synthesized in a 28 nm CMOS technology. In the case of frequent modulus switching and same on-chip storage, the calculation speed of ESC-NTT is 1.05× to 241.39× that of existing FHE accelerators when performing 4096-point NTT.

With the advance of deep learning in the BigData era, image/video coding for machines (VCM) as called for proposals by the moving picture experts group (MPEG) now becomes the pivotal technique for extensive intelligent vision tasks. However, existing VCM methods typically focus on compressing features independently at each scale, ignoring the redundancy of features across multiple scales. This paper thus introduces a simple yet effective architecture called hybrid single input and multiple output (H-SIMO) for VCM, which can significantly reduce the redundancy across scales of features. More specifically, as the pyramid structure is commonly employed for localising multi-scale objects, our H-SIMO method proposes to compress all features by inputting a single-scale feature while retaining the ability to decompress all the features. Moreover, an entropy model is seamlessly integrated into the training process to efficiently reduce the statistical redundancy of features. During the testing phase, the hybrid coding method, in conjunction with the versatile video coding (VVC), is employed to compress the features from both images and videos. We comprehensively evaluate the performance of our H-SIMO method in two standard machine vision tasks: object detection and instance segmentation, in which the experimental results verify the superior performances of our H-SIMO method.

In cognitive radio networks, cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) is a key approach to effectively discover spectrum opportunities for secondary users. However, due to the presence of malicious nodes, CSS faces significant challenges in the trust issue of sensing results caused by spectrum sensing data falsification and the privacy leakage of sensing nodes. In this article, we develop a trustworthy and privacy-preserving CSS solution based on blockchain, TaP2-CSS. It achieves the transparency and trustworthiness in exchanging and fusing sensing reports and preserves privacy of sensing nodes. More specifically, a fusion scheme is proposed to realize the high defense capability against the spectrum sensing falsification attack launched by lurking and persistent malicious nodes. Furthermore, to address privacy threats of sensing nodes, we propose a privacy-preserving sensing scheme based on dynamic sensing time for resource-constrained sensing nodes. It effectively limits the location information leaked by sensing reports without the need for complex cryptographic computation and protocol interaction. Comprehensive evaluation and comparison show that the proposed solution achieves high sensing accuracy in the presence of malicious nodes while preserving the privacy of sensing nodes.

Recently, an emerging branch of research in the field of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) attracts growing attention, where optimizations are carried out in developing fast and efficient homomorphic logic circuits. While existing works have pointed out that compound homomorphic gates can be constructed without incurring significant computational overheads, the exact theory and mechanism of homomorphic gate design have not yet been explored. In this work, we propose AutoHoG, an automated procedure for the generation of compound gates over FHE. We show that by formalizing the gate generation procedure, we can adopt a match-and-replace strategy to significantly improve the evaluation speed of logic circuits over FHE. In the experiment, we first show the effectiveness of AutoHoG through a set of benchmark gates. We then apply AutoHoG to optimize common Boolean tasks, including adders, multipliers, the ISCAS’85 benchmark circuits and the ISCAS’89 benchmark circuits. We show that for various circuit benchmarks, we can achieve up to 5.7× reduction in computational latency when compared to the state-of-the-art implementations of logic circuits using conventional gates.

The space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) has a stringent demand on the efficiency of authentication protocols deployed in the devices that have been launched into the air and space. In this paper, we define the concept of the security model of conditional physical unclonable function (CPUF) that guarantees the security of the protocol while allowing the use of PUFs that can be modeled. We then propose a CPUF-based authentication and key agreement (AKA) scheme, named CPAKA, that addresses the challenges of device key leakage and inefficient authentication in resource-asymmetric environments. The CPAKA scheme embeds PUFs in weak nodes and deploys prediction models corresponding to the PUFs in strong nodes, eliminating the need to store challenge-response pairs or perform complex calculations. We formally prove the protocol's security under the decisional uniqueness assumption of CPUF and the universal composability framework, and we analyze its secrecy and authentication properties using the Tamarin prover. We also implement an Arbiter PUF on the ZYNQ-7020 FPGA, verify its accuracy through experiments, and show that CPAKA is secure, efficient, and suitable for SAGIN. Our CPAKA scheme greatly reduces computing and storage costs while improving authentication efficiency compared to traditional schemes.

The cloud-edge-end architecture is suitable for many essential scenarios, such as 5 G, the Internet of Things (IoT), and mobile edge computing. Under this architecture, cross-domain and cross-layer data sharing is commonly in need. Considering cross-domain data sharing under the zero-trust model, where each entity does not trust the others, existing solutions have certain problems regarding security, fairness, scalability, and efficiency. Aiming at solving these issues, we conduct the following research. First, a new plaintext checkable encryption scheme is constructed, which can be used on lightweight IoT devices to verify the ciphertext validity sent by a data owner. Second, we propose a new multi-domain cloud-edge-end architecture based on sharding blockchains and design a cross-domain data sharing scheme under the partial trust model to achieve security, scalability, and high performance. Third, a cross-domain data sharing scheme under the zero trust model is further designed, which can ensure the fairness of both parties in data sharing. Fourth, we give a formal security definition and analysis of cross-domain data sharing. Fifth, we conduct a detailed theoretical analysis of the protocol and give an in-depth functional test and performance test, including the throughput and latency of data sharing policy registration and execution.

As concerns are increasingly raised about data privacy, encrypted database management system (DBMS) based on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) attracts increasing research attention, as FHE permits DBMS to be directly outsourced to cloud servers without revealing any plaintext data. However, the real-world deployment of FHE-based DBMS faces two main challenges: i) high computational latency, and ii) lack of elastic query processing capability, both of which stem from the inherent limitations of the underlying FHE operators. Here, we introduce HE3DB, a fully homomorphically encrypted, efficient and elastic DBMS framework based on a new FHE infrastructure. By proposing and integrating new arithmetic and logic homomorphic operators, we devise fast and high-precision homomorphic comparison and aggregation algorithms that enable a variety of SQL queries to be applied over FHE ciphertexts, e.g., compound filter-aggregation, sorting, grouping, and joining. In addition, in contrast to existing encrypted DBMS that only support aggregated information retrieval, our framework permits further server-side elastic analytical processing over the queried FHE ciphertexts, such as private decision tree evaluation. In the experiment, we rigorously study the efficiency and flexibility of HE3DB. We show that, compared to the state-of-the-art techniques, HE3DB can homomorphically evaluate end-to-end SQL queries as much as 41X-299X faster than the state-of-the-art solution, completing a TPC-H query over a 16-bit 10K-row database within 241 seconds.

The device fingerprinting technique extracts fingerprints based on the hardware characteristics of the device to identify the device. The primary goal of device fingerprinting is to accurately and uniquely identify a device, which requires the generated device fingerprints to have good stability to achieve long-term tracking of the target device. However, the fingerprints generated by some existing fingerprinting technologies are not stable enough or change frequently, making it impossible to track the target device for a long time. In this paper, we present FPHammer, a novel DRAM-based fingerprinting technique. The device fingerprint generated by our technique has high stability and can be used to track the device for a long time. We leverage the Rowhammer technique to repeatedly and quickly access a row in DRAM to get bit flips in its adjacent row. We then construct a physical fingerprint of the device based on the locations of the collected bit flips. The evaluation results of the uniqueness and reliability of the physical fingerprint show that it can be used to distinguish devices with the same hardware and software configuration. The experimental results on device identification demonstrate that the physical fingerprints engendered by our innovative technique are inherently linked to the entirety of the device rather than just the DRAM module. Even if the device modifies software-level parameters such as MAC address and IP address or even reinstalls the operating system, we can accurately identify the target device. This demonstrates that FPHammer can generate stable fingerprints that are not affected by software layer parameters.

With the continuous advancement of edge intelligence, edge servers undertake more and more intelligent computing tasks. Nowadays, there are a large number of IoT devices in the network in idle state. For instance, the mining process for consensus of miners in blockchain such as Bitcoin causes a waste of computing resources and energy. A natural question arises: can we couple the idle computing resources of network devices to continuously and credibly share the burden of edge intelligent computing tasks in a secure manner? The answer of this paper is yes. We propose a blockchain-based IoT resource monitoring and scheduling framework that supports resource management and trusted edge computing. We analyze the security threats in all phases of distributed edge computing, and utilize the trusted computing and public verifiability features of blockchain to ensure reliability and fairness in the trusted measurement of device computing power, the decomposition of intelligent computing tasks, the matching of task and computing power, and the verification of computing result. Finally, we implement a simulation on the edge network by performing distributed machine learning task for weather prediction, and the simulation results demonstrate the availability of our scheme.

Cross-silo federated learning (FL) is promising in facilitating data collaboration across various organizations, which greatly alleviates the information silo problem in industries and promotes the data intelligence of Internet of Things. With the advances of decentralized FL, the higher requirements of trust and privacy are put forward. Traditional FL heavily relies on a central coordinating server, which suffers from single points of failure and lacks trust in the correctness of aggregation results. What is more, the intrinsic privacy issues of FL have aroused public attention, such as gradient inversion attack in local gradients. However, the privacy of quantized gradients remains serious and lacks attention, especially the most extremely 1-bit quantization in sign-based FL. In this article, we demonstrate the potential privacy risk in sign-based FL by presenting a new gradient inversion attack, which successfully restores the original data from sign-based quantized gradients. And then we tackle the above two challenges via constructing a self-aggregation privacy-preserving FL atop blockchain, which takes advantage of a variant of ElGamal encryption to protect the privacy of local sign-based quantized gradients, and leverages the smart contract to achieve secure self-aggregation for participants without involving a centralized server. Moreover, we analyze that the proposed protocol achieves privacy and public verifiability. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol with a real deep learning model, and the results show that our protocol is resilient against gradient inversion attack in a decentralized environment without sacrificing learning accuracy.

Multiple image hiding aims to hide multiple secret images into a single cover image, and then recover all secret images perfectly. Such high-capacity hiding may easily lead to contour shadows or color distortion, which makes multiple image hiding a very challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel multiple image hiding framework based on invertible neural network, namely DeepMIH. Specifically, we develop an invertible hiding neural network (IHNN) to innovatively model the image concealing and revealing as its forward and backward processes, making them fully coupled and reversible. The IHNN is highly flexible, which can be cascaded as many times as required to achieve the hiding of multiple images. To enhance the invisibility, we design an importance map (IM) module to guide the current image hiding based on the previous image hiding results. In addition, we find that the image hidden in the high-frequency sub-bands tends to achieve better hiding performance, and thus propose a low-frequency wavelet loss to constrain that no secret information is hidden in the low-frequency sub-bands. Experimental results show that our DeepMIH significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, in terms of hiding invisibility, security and recovery accuracy on a variety of datasets.

Recently, fake face images generated by generative adversarial network (GAN) have been widely spread in social networks, raising serious social concerns and security risks. To identify the fake images, the top priority is to find what properties make the fake images different from the real images. In this letter, we reveal an important observation about real/fake images, i.e., the GAN generated fake images contain stronger non-local self-similarity than the real images. Motivated by this observation, we propose a simple yet effective non-local attention based fake image detection network, namely NAFID, to distinguish GAN generated fake images from real images. Specifically, we develop a non-local feature extraction (NFE) module to extract the non-local features of the real/fake images, followed by a multi-stage classification module to distinguish the images with the extracted non-local features. Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of our NAFID over state-of-the-art (SOTA) face forgery detection methods. More importantly, since the NFE module is independent from classification, we can plug it into any other forgery detection models. The results show that the NFE module can consistently improve the detection accuracy of other models, which verifies the universality of the proposed method.

Cloud computing has become an increasingly popular option for users to store and share data. Encryption prior to outsourcing data to the cloud is the best way to protect data security and privacy; however, it hinders sharing of the data that was encrypted. In addition, users in many real-world organizations (e.g., enterprises) have multiple level structures and a higher-level user should have the privilege to decide which data can be shared with a lower-level user. Most solutions in the literature suffer from inefficiency or inflexibility in tackling this problem. In this article, we propose a fine-grained hierarchical data sharing (FHDS) scheme in clouds. With FHDS, the data owner can encrypt data with his public key, and then selectively share encrypted data with users in a hierarchy; if necessary, the users can disseminate the owner's data to their subordinates in the lower levels by generating access keys. In particular, the higher-level users could puncture the keys with some tags such that the part of the owner's data which is labeled by the punctured tags will not be accessible to the lower-level users. The proposed scheme is provable secure under our security model and performance analyses show the efficiency of the scheme.

Sharding technology is crucial to achieve decentralization, scalability, and security simultaneously. However, existing sharding blockchain schemes suffer from high cross-shard transaction processing latency, low parallelism, incomplete cross-shard views of shard members, centralized reconfiguration, high overhead of randomness generation, and lack of formalized protocol design and security proofs. This paper proposes a flexible sharding (FS) blockchain protocol. First, a cross-shard Byzantine fault tolerance (CSBFT) protocol is designed to cut down confirmation delays when processing cross-shard transactions. Second, we utilize multiple parallel CSBFT where each node acts not only as a leader but also as multiple ordinary members to break through the performance bottleneck caused by a leader’s bandwidth and computing power, improving the system parallelism. Third, a cross-shard transaction censorship attack is proposed, and a cross-shard view-change mechanism is designed to defend against it. Fourth, a secure and truly decentralized shard reconfiguration method combining proof-of-work, proof-of-possession, and intra-shard BFT is designed. Fifth, we utilize a formal protocol design method and give strict security proof for each protocol. Finally, we evaluate FS from both theoretical and practical perspectives. FS is proven to have lower communication and computation complexity and achieve considerable performance.

The emergence of electric vehicles promotes the development of Internet of Vehicle (IoV). However, there are a series of security problems to be solved in the IoV. Firstly, how to allow vehicle users to find the nearest non-queuing charging pile without detours is a challenge. Secondly, applications in the IoV are delay-sensitive, while high communication delays caused by security mechanisms would bring serious consequences to vehicles. Thirdly, the verifiability and fairness between charging and payment are difficult to be guaranteed. Aiming at the efficiency and security problems of the charging service in the IoV, this paper proposes a blockchain-based intelligent and fair IoV charging service system. According to the multi-factor constraints between vehicles and charging piles, a multi-factor IoV branch and bound algorithm is proposed to intelligently recommend charging piles for vehicles and maximize the overall energy saving. We propose the cross-area consensus protocol to achieve low latency in vehicle communication. In addition, we ensure the fairness between charging and payment through a payment channel protocol based on verifiable encrypted signatures. Finally, we implement the proposed scheme, and we put the project prototype on an open source platform is available at:https://github.com/chenruonan/blockchain-based-intelligent-and-fair-IoV-charging-service-protocol. The experimental results demonstrate the low latency and energy-saving advantages of our proposal. When the payment is executed 250 times, the delay of our proposal is only 1.54% of the normal on-chain payment time.

When viewing omnidirectional images (ODIs), viewers can access different viewports via head movement (HM), which sequentially forms head trajectories in spatial-temporal domain. Thus, head trajectories play a key role in modeling human attention on ODIs. In this paper, we establish a large-scale dataset collecting 21,600 head trajectories on 1,080 ODIs. By mining our dataset, we find two important factors influencing head trajectories, i.e., temporal dependency and subject-specific variance. Accordingly, we propose a novel approach integrating hierarchical Bayesian inference into long short-term memory (LSTM) network for head trajectory prediction on ODIs, which is called HiBayes-LSTM. In HiBayes-LSTM, we develop a mechanism of Future Intention Estimation (FIE), which captures the temporal correlations from previous, current and estimated future information, for predicting viewport transition. Additionally, a training scheme called Hierarchical Bayesian inference (HBI) is developed for modeling inter-subject uncertainty in HiBayes-LSTM. For HBI, we introduce a joint Gaussian distribution in a hierarchy, to approximate the posterior distribution over network weights. By sampling subject-specific weights from the approximated posterior distribution, our HiBayes-LSTM approach can yield diverse viewport transition among different subjects and obtain multiple head trajectories. Extensive experiments validate that our HiBayes-LSTM approach significantly outperforms 9 state-of-the-art approaches for trajectory prediction on ODIs, and then it is successfully applied to predict saliency on ODIs.

It is becoming fashionable for people to access data outsourced to clouds with mobile devices. To protect data security and privacy, attribute-based encryption (ABE) has been widely used in cloud storage systems. However, one of the main efficiency drawbacks of ABE is the high computation overheads at mobile devices during user revocation and file access. To address this issue, we propose a revocable attribute-based data storage (RADS) scheme equipped with several attracting features. First, our RADS scheme achieves a fine-grained access control mechanism, by which file owners do not need to explicitly specify authorized visitors to their outsourced files. Second, our RADS scheme allows mobile users to authorize the cloud service provider (CSP) to share costly computations in file access, without exposing the file content. Third, our RADS scheme offloads the operations of access-credential update and file re-encryption during revocation process to CSP, leaving all non-revoked users undisturbed. The revocation of RADS achieves a strong data protection, i.e., revoked users can access neither newly uploaded files nor old ones. The security and efficiency of the RADS scheme are validated via both analysis and experimental results.

Image hiding aims to hide a secret image into a cover image in an imperceptible way, and then recover the secret image perfectly at the receiver end. Capacity, invisibility and security are three primary challenges in image hiding task. This paper proposes a novel invertible neural network (INN) based framework, HiNet, to simultaneously overcome the three challenges in image hiding. For large capacity, we propose an inverse learning mechanism by simultaneously learning the image concealing and revealing processes. Our method is able to achieve the concealing of a full-size secret image into a cover image with the same size. For high invisibility, instead of pixel domain hiding, we propose to hide the secret information in wavelet domain. Furthermore, we propose a new low-frequency wavelet loss to constrain that secret information is hidden in high-frequency wavelet subbands, which significantly improves the hiding security. Experimental results show that our HiNet significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art image hiding methods, with more than 10 dB PSNR improvement in secret image recovery on ImageNet, COCO and DIV2K datasets. Codes are available at https://github.com/TomTomTommi/HiNet.

The use of convolutional neural networks which achieved success in many area nowadays is hardly applicable in embedded devices directly because of the high computation and storage cost. Many previous methods have been proposed to reduce the FLOPs and parameters of network. However, many methods aren't effective enough and suffer the loss of accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel pruning method according to filter rank. Comparative experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness. Results show that it can achieve 93.55% accuracy with VGG-16 on CIFAR-10 pruning 49.48% FLOPs and 81.17% parameters. Besides, we reduce 50.02% FLOPs and 42.35% parameters of ResNet-56 on CIFAR-10 achieving 92.56% accuracy.

This paper presents an initial effort for the trusted geolocation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices based on the booming low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites. As the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) reception cannot always be guaranteed at LEO satellites, the recently developed direct position determination (DPD) approach is adopted. For such passive localization systems, the efficient DPD execution is challenging due to the vast coverage area of LEO satellites. In order to reduce the computational complexity, we propose a method to narrow the search area using the time difference of arrival (TDOA) measurements and error variances. In this way, the size of the searching area is determined by both geometrical constraints and qualities of received signals, and signals with a higher SNR are more effective in positioning as their search areas are usually smaller. The superior accuracy performance of the proposed method is also verified through the comparison with conventional two-step methods. Mento Carlo simulations show that the proposed approach provides a robust and trusted localization service, and the positioning error is less than 10 kilometers when the SNR is lower than −15dB.

The past few years have witnessed great success in applying deep learning to enhance the quality of compressed image/video. The existing approaches mainly focus on enhancing the quality of a single frame, not considering the similarity between consecutive frames. Since heavy fluctuation exists across compressed video frames as investigated in this paper, frame similarity can be utilized for quality enhancement of low-quality frames given their neighboring high-quality frames. This task is Multi-Frame Quality Enhancement (MFQE). Accordingly, this paper proposes an MFQE approach for compressed video, as the first attempt in this direction. In our approach, we first develop a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) based detector to locate Peak Quality Frames (PQFs) in compressed video. Then, a novel Multi-Frame Convolutional Neural Network (MF-CNN) is designed to enhance the quality of compressed video, in which the non-PQF and its nearest two PQFs are the input. In MF-CNN, motion between the non-PQF and PQFs is compensated by a motion compensation subnet. Subsequently, a quality enhancement subnet fuses the non-PQF and compensated PQFs, and then reduces the compression artifacts of the non-PQF. Also, PQF quality is enhanced in the same way. Finally, experiments validate the effectiveness and generalization ability of our MFQE approach in advancing the state-of-the-art quality enhancement of compressed video.

Summary As the value of data has received considerable attention, data trading shows broad market prospects. The existing data trading methods, including private trades and centralized trades, have high risks regarding transaction security and data protection. To solve this problem, we propose a decentralized trading solution for open fair data trading by deploying the smart contract on the blockchain network. The data for sale are encrypted and stored on the distributed storage platform but not directly on the blockchain network. Because the trading content is the decryption key of the data, the proposed new method can alleviate the storage pressure of the blockchain by reducing the transaction cost. We conduct a security analysis which shows that our scheme achieves secure, practical, open, and fair trading. We implement our trading contract with solidity and test it on the Ethereum's test network, and extensive experiments demonstrate desirable feasibility of our proposal.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is to process, analyse, store and calculate the network data at the edge of the network. When the ground infrastructure is damaged in an emergency, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formation can be rapidly deployed to undertake the task of MEC. However, there are some potential problems to be considered in UAV‐enabled MEC, such as the trust among UAVs from different sources and the stability of UAV formation network. In view of the problems existing, this study proposes a blockchain‐based architecture to build a system of mutual trust, fairness, openness, and stability in this scenario. Through the implementation of blockchain technology, key data such as device computing capacity, task allocation, and task execution process are recorded openly, transparently, and irrevocably. As multi‐party trust is built to reduce the occurrence of fraud, system participants can get a reasonable reward. On this basis, the smart contract is used to ensure that algorithms are accessible to the public, and the sub‐blockchain technology improves the stability of the system. In the case study, the simulation results show that the resource consumption and time cost of the proposed scheme is reasonable and feasible.

With the rapid development of cloud computing, an increasing number of individuals and organizations are sharing data in the public cloud. To protect the privacy of data stored in the cloud, a data owner usually encrypts his data in such a way that certain designated data users can decrypt the data. This raises a serious problem when the encrypted data needs to be shared to more people beyond those initially designated by the data owner. To address this problem, we introduce and formalize an identity-based encryption transformation (IBET) model by seamlessly integrating two well-established encryption mechanisms, namely identity-based encryption (IBE) and identity-based broadcast encryption (IBBE). In IBET, data users are identified and authorized for data access based on their recognizable identities, which avoids complicated certificate management in usual secure distributed systems. More importantly, IBET provides a transformation mechanism that converts an IBE ciphertext into an IBBE ciphertext so that a new group of users not specified during the IBE encryption can access the underlying data. We design a concrete IBET scheme based on bilinear groups and prove its security against powerful attacks. Thorough theoretical and experimental analyses demonstrate the high efficiency and practicability of the proposed scheme.

In contrast with traditional videos, omnidirectional videos enable spherical viewing direction with support for head-mounted displays, providing an interactive and immersive experience. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, there are only a few visual quality assessment (VQA) methods, either subjective or objective, for omnidirectional video coding. This paper proposes both subjective and objective methods for assessing the quality loss in encoding an omnidirectional video. Specifically, we first present a new database, which includes the viewing direction data from several subjects watching omnidirectional video sequences. Then, from our database, we find a high consistency in viewing directions across different subjects. The viewing directions are normally distributed in the center of the front regions, but they sometimes fall into other regions, related to the video content. Given this finding, we present a subjective VQA method for measuring the difference mean opinion score (DMOS) of the whole and regional omnidirectional video, in terms of overall DMOS and vectorized DMOS, respectively. Moreover, we propose two objective VQA methods for the encoded omnidirectional video, in light of the human perception characteristics of the omnidirectional video. One method weighs the distortion of pixels with regard to their distances to the center of front regions, which considers human preference in a panorama. The other method predicts viewing directions according to the video content, and then the predicted viewing directions are leveraged to allocate weights to the distortion of each pixel in our objective VQA method. Finally, our experimental results verify that both the subjective and objective methods proposed in this paper advance the state-of-the-art VQA for omnidirectional videos.

The latest High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard has been increasingly applied to generate video streams over the Internet. However, HEVC compressed videos may incur severe quality degradation, particularly at low bit rates. Thus, it is necessary to enhance the visual quality of HEVC videos at the decoder side. To this end, this paper proposes a quality enhancement convolutional neural network (QE-CNN) method that does not require any modification of the encoder to achieve quality enhancement for HEVC. In particular, our QE-CNN method learns QE-CNN-I and QE-CNN-P models to reduce the distortion of HEVC I and P/B frames, respectively. The proposed method differs from the existing CNN-based quality enhancement approaches, which only handle intra-coding distortion and are thus not suitable for P/B frames. Our experimental results validate that our QE-CNN method is effective in enhancing quality for both I and P/B frames of HEVC videos. To apply our QE-CNN method in time-constrained scenarios, we further propose a time-constrained quality enhancement optimization (TQEO) scheme. Our TQEO scheme controls the computational time of QE-CNN to meet a target, meanwhile maximizing the quality enhancement. Next, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our TQEO scheme from the aspects of time control accuracy and quality enhancement under different time constraints. Finally, we design a prototype to implement our TQEO scheme in a real-time scenario.

An extensive study on the in-loop filter has been proposed for a high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard to reduce compression artifacts, thus improving coding efficiency. However, in the existing approaches, the in-loop filter is always applied to each single frame, without exploiting the content correlation among multiple frames. In this paper, we propose a multi-frame in-loop filter (MIF) for HEVC, which enhances the visual quality of each encoded frame by leveraging its adjacent frames. Specifically, we first construct a large-scale database containing encoded frames and their corresponding raw frames of a variety of content, which can be used to learn the in-loop filter in HEVC. Furthermore, we find that there usually exist a number of reference frames of higher quality and of similar content for an encoded frame. Accordingly, a reference frame selector (RFS) is designed to identify these frames. Then, a deep neural network for MIF (known as MIF-Net) is developed to enhance the quality of each encoded frame by utilizing the spatial information of this frame and the temporal information of its neighboring higher-quality frames. The MIF-Net is built on the recently developed DenseNet, benefiting from its improved generalization capacity and computational efficiency. In addition, a novel block-adaptive convolutional layer is designed and applied in the MIF-Net, for handling the artifacts influenced by coding tree unit (CTU) structure in HEVC. Extensive experiments show that our MIF approach achieves on average 11.621% saving of the Bjøntegaard delta bit-rate (BD-BR) on the standard test set, significantly outperforming the standard in-loop filter in HEVC and other state-of-the-art approaches.

With the development of video coding technology, high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) has become a promising alternative, compared with the previous coding standards, for example, H.264. In general, H.264 to HEVC transcoding can be accomplished by fully H.264 decoding and fully HEVC encoding, which suffers from considerable time consumption on the brute-force search of the HEVC coding tree unit (CTU) partition for rate-distortion optimization (RDO). In this paper, we propose a deep learning method to predict the HEVC CTU partition, instead of the brute-force RDO search, for H.264 to HEVC transcoding. First, we build a large-scale H.264 to HEVC transcoding database. Second, we investigate the correlation between the HEVC CTU partition and H.264 features, and analyze both temporal and spatial-temporal similarities of the CTU partition across video frames. Third, we propose a deep learning architecture of a hierarchical long short-term memory (H-LSTM) network to predict the CTU partition of HEVC. Then, the brute-force RDO search of the CTU partition is replaced by the H-LSTM prediction such that the computational time can be significantly reduced for fast H.264 to HEVC transcoding. Finally, the experimental results verify that the proposed H-LSTM method can achieve a better tradeoff between coding efficiency and complexity, compared to the state-of-the-art H.264 to HEVC transcoding methods.

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) significantly reduces bit-rates over the preceding H.264 standard but at the expense of extremely high encoding complexity. In HEVC, the quad-tree partition of coding unit (CU) consumes a large proportion of the HEVC encoding complexity, due to the brute-force search for rate-distortion optimization (RDO). Therefore, this paper proposes a deep learning approach to predict the CU partition for reducing the HEVC complexity at both intra-and inter-modes, which is based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and long-and short-term memory (LSTM) network. First, we establish a large-scale database including substantial CU partition data for HEVC intra-and inter-modes. This enables deep learning on the CU partition. Second, we represent the CU partition of an entire coding tree unit (CTU) in the form of a hierarchical CU partition map (HCPM). Then, we propose an early-terminated hierarchical CNN (ETH-CNN) for learning to predict the HCPM. Consequently, the encoding complexity of intra-mode HEVC can be drastically reduced by replacing the brute-force search with ETH-CNN to decide the CU partition. Third, an early-terminated hierarchical LSTM (ETH-LSTM) is proposed to learn the temporal correlation of the CU partition. Then, we combine ETH-LSTM and ETH-CNN to predict the CU partition for reducing the HEVC complexity at inter-mode. Finally, experimental results show that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches in reducing the HEVC complexity at both intra-and inter-modes.