Performing effective supervision in blockchain networks while preserving public anonymity has long been a challenging issue. Existing solutions often depend on third-party institutions or dual-chain architectures to monitor and recover user identities, but these approaches pose significant risks, such as identity disclosure and increased inter-chain communication costs. To address these concerns, this paper proposes a novel supervised scheme based on Threshold Secret-Sharing (TSS) and Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) on anonymous accounts on the blockchain called TSS-ZKP, while integrating regulatory authority (RA) and multiple traceability centers (TC). Compared to traditional single RA, TSS-ZKP decentralizes the regulatory authority and storage across multiple TCs, significantly reducing the risk of user identity leakage by a single RA. By TSS-ZKP, user identities are recovered through the collaborative generation of sub-secrets by the RA and TCs, without storing actual identity information. By leveraging elliptic curves and using hash functions as secret labels, TSS-ZKP achieves lightweight operations, allowing TCs to efficiently locate sub-secrets without extensive traversal. The comprehensive analysis of security and privacy demonstrated that TSS-ZKP effectively safeguards user privacy while enabling feasible supervision. In addition, comparison experimental results show that the time consumption of the TSS-ZKP is about 30% of that of the comparison scheme. Meanwhile, the simulation results highlight the practicality of the scheme, showing that TSS-ZKP significantly reduces the delays in the identity recovery process while maintaining high usability. In general, TSS-ZKP provides a safer and more feasible solution for enabling the supervision of blockchain accounts.

In the era where Web3.0 values data security and privacy, adopting groundbreaking methods to enhance privacy in recommender systems is crucial. Recommender systems need to balance privacy and accuracy, while also having the ability to overcome cold start problems. The Differential Trust Mechanism (DTM) introduced in this paper is such an approach. The DTM provides a unique use of Gaussian distributions in modeling trust relationships within data, offering a novel way to balance recommendation accuracy with user privacy. This mechanism innovatively applies differential privacy principles, using Gaussian noise addition to protect individual user data from inference attacks, while maintaining the integrity and utility of the overall dataset. Unlike traditional anonymization techniques that often compromise data utility or vulnerability to reverse engineering, DTM provides a robust solution by dynamically adjusting privacy levels based on the trustworthiness of data requests. By combining DTM with existing mainstream recommendation algorithms, the prediction accuracy of MAE and RMSE increases by at least 6.60% and 2.69%, respectively. This dual benefit positions DTM as a significant advancement in secure data processing, especially relevant for online businesses and platforms where personalized recommendations are crucial yet privacy concerns are paramount.

In a smart grid, the identity authentication between a smart meter and an aggregator is a prerequisite for both parties to establish a secure channel. All existing authentication schemes have their own shortcomings in either security or efficiency to make them difficult to meet the security requirements of the smart grid. In this paper, we are motivated to propose an efficient and secure mutual authentication scheme based on the extended Chebyshev chaotic maps. The smart meters and aggregators are registered with a trusted third party to conduct a mutual authentication. The proposed scheme provides anonymity protection for smart meters to achieve perfect forward secrecy. Through security analysis, we conclude that the proposed scheme has the characteristics of high security. In addition, we compare the proposed scheme with other three schemes in terms of number of encryption operations, computation delay. The performance comparison demonstrates that the proposed scheme is efficient without sacrificing the desired security properties.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) in cyber-physical systems (CPSs) with massive resource-constrained edge computing node (ECN) faces new challenges in security provisioning. The traditional centralized security authentication schemes with low performance are no longer applied for MEC in CPS. Due to the mobility of ECN, it is extraordinarily practical for ECN to establish a security association with another AP once leaving the service area of its current AP. In this paper, we represent the related research and propose a novel and efficient software-defined networking (SDN)-based handover authentication scheme for MEC in CPS (SHAS). An authentication handover module (AHM) in the SDN controller is applied for key distribution and authentication management. Before ECN handovers, the AHM distributes a key to the current serving AP for ECN further handover. Whenever a handover happens, target AP requests the AHM for the one-time session key (OSK) to authenticate the ECN. The target AP and ECN can proceed with the 3-way handshake protocol by the OSK to achieve mutual authentication and secret key confidentiality. Using the logical derivation of Burrows, Abadi, and Needham and formal verification by automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications (AVISPAs), proposed SHAS scheme can get mutual authentication and secret key confidentiality with a strong anti-attack ability. The simulation results show that the SHAS scheme has the characteristics of lower computational delay and less communication resources. Finally, the practical demonstration of our scheme is done using the widely accepted NS-3 simulation.

A whole extensible authentication protocol (EAP)-based authentication scheme is time-consuming due to the operations of public key cryptography and validation of certificates which is unacceptable for the wireless regional area networks (WRANs) handover. In this paper, an EAP-based pre-authentication scheme for WRANs handover (EPH) over TV white space is proposed. By applying the proposed pre-authentication scheme, the customer premises equipment and the target secondary user base station can accomplish a seamless handover using a symmetric key. Approved by the logic derivation by Burrows, Abadi, and Needham (BAN) logic, we conclude that the proposed EPH scheme can obtain mutual authentication and hold key secrecy. Additionally, the performance of the EPH scheme has been investigated by simulation experiments with the results showing that the EPH scheme is much more efficient in terms of lower computation delay required than the security scheme regulated in IEEE 802.22 standard.

Cognitive radio technique has been recognized as an effective solution to the dilemma introduced by the rapid growth of wireless communications and the scarcity of spectrum resources. One example of the cognitive radio systems is the wireless regional area network operating in television white space TVWS spectrum, which has been specified by IEEE 802.22 standard. The wireless regional area networks in TVWS face not only the traditional security threats but also cognitive security challenges. Especially, the authentication between the base station and the customer premises equipment is vital for secure communication. We discovered that the authentication protocol specified in IEEE 802.22 is vulnerable to the interleaving attacks and cannot achieve mutual key confirmation. In this paper, an Enhanced Certificate-based Authentication scheme ECA has been proposed to overcome the vulnerability of the authentication scheme in IEEE 802.22 standard with much less requirements on the computation and communication resources. The drawbacks of the authentication protocol in IEEE 802.22 standard has been explored followed by the presentation of the proposed enhanced authentication protocol, ECA. The ECA protocol has been evaluated in terms of security functionality and the performance. The correctness of the Enhanced Certificate-based Authentication scheme is analyzed by the Burrows, Abadi, and Needham logic. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.