With the rapid development of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), achieving trustworthy vehicle position verification while preserving location privacy has become a key requirement in intelligent traffic supervision scenarios such as defense control zones and urban restricted-access areas. Existing privacy-preserving schemes have difficulty simultaneously supporting accurate determination of complex-shaped prohibited areas and efficient computation, and still face malicious attacks such as interference with verification procedures, tampering with communication processes, and privacy inference when determining the positional relationship between vehicles and prohibited areas. To address these issues, this paper proposes an efficient privacy-preserving position verification (PPPV) scheme based on secure multi-party computation (MPC). The scheme supports arbitrary polygonal prohibited areas, including convex, concave, and self-intersecting polygons, thereby improving its applicability in complex IoV supervision scenarios. Based on an improved cross-product determination method, this paper constructs an efficient PPPV protocol under the semi-honest model, achieving near-plaintext computational efficiency while protecting the privacy of both vehicle locations and area boundaries. To resist malicious attacks, this paper further combines Paillier homomorphic encryption, the cut-and-choose method, and zero-knowledge proof to construct a secure PPPV protocol under the malicious model, which can effectively prevent protocol deviations, result tampering, and inference attacks. This paper also conducts formal security proof based on the real/ideal model paradigm, and evaluates the performance of the scheme through benchmark experiments and attack experiments. Experimental results show that the scheme achieves a good balance among efficiency, applicability, and security, providing a deployable trustworthy position verification mechanism for next-generation IoV intelligent supervision applications.

Internet of Things (IoT) systems face escalating security threats as the number of connected devices surpassed 18.5 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach 39 billion by 2030. The dynamic and heterogeneous characteristics of IoT networks create vulnerabilities to sophisticated attacks. Existing trust management approaches struggle with these threats due to static graph construction, feature redundancy between direct and indirect trust, and inflexible fusion strategies. This paper proposes a Dual-Trust graph attention network-based malicious device detection method for IoT environments, named DTEM. The proposed scheme constructs dynamic temporal graphs based on real interaction history. Then it designs a completely decoupled dual-trust learning architecture. Finally it introduces a hybrid fusion mechanism. Overall, the improvements significantly enhance the detection accuracy of malicious devices in complex environments and adaptability to heterogeneous scenarios. Experimental results on the UNSW-NB15 dataset demonstrate that DTEM achieves an average F1-Score of 0.973 and ROC-AUC of 0.994 across three threat scenarios, outperforming traditional methods.

Mobile cloud computing has become widely adopted for its convenience in data storage and sharing, but it also introduces challenges related to data privacy and security. To address these issues, public key authenticated encryption with keyword search (PAEKS) has emerged as a potential solution that ensures data privacy while resisting internal keyword guessing attacks (IKGAs). Unfortunately, most existing PAEKS schemes have limited adaptability to multi-user scenarios. Specifically, in PAEKS, ciphertext generation requires the participation of users' secret keys, which results in ciphertexts being unique, even when the same keywords are encrypted by different users. Con sequently, the number of trapdoors used to match the ciphertexts grows linearly with the amount of senders. Designing an efficient PAEKS scheme for multiple users remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose CT-PAEKS, a lattice-based PAEKS scheme with constant trapdoor for data privacy-preserving in mobile cloud computing. CT-PAEKS introduces an additional administrator, enabling the receiver to generate a unified search trapdoor for ciphertexts from multiple senders. Additionally, it allows multiple senders to generate a single ciphertext for the same keyword encryption, thus avoiding ciphertext duplication. Furthermore, CT-PAEKS supports fast search during ciphertext matching, allowing all corresponding ciphertexts to be identified with a single match. We also formalize and prove the security of CT-PAEKS in the random oracle model. Comprehensive perfor mance evaluations indicate that our scheme outperforms prior arts, achieving the 1.7×-2.7× and 2.0×-4.4× reduction in terms of computational and communication overhead, respectively.

With the growing demand for secure medical data sharing and accurate insurance premium assessment, privacy, trust, and interoperability have become pressing challenges in healthcare digitalization. Existing solutions often suffer from centralized control, inflexible access policies, and weak privacy guarantees. To address these, we propose a blockchain-based, privacy-preserving scheme that integrates threshold proxy re-encryption and zero-knowledge proofs. Patients’ encrypted medical records are stored in private cloud environments, while access control is enforced through a threshold proxy re-encryption mechanism. Dynamic rekeying and delegation are supported through re-encryption key redistribution. For insurance verification, we generate zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs) based on arithmetic circuits that represent the insurance policy requirements. These proofs are verified on-chain without revealing any underlying medical information. Security and performance analyses demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed system. Experimental results show that our scheme supports sub-100 ms re-encryption cycles, reduces zero-knowledge proof generation time by over 90% compared to other zk-SNARK schemes, and imposes low on-chain computational overhead. These findings demonstrate the feasibility and potential suitability for real-world privacy-preserving medical data sharing and insurance evaluation.

In computer vision, the intersection determination of polygonal areas is utilized to segment different regions in an image and assist in detecting the boundaries of the regions. Moreover, the secure computation of the intersection area of polygons can solve the private calculation of geometric problems in machine learning. A security protocol under the semi-honest model was designed for the problem of secure computation of the intersection area of two polygons. This protocol adopts a new coding method and the Paillier homomorphic encryption algorithm. Aiming at the malicious behaviors that malicious participants may carry out in the semi-honest protocol, a secure computation protocol for the intersection area of polygons under the malicious model was designed by using methods such as hash function, cut-and-choose and zero-knowledge proof. The security of this protocol was proved, and its computational complexity and communication complexity were analyzed. Compared with the existing schemes, it is more efficient.

With the wide applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN) in the fields of smart transportation and industrial internet of things (IIoT), there is an increasing demand for their security and trustworthiness. To solve the problem of WSN’s malicious nodes such as identity forgery attacks, node spoofing, and man-in-the-middle attacks, this paper proposes a scheme that detects malicious nodes by securely computing spatially parallel straight-line distance (SPSLD) and combining it with secure multi-party computation (MPC). This scheme uses the NTRU encryption algorithm with the additive homomorphism to design the SPSLD secure computation protocol under the semi-honest model, and for the malicious attack behaviors present in it, the secure protocol under the malicious model is proposed with the cut-and-choose method. The correctness of the protocol under different models is analyzed, and the security is proved by real/ideal model paradigm. Performance comparison and experimental simulation results indicate that, while ensuring security: The computational complexity of the semi-honest model protocol is reduced by at least 85% compared to Paillier-based schemes, with execution time shortened by 32-46%. The malicious model protocol is 12% faster than similar attack-resistant schemes, effectively defending against malicious adversary attacks, although additional overhead is introduced, its execution efficiency remains within an acceptable range for WSN environments, providing an efficient solution for enhancing the security and reliability of WSN.

Introduced by Google in 2016, federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning framework to ensure data privacy amid the surge in big data. FL enables secure data sharing without accessing local data. Despite its advantages, it faces challenges due to the limited participation of the data owner. To address this, this article proposes the model value transfer incentive (MVTI) to enhance FL incentives for Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT). MVTI allows active participation of data requesters in FL training, addressing limited data owner engagement, and facilitating personalized model construction. The integrated model bail and contribution assessment mechanism ensures fair benefit redistribution. Using smart contracts (SCs) and interplanetary file system (IPFS) enhances security and reliability, ensuring transparent and tamper-resistant execution for secure transactions and data integrity. Our experiments highlight MVTI’s superiority in addressing FL incentive challenges for AIoT compared to state-of-the-art baselines on real-world datasets. We also demonstrate the compatibility of multiple gradient protections with incentive mechanisms, especially with gradient compression. The proposed SC-MVTI scheme is resilient and demonstrates the potential to significantly improve the overall efficacy of the FL system within incentive frameworks.

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has garnered significant research attention from both academic and medical institutions. However, the sensitive medical data involved in IoMT raises security and privacy concerns. To mitigate these, ring signature has surfaced as a proper solution, which offers unforgeability and anonymity. Unfortunately, most multi-signer ring signature schemes require a predetermined number of signers and are difficult to adjust dynamically. Additionally, traditional ring signatures have limited adaptability for IoMT due to their reliance on a single entity. It is challenging to effectively define different signature permissions for users of various entities, such as patients and doctors. Therefore, research focusing on constructing a dynamic multi-signer ring signature for multi-party participation remains a critical and ongoing challenge. In this paper, we present ASMR, an anonymity-enhanced sequential multi-signer ring signature scheme for secure medical data sharing in IoMT. ASMR contains two different rings, PR and DR, for patients and doctors, respectively. It allows patients in PR to anonymously sign their electronic healthcare record (EHR) owned by doctors in DR, overcoming the reliance on a single entity in existing approaches while enhancing the anonymity of the signature. Meanwhile, ASMR introduces the concept of signature chaining, allowing multiple users in DR to co-sign information in sequence. In addition, it ensures that each generated signature is traceable, offering a transparent system. We also formally prove the security of ASMR in the random oracle model. Comprehensive performance evaluations indicate that ASMR excels in both computational and storage overhead. In the best case, computational overhead is reduced by approximately 4.7×-61.7×, while storage overhead is reduced by approximately 26.7×-212.8× compared to prior arts.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been widely studied, which dramatically enhanced the manufacturing efficiency and service elasticity. However, how to ensure the data confidentiality and security in the event-driven publish/subscribe communication model becomes a cumbersome problem. To address this concern, ring signatures have been researched deeply. Nevertheless, existing solutions have large computational burdens and neglect to incorporate reporting and tracing features, which makes it impractical for IIoT. In this way, research focus on designing an efficient report and traceable ring signature is still far-reaching. In this article, we propose RAT ring, a novel report and traceable ring signature, which provides publisher authentication, anonymous communication, reporting, and tracing. To achieve this, we adopt the zero knowledge proof to verify the authenticity of publisher data, and the signature of knowledge to trace the signature. Then, we formalize and prove the security of our scheme. Eventually, through comprehensive performance evaluation, our scheme outperforms prior works by approximately up to 51 times in terms of total computational overhead. These results demonstrate that our design is practical and effective for data privacy-preserving in IIoT.

Data fusion in the Internet of Things (IoT) is based on the intersection and union problems of sets without complete set restrictions to achieve accurate and reliable location services. However, protecting users’ privacy in IoT is challenging, for which a solution is proposed herein in conjunction with secure multi-party computation (MPC). Using the proposed solutions, users’ privacy can be ensured while achieving accurate and reliable location positioning. Current privacy-preserving schemes used for data fusion require a set’s elements belonging to an appropriate complete set, and the range of elements used by such schemes is usually integers. Moreover, a unified range of all elements in a set cannot be determined in real-time for practical scenarios. Limiting the range of elements to integers is also impossible, because the type of data collected by IoT devices is uncertain. To address these issues, new encoding and transformation methods are proposed herein to map a set of rational numbers to the Cartesian coordinate system. The NTRU encryption scheme is used to design the intersection and union MPC protocols of rational numbers’ sets without any complete set restriction under the semi-honest model. Then, to prevent possible malicious behaviors in the semi-honest model protocols, MPC protocols for the intersection and union of rational numbers’ sets are designed without any complete set. The security of the protocols is demonstrated by applying the real/ideal model paradigm. The comparison of the proposed protocols with other schemes shows that our protocols have higher computational efficiency.

Nowadays, the quality of cloud services offered by different service providers varies greatly. Reputation mechanism, as a better service evaluation method, can help standardize and regulate the cloud service market. However, existing reputation systems either rely on a trusted third party with security and privacy issues, or lack reliable evaluation. To address the above issues, we propose a blockchain based privacy-preserving dynamic reputation mechanism for cloud service and a reputation management smart contract (RM) is designed to implement trusted reputation computation. The reputation integrates conformance trust in the subjective view and recommendation trust in the objective view together to provide a comprehensive evaluation. Besides, a miner selection algorithm is designed to prevent miners from launching a collusion attack. Moreover, the Paillier homomorphic encryption algorithm (PHE) is introduced to encrypt the sensitive data of customers, ensuring the security of data stored on the blockchain. Experiment results reveal that the proposed model is feasible and the performance of encryption is acceptable.

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are the most critical data in human health management. As in traditional centralized healthcare service systems (HSSs), user privacy security, EMRs data leakage, tampering, and island are some significant problems. However, blockchain is a promising technology to protect the privacy and realize cross-institutional data sharing for solving these problems. In this article, a novel peer-to-peer EMRs data management and trading system called healthchain has been proposed based on consortium blockchain technology. Through this distributed system, the patient can access their EMRs in different institutions freely, and the EMRs can be traded among different users conveniently. Then, to balance EMRs data supply and demand, we establish a Stackelberg pricing model to evaluate EMRs data providers and consumers' interactions. The optimal unit price and data amounts can be found by applying the backward induction method, and the maximizing benefits of the participants can be obtained by achieving the Nash equilibrium in the proposed game. Moreover, security analysis shows the healthchain can provide secure EMRs management and trading, and the simulation results show that the proposed pricing model can help the healthchain achieve social welfare maximization.