In the field of artificial intelligence, secure model inference is essential for protecting data confidentiality, which allows users to interact with trained models for decision-making support without privacy leakage. However, current secure inference methods often overlook the simultaneous verification of data origins for both user inputs and model weights, which is crucial for maintaining the integrity of inference outcomes. In this study, we present a novel verifiable secure inference scheme that leverages blockchain to enhance the verifiability of both the inference process and the origins of user inputs and model weights. We integrate the decentralized ledger to store the committed inputs and weights, serving as convincing data origins. We then transform neural networks into zero-knowledge proof constraints with optimized structures for the inference process. To illustrate its application scenario, we propose a regulatable privacy-preserving transaction scheme. Its regulation depends on anomaly detection on private transactions without privacy leakage, which takes the encrypted ledger as the data source and the committed detection model as the parameter source to perform our verifiable secure inference. We provide rigorous security proofs for our schemes, demonstrating their authenticity and privacy. We implement them to demonstrate their scalability through analyzing their computational and communication performance.

The recent popularity of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum has drawn widespread attention to the blockchain technique. In particular, some private cryptocurrencies like Zerocash and Monero enhance privacy protection by concealing the identities of participants and transaction amounts. However, such comprehensive privacy measures present regulatory challenges to malicious activities like money laundering and extortion. Therefore, building a novel blockchain that maintains privacy while supporting regulatory oversight is crucial. In this paper, we propose a regulatable and privacy-preserving blockchain scheme that introduces a decoupled and preparatory regulatory process. It serves as a privacy-preserving first line of defense, enabling the identification of anomalous transactions without compromising the confidentiality of the underlying data. Our approach pioneers a method for anomaly screening on private transactions, mitigating risks without resorting to key escrow or content recovery, thus preserving end-to-end privacy for legitimate users. Initially, we explore suitable transaction features within private blockchains for training machine learning classifiers to detect anomalous behaviors. Subsequently, we customize a privacy-centric classifier employing homomorphic encryption to achieve private computation of anomaly detection without leaking sensitive information from private transaction content. We then construct the zero-knowledge proof for validating the encrypted computation process. Our work pioneers in fully integrating homomorphic encryption with zero-knowledge proof, enabling credible and trustworthy verification of the homomorphic ciphertext computations. Finally, we conduct comprehensive security analysis and experimental simulations. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of our approach.

Machine Learning-as-a-Service systems (MLaaS) have been largely developed for cybersecurity-critical applications, such as detecting network intrusions and fake news campaigns. Despite effectiveness, their robustness against adversarial attacks is one of the key trust concerns for MLaaS deployment. We are thus motivated to assess the adversarial robustness of the Machine Learning models residing at the core of these securitycritical applications with categorical inputs. Previous research efforts on accessing model robustness against manipulation of categorical inputs are specific to use cases and heavily depend on domain knowledge, or require white-box access to the target ML model. Such limitations prevent the robustness assessment from being as a domain-agnostic service provided to various real-world applications. We propose a provably optimal yet computationally highly efficient adversarial robustness assessment protocol for a wide band of ML-driven cybersecurity-critical applications. We demonstrate the use of the domain-agnostic robustness assessment method with substantial experimental study on fake news detection and intrusion detection problems.

Usage-based insurance (UBI) provides reasonable vehicle insurance premiums based on vehicle usage and driving behavior. In general, there are three major issues in realizing intelligent UBI systems. First, UBI evaluation mechanisms are not auditable to drivers. Insurers may thus deliberately adjust the UBI premiums. Second, the process of collecting driving data by insurers may lead to serious privacy breaches. Third, forging safer driving data for reducing insurance premiums may cause economic losses for insurers. To address these challenges, in this study, we propose CCUBI, a cross-chain-based premium competition scheme with privacy preservation for intelligent UBI systems. We introduce tamper-resistant blockchain and smart contracts to construct credible insurance mechanisms. The cross-chain technology connects these blockchains in the entire network to form an open premium competition scheme. Vehicle owners can assess designated insurers by sharing historical data with them to get a suitable CCUBI plan. In addition, we propose a data aggregation method used for CCUBI analysis with privacy preservation. Vehicle owners only publish proofs of the driving data. Proofs can still maintain privacy and computability in cross-chain flows. Finally, we adopt roadside units to detect forged driving data. We conduct a detailed security analysis. Experimental results also demonstrate the efficiency of CCUBI.

Autonomous vehicle platoon is a promising paradigm towards traffic congestion problems in the intelligent transportation system. However, under certain circumstances, the advantage of the platoon cannot be fully developed. In this paper, we focus on the highway Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) charging problem. We try to let the opportunistic platoon pass the ETC as a whole. There are three main issues in this scenario. Firstly, the opportunistic platoon is temporarily composed; vehicles do not trust each other. Secondly, single vehicle may try to escape from the ETC charging by following the platoon. Finally, platoon members may collude with each other and try to underreport the number of vehicles in the platoon so as to evade payment. To solve these challenges, we propose a blockchain-based efficient highway toll paradigm for the opportunistic platoon. The driving history, credential information of every registered vehicle, is recorded and verified from the blockchain. A roadside unit (RSU) is adopted to distinguish the single vehicle from the platoon and in charge of lane allocation. Additionally, an aggregate signature is introduced to accelerate the authentication procedure in the RSU. We analyse the potential security threats in this scenario. The experimental result indicates that our scheme is efficient and practical.