The data generated in the Internet of Things (IoT) holds significant transactional and utilitarian value. However, traditional data trading models face numerous challenges, including privacy leaks of raw data and limitations in arbitration. This paper proposes a secure and verifiable privacy-preserving data trading scheme for IoT (SVDT), in which perturbed data is substituted for raw data to fundamentally mitigate the risk of privacy leakage. Secondly, we construct a dual-verification mechanism based on homomorphic encryption and merkle trees to simultaneously achieve verifiability and confidentiality during the trading process. Additionally, smart contract facilitate escrow and automated execution to ensure trading fairness. Finally, a collusion-resistant anonymous arbitration mechanism is designed utilizing ring signatures to sever the association between the arbitrator’s identity and the adjudication result, thereby safe-guarding the anonymity and independence of the arbitration while effectively resolving disputes. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the scheme effectively achieves data security and trading fairness, with security analysis validating its privacy-preserving properties. Experimental results show a favorable balance between performance overhead and privacy utility. The findings indicate that SVDT scheme provides a practical solution for fair trading involving IoT data.

The widespread adoption of data-driven services, including networked data collection and analysis systems, has greatly enhanced convenience and decision-making, but it has also raised growing concerns about the trade-off between fine-grained utility and personalized privacy guarantees. Personalized Differential Privacy (PDP) offers a flexible framework by allowing users to specify individualized privacy budgets. However, existing sampling-based PDP mechanisms often rely on coarse risk modeling assumptions that treat individual data characteristics uniformly, leading to suboptimal utility and inefficient privacy expenditure. In this paper, we propose the Utility-Aware Sampling Mechanism (UASM), a principled PDP implementation that enables fine-grained, user-centric privacy control while explicitly optimizing utility. First, UASM formalizes policy-assisted secret specifications, allowing confidentiality to be determined through a combination of baseline protection rules and personalized privacy preferences, and combines them with individualized privacy budgets. Second, UASM employs a two-stage utility-aware sampling strategy to calibrate noise: (i) an optimal global threshold selected to reduce unnecessary privacy-budget wastage while respecting users’ declared budgets, and (ii) a sensitivity-aware refinement stage that allocates privacy loss according to each record’s influence on query accuracy. Formal privacy analysis demonstrates that UASM provides rigorous privacy guarantees and promotes fairer privacy expenditure under heterogeneous privacy requirements. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, including network-oriented downstream tasks, show that UASM achieves a superior privacy-utility trade-off over state-of-the-art PDP baselines, underscoring its practical effectiveness.

In the era of pervasive online social networks (OSNs), the erosion of information privacy is occurring at an unprecedented rate. Empowering individuals with user-centric control over their private information is crucial to fostering public confidence in OSN services. Hence, the investigation into the personalized privacy configurations within the framework of differential privacy for OSNs, particularly for social relationships, is captivating. In this paper, we introduce a Collaborative Personalized Edge Differential Privacy model (CPEDP), ensuring personalized protection for sensitive social relationships while retaining the high utility of network features. Specifically, CPEDP allows each user to define a policy specification consisting of two complementary components: secret specifications at the edge level to identify sensitive relationships, and privacy specifications at the user level to determine personalized privacy parameters. These user-defined preferences are integrated through a collaborative privacy decision-making process that ensures consistent and interpretable privacy guarantees. Furthermore, we formalize the privacy primitive of CPEDP and develop a sampling-based mechanism to effectively implement the proposed model. Finally, comparative experiments on real-world datasets confirm that CPEDP achieves superior privacy-utility trade-offs, yielding more accurate estimates of key graph statistics through policy-driven personalization.

As the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) expands, the number of stakeholders increases. Many entities require significant amounts of data from industrial devices. These data streams improve information sharing and optimize the industrial chain. However, IIoT’s enormous data volumes pose challenges to traditional encryption methods, which are unable to meet efficiency and energy consumption requirements. Thus, a new, efficient encryption algorithm is essential for managing data flows among IIoT subscribers. In this paper, we propose a fast, low-energy, high-security encryption scheme to manage multi-entity data streams. First, we introduce a novel encryption scheme based on the Subset Sum Problem (SSP), which improves energy efficiency and speed. Second, to meet subscription requirements, we employ attribute-based encryption (ABE) for key forwarding. Finally, we handle subscription revocations with device key updates. The device owner utilizes their secret value to generate an identity proof with a key update request.

The pursuit of refined data analysis and the preservation of privacy in Big Data pose significant concerns. Among the paramount paradigms for addressing these challenges, differential privacy stands out as a vital area of research. However, traditional differential privacy tends to be excessively restrictive when it comes to individuals’ control over their own data. It often treats all data as inherently sensitive, whereas in reality, not all information related to individuals is sensitive and requires an identical level of protection. In this paper, we define secret specification-based differential privacy (SSDP), where the term “secret specification” implies enabling users to decide what aspects of their information are sensitive and what are not, prior to data generation or processing. By allowing individuals to independently define their secret specifications, the SSDP achieves personalized privacy protection and facilitates effective data analysis. To enable the targeted application of SSDP, we further present task-specific mechanisms designed for database and graph data scenarios. Finally, we assess the trade-offs between privacy and utility inherent in the proposed mechanisms through comparative experiments conducted on real datasets, demonstrating the utility enhancements offered by SSDP mechanisms in practical applications.

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has led to a surge in data generation within smart home environments. This data explosion has raised significant privacy concerns and highlighted a lack of user-friendly controls. Consequently, there is a pressing need for a robust privacy-enhancing mechanism tailored for smart homes, safeguarding sensitive data from a user-centric perspective. In this paper, we introduce the Fog-enhanced Personalized Differential Privacy (FEPDP) model, which utilizes the distributed nature of fog computing to improve data processing efficiency and security in smart homes. Specifically, the personalization, as a key feature of FEPDP, is manifested through an array of user-driven policy specifications, enabling home users to specify secret and privacy specifications for their personal data. These specifications not only enhance control over personal data but also align with the heterogeneous nature of smart home environments. Subsequently, aligned with fog-based smart home architecture, we propose two policy-driven partitioning mechanisms that utilize threshold partitioning based on dynamic programming to effectively implement FEPDP. Finally, comprehensive theoretical analysis and experimental validation across various statistical analysis tasks and datasets confirm that FEPDP achieves a superior privacy-utility trade-off for smart home data by leveraging non-sensitive data and fog-based partitioning.

With the prevalence of online social networks (OSNs), much personal information is collected and maintained by trusted service providers for third-party queries and analyses. Existing works regarding differentially private social network data publication overlook the fact that different users exhibit distinct privacy preferences or sensitivity inclinations. Neglecting these individual nuances may lead to privacy mechanisms that are overly conservative or inadequately protective. Furthermore, the injection of excessive noise into OSN data perceived by users as non-personal or less sensitive can incur additional privacy costs, resulting in lower service quality. This paper introduces a fine-grained, sensitivity-aware personalized edge differential privacy model (SPEDP) for OSNs. Specifically, SPEDP enables each OSN user to individually define the sensitivity level of their social connections, facilitating user-friendly personalized privacy settings. We design a privacy-aware mechanism that operates within a trusted service provider, capable of establishing privacy protection levels based on user-perceived sensitivity settings. Additionally, we propose a sensitivity-aware sampling mechanism to implement SPEDP. To further optimize the privacy mechanism, we explore a privacy threshold optimization strategy aimed at minimizing privacy budget waste. Finally, the personalized privacy protections and utility improvements achieved by the SPEDP mechanism are rigorously validated through theoretical analysis and comprehensive comparative experiments on benchmark datasets.

Online social networks have emerged as a significant data source, but the extensive collection and utilization of personal information have given rise to profound concerns regarding privacy. From a legislative and policy perspective, and in alignment with the concept of privacy as control, users have the right to control their personal privacy information. However, users often encounter challenges in terms of understanding and effectively managing their privacy settings to align with their specific privacy requirements. To address this issue, in this paper, we incorporate the concept of trust and propose a trust-based personalized differential privacy model for online social networks, denoted as TPDP, which relies on a trusted central server to facilitate its operation. Specifically, when a user requests access to another user’s personal information, the TPDP mechanism provides a privacy response, where the privacy level is determined based on the direct and indirect trust values among users, calculated automatically by the trusted central server. Furthermore, the proposed TPDP model offers user-to-user personalized differential privacy protection from the perspectives of network structures, trust-related factors, and trust propagation patterns. Finally, we validate the model’s feasibility and assess the privacy-utility trade-off, as well as its robustness against attacks, through theoretical analysis and performance evaluation.

Data privacy breaches have prompted growing concerns regarding privacy issues on social networks. Preserving the privacy of links in the directed social graph, where edges signify the information flow or data contributions, poses a formidable challenge. However, existing methods for uncertain graphs primarily target undirected graphs and lack rigorous privacy guarantees. In this paper, we present a personal evidence protection algorithm called PEPA, which provides formally dual privacy guarantees for directed social links. Specifically, we implement out-link privacy to protect the out-links of nodes. Despite this protection, the exposure of in-links can still compromise privacy, potentially affecting service quality. To address this, we further introduce an uncertain directed graph algorithm as a post-processing approach for out-link privacy. This algorithm injects uncertainty into nodes’ in-links, effectively transforming the original directed graph into a probability-driven uncertain structure. Additionally, we propose an effective noise optimization method. Finally, we evaluate the trade-off between privacy and utility achieved by PEPA through comparative experiments. The results demonstrate privacy enhancements of PEPA compared to the$(k, \varepsilon )$-obfuscation algorithm and utility improvements over the RandWalk algorithm and UG-NDP. Particularly, PEPA demonstrates approximately a 2-fold improvement in utility compared to PEPA without noise optimization.

Differential privacy has received considerable attention as a privacy concept for releasing statistical information from datasets. While differential privacy provides strict statistical guarantees, it is equally crucial to investigate how these guarantees interact with individual privacy preferences and privacy policies. Existing solutions, such as one-sided differential privacy, treat all sensitive records equally in terms of privacy protection, although datasets can be classified based on predetermined privacy policies that differentiate between sensitive and insensitive records. In this paper, we present a novel concept of privacy termed One-sided Personalized Differential Privacy (OSPDP), offering verifiable privacy assurances at the user level for sensitive records derived from privacy policies. Specifically, OSPDP enables data owners to articulate their privacy needs more flexibly, avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach to privacy protection and potentially establishing a dichotomous privacy policy regarding the sensitivity of records. Furthermore, the truthful release or legitimate disclosure of non-sensitive records reduces unnecessary privacy consumption and can be utilized to significantly enhance data utility. Additionally, we present several well-performing mechanisms for achieving OSPDP. Finally, we evaluate and analyze the trade-off between privacy and utility of the proposed mechanisms through extensive experiments.

With the development of big data technology, the power industry has also entered the data-driven intelligence era. Cloud computing-based smart grids give the power industry stronger capabilities in data analytics. Electricity load forecasting in the cloud helps smart grids allocate resources appropriately. However, the users' privacy is easily compromised in the load forecasting process with cloud computing. The electricity usage data collected by the system may contain sensitive information about the users, which could lead to serious privacy leakage. In order to solve the issues, we propose a novel privacy-preserving cloud-aided load forecasting scheme for the cloud computing-based smart grid. It contains a secure online training algorithm and an efficient real-time forecasting algorithm. Meanwhile, the two-party interaction security scheme is more suitable for real-world applications. Before being sent to the cloud server, the control center of the smart grids encrypts the data using homomorphic encryption. During the process of model training and forecasting, the data remains securely encrypted at all times to avoid the risk of data privacy breaches. Finally, security and experimental analyses show that our scheme effectively avoids privacy leakage while reducing resource consumption.

The growing prevalence of graphs representations in our society has led to a corresponding rise in the publishing of graphs by researchers and organizations. To protect the privacy, it is important to ensure that graphs including sensitive data are not disclosed. Since the weight of edges could be utilized to infer confidential information, the graph should be privately published to avoid ethical and legal issues. In this paper, we propose a novel method for privately publishing shortest paths while preserving the privacy of sensitive edge weights in graph. Specifically, we divide the edge weights into internal and external edges based on their edge betweenness centrality. Then, we give two different differentially private algorithms to perturb edge weights based on the distinction between internal and external edges, respectively. To reduce the error ratios between differentially private shortest paths and real shortest paths, we employ edge betweenness centrality to search for the shortest path, which is closest to the true one. Our experimental results show that our mechanisms can effectively reduce the error in the average shortest path distance by 1.1% for large graphs, while for the shortest path change rate, our mechanisms can reduce it by 8.3%.

With the widespread application of real-time embedded systems (ESs), the contradiction between the energy consumption requirements of modern processors and the limited battery capacity becomes more obvious. Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) has been proven to be one of the most effective technologies for energy management. However, recent studies have shown that the use of DVS leads to a significant increase in the transient fault rate of processors as the characteristic size of logic gates (or transistors) gets smaller and smaller. In this article, we consider the problem of assigning processing frequencies to a group of periodic real-time tasks so as to minimize the overall energy consumption under the constraints of time and reliability. First, under the DVS, we take the reliability of the ESs into consideration through the regularization terms and present the energy consumption optimization model based on the metaheuristic algorithms. Second, a novel algorithm for adaptive differential whale swarm optimization (ADWOA) is proposed according to the optimization requirements. Finally, the optimized data are saved on the chain through the storable feature of the blockchain for the necessary queries. It is worth noting that the on-chain data contains the intrinsic characteristics of the ES, which may give rise to the disclosure of processor privacy. Therefore, we come up with the differential privacy on-chain creating algorithm (DPCA) to protect the privacy of data on the chain. Experimental results show that ADWOA can minimize the energy consumption in real-time ES on the premise of ensuring system reliability and privacy.

Currently, the conventional mode of power data transaction is mediated by Web pages. Nevertheless, there are challenging issues such as privacy protection, transaction security and data reliability in power data trading. In this paper, we present a novel secure power data trading scheme (SPDTS). Firstly, the zero-knowledge proof is employed to achieve data availability and consistency without revealing the data. Then, SPDTS takes full advantage of the dispersibility and immutability of blockchain to ensure the reliability of data transactions. To keep the transaction process efficient, the processing tasks for power data are performed under smart contract. Meanwhile, a trusted execution environment (TEE) is adopted to guarantee the security of power data. Finally, we present a differential privacy scheme to safeguard the privacy information in the power data. Our study indicates that the proposed scheme can achieve privacy protection, transaction security and data reliability. Also, we conduct security analysis and verify the privacy protection property of the scheme in real cases.