In the Web 3.0 ecosystem, blockchain and Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) construct the infrastructure, where blockchain transaction semantic detection (BTSD) aims to enhance blockchain security by identifying illegal transactions through distributed miners executing AI algorithms. However, the computational cost of performing semantic detection discourages miners from participating without adequate incentives. Existing studies focus on algorithmic aspects of BTSD, which generally ignore the critical issue of incentive mechanism. To fill this gap, we propose the first incentive-based BTSD framework in the transaction pool phase, emphasizing how incentives affect the behavior of miners and users. We use evolutionary game theory to model miner-user interactions and define three key scenarios to simulate the impact of reward decay and penalty factors on system dynamics. Our results demonstrate that adjusting these parameters significantly influences the number of miners engaging in semantic detection and users initiating legitimate transactions. Under certain conditions, a well-designed incentive mechanism can lead to an Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS), thereby achieving systemic stability. This study introduces a novel incentive mechanism for BTSD during the transaction pool phase and validates its effectiveness through both theoretical insights and numerical solutions to enhance blockchain security.

The Metaverse, envisioned as the next-generation Internet, will be constructed via twining a practical world in a virtual form, wherein Meterverse service providers (MSPs) are required to collect massive data from Meterverse users (MUs). In this regard, a critical demand exists for MSPs to motivate MUs to contribute computing resources and data while preserving user privacy. Federated learning (FL), as a privacy-preserving collaborative machine learning paradigm, can support distributed intensive computation in the Metaverse. In this work, we first investigate minting the machine learning models into NFT with FL assistance (referred to as FL-NFT), such that MUs as stakeholders can control the ownership and share the economic value of user-generated content (UGC). Specifically, MUs are encouraged to establish a decentralized autonomous organization (i.e., MU-DAO) to aggregate local models and mint FL-NFT. MUs and MSPs optimize the strategies by formulating an imperfect information Stackelberg game to trade off the cost and benefit. We apply the backward induction to derive the equilibrium solution. Then, we construct a privacy-preserving multi-winner sealed-bid auction mechanism (PMS-AM), in which the Hidden Markov Model assists MSPs in choosing rational bidding strategies according to historical bids, and the double auction mechanism determines the winners and price of FL-NFT. Finally, the numerical results based on theoretical analysis and simulations demonstrate that the proposed PMS-AM can increase the quality of FL-NFT and achieve the economic properties of incentive mechanisms such as individual rationality and incentive compatibility.

Searchable encryption (SE) has emerged as a cryptographic primitive that allows data users to search on encrypted data. Most existing SE schemes usually delegate search operations to an intermediary such as a cloud server, which would inevitably result in single-point failure, privacy leakage, and even untrustworthy results. Several blockchain-based SE schemes have been proposed to alleviate these issues; however, they suffer from some issues, such as the support for multi-keyword multi-owner model, query privacy and data storage availability. In this paper, we propose BPMS, blockchain-based privacy-preserving multi-keyword search in multi-owner setting, which supports searching over encrypted data in trustworthy, private and efficient manners. The attribute Bloom filter has been introduced into our BPMS to build indexes, which protects query privacy and improves index generation performance. To guarantee data storage availability, our BPMS leverages the advantages of IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) to store large scale of encrypted data. Security proof and comparative analysis in theory indicate that our BPMS is more secure and efficient. A series of experiments conducted on a real-world dataset further demonstrate that our BPMS is feasible in practice.

Federated learning (FL) is essentially a distributed machine learning paradigm that enables the joint training of a global model by aggregating gradients from participating clients without exchanging raw data. However, a malicious aggregation server may deliberately return designed results without any operation to save computation overhead, or even launch privacy inference attacks using crafted gradients. There are only a few schemes focusing on verifiable FL, and yet they cannot achieve collusion-resistant verification. In this paper, we propose the first Verifiable, Collusion-resistant, and Dynamic FL (VCD-FL) to tackle this issue. Specifically, we first optimize Lagrange interpolation by gradient grouping and compression for achieving efficient verifiability of FL. To protect clients’ data privacy against collusion attacks, we propose a lightweight commitment scheme using irreversible gradient transformation. By integrating the proposed efficient verification mechanism with the novel commitment scheme, our VCD-FL can detect whether or not the aggregation server is involved in collusion attacks. Moreover, considering that clients might go offline due to some reason such as network anomaly and client crash, we adopt the secret sharing technique to eliminate the effect of federation dynamics on FL. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to achieve collusion-resistant verification and collusion attack detection with supporting the correctness, privacy, and dynamics. Finally, we theoretically prove the effectiveness of our VCD-FL, make comprehensive comparisons, and conduct a series of experiments on MNIST dataset with MLP and CNN models. The theoretical proof and experimental analysis demonstrate that our VCD-FL is computationally efficient, robust against collusion attacks, and able to support the dynamics of FL.

Worker selection in crowdsensing plays an important role in the quality control of sensing services. The majority of existing studies on worker selection were largely dependent on a trusted centralized server, which might suffer from single point of failure, the lack of transparency and so on. Some works recently proposed blockchain-based crowdsensing, which utilized reputation values stored on blockchains to select trusted workers. However, the transparency of blockchains enables attackers to effectively infer private information about workers by the disclosure of their reputation values. In this article, we proposed the TrustWorker, a trustworthy and privacy-preserving worker selection scheme for blockchain-based crowdsensing. By taking the advantages of blockchains such as decentralization, transparency and immutability, our TrustWorker could make the worker selection process trustworthy. To protect workers’ reputation privacy in our TrustWorker, we adopted a deterministic encryption algorithm to encrypt reputation values and then selected the top$N$workers in the light of secret minimum heapsort scheme. Finally, we theoretically analyzed the effectiveness and efficiency of our TrustWorker, and then conducted a series of experiments. The theoretical analysis and experiment results demonstrate that our TrustWorker can achieve trustworthy worker selection, while ensuring the workers’ privacy and the high quality of sensing services.

Traditional identity authentication solutions mostly rely on a trusted central entity, so they cannot handle single points of failure well. In addition, most of these traditional schemes need to store a large amount of identity authentication or public key information, which makes the schemes difficult to expand and use in distributed situations. In addition, the user prefers to protect the privacy of their information during the identity verification process. Due to the open and decentralized nature of the blockchain, the existing identity verification schemes are difficult to apply well in the blockchain. To solve this problem, in this article, we propose a privacy protection identity authentication scheme based on the blockchain. The user independently generates multiple-identity information, and these identities can be used to apply for an identity certificate. Authorities use the ECDSA signature algorithm and the RSA encryption algorithm to complete the distribution of the identity certificate based on the identity information and complete the registration of identity authentication through the smart contract on the blockchain. On the one hand, it can realize the protection of real identity information; on the other hand, it can avoid the storage overhead caused by the need to store a large number of certificates or key pairs. Due to the use of the blockchain, there is no single point of failure in the authentication process, and it can be applied to distributed scenarios. The security and performance analysis show that the proposed scheme can meet security requirements and is feasible.

In the setting of secret sharing, one desirable property is fairness, which guarantees that if there is a player getting the secret in the recovery phase, then each player participating to the reconstruction process does too. In this paper we study the fairness problem of secret reconstruction in a secret sharing scheme. We use a new approach to achieve the fairness of secret sharing. We first define the fairness of secret sharing probabilistically. Based on this definition, a fair secret sharing scheme is proposed, its security and fairness are shown against three different attack types and do not depend upon any unproven intractability assumption. Our scheme is an extension of Shamir's secret sharing scheme and the approach of fairness of Dov Gordon et al.(STOC2008). Theoretical analysis shows that our proposed scheme is more efficient.