With the rapid growth of connected vehicles and the increasing demand for low-latency and reliable communication, traditional vehicular networks face severe security challenges. Existing cross-domain authentication schemes often suffer from complex certificate management, key leakage, and inefficient trust coordination. In this paper, we propose a Secure and Efficient Blockchain-based Cross-Domain Authentication (SEBA) scheme for vehicular networks that integrates blockchain with physical unclonable functions (PUFs) to establish a robust trust management framework. The proposed scheme adopts a hybrid on-chain/off-chain architecture, where blockchain-based smart contracts provide tamper-resistant credential storage, while time-critical authentication operations are executed off-chain to improve system throughput and response latency. By incorporating PUF technology, SEBA enables reliable binding between physical devices and cryptographic identities, effectively resisting impersonation and cloning attacks. In addition, lightweight cryptographic primitives are employed to further reduce computation and communication overhead. The security of the proposed scheme is formally verified using ProVerif and further analyzed through theoretical security analysis. Performance evaluation is conducted using a simulation framework that models vehicular communication latency, cryptographic operation costs, and blockchain transaction confirmation delays. Experimental results under varying vehicle loads demonstrate that SEBA significantly outperforms existing schemes, achieving up to 83% higher throughput and 38% lower authentication latency. Overall, SEBA provides a privacy-preserving and low-latency authentication framework suitable for large-scale and highly dynamic vehicular networks.

Redactable blockchains are challenging the core principle of traditional blockchains: immutability. One such example is the chameleon hash-based blockchain. Despite rapid academic advances, most solutions have not yet simultaneously considered four key aspects: the degree of modification privileges, the transparency of the modification process, the consistency in the post-redaction global state, and system security after redaction. In this paper, we present a controllable, publicly auditable, and redactable blockchain with a main-auxiliary architecture. Specifically, we integrate weighted secret sharing, digital signature, and non-interactive zero-knowledge proof technologies to propose a verifiable and controllable chameleon hash primitive. To encourage logical nodes, it includes a reputation evaluation mechanism and a DAO-based governance model. Additionally, we construct a redactable bi-directionally anchored main-auxiliary blockchain structure, where the auxiliary chain exclusively maintains the modification proofs associated with each block of main chain. Any node can audit the modification history or, in the event of an accusation, self-prove. This structure also simplifies global state updates for newly joined or restarted nodes. Finally, we provide comprehensive security proofs for our construction, conduct extensive experiments to evaluate its functionality and performance, and compare it with analogous solutions to demonstrate its superiority.

The development of vehicular networks has significantly improved driving safety and enabled a wide range of intelligent transportation applications. However, in cross-domain scenarios, vehicular networks still face challenges, such as security risks, privacy breaches, and heavy computing burden. In this article, we propose a novel cross-domain authentication scheme for vehicular networks based on Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), in which the computing tasks on the vehicle side are offloaded to the edge server, which effectively alleviates the computation overhead on the resource-constrained vehicle side. Unlike existing schemes, we adopt a server function division and a distributed registration center approach to alleviate the burden and risk associated with the trusted authority (TA) during the authentication process. In addition, we use anonymity mechanism and batch verification to achieve privacy protection and improve authentication efficiency, respectively. Through rigorous security proofs and detailed security analyses, it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme meets the security requirements of vehicular networks and can withstand a broader range of security attacks. Performance comparison results indicate that the proposed scheme outperforms existing related schemes in terms of both communication and computation overheads.

With the integrating development of Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing, data sharing among various IoT devices has become the trend for extensive applications. However, data sharing in IoT environments is challenged by limited terminal resources and distributed data storage, which places higher demands on security and effectiveness. Even though existing searchable encryption technologies provide feasible solutions, there remain challenges in terms of trustworthy retrieval and execution efficiency. To address these issues, this paper proposes an efficient supply-demand-aligned and trustworthy multi-keyword (ESTM) search scheme in edge-assisted IoT environments, where encrypted documents are stored in edge servers. Furthermore, blockchain-based smart contracts are employed so that search results are consensus on the Fabric ledger and data users can verify whether the returned encrypted documents are reliable using encrypted hashes. To achieve the supply-demand-aligned requirement, the RoBERTa (Robustly optimized BERT approach) model is introduced for text classification and data users can judge which edge server stores data best suits their demands. Meanwhile, coordinate (COO) format is adopted into index vectors and search vectors, which can decrease the time required for constructing an index tree to about 2.7% and the time required for generating trapdoors to about 4.6%. Finally, we conducted an in-depth security analysis and performance comparison with existing works, results show that the proposed scheme is effective and feasible.

The Augmented Intelligence of Things enables many edge or end devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) to perform machine reasoning to make decisions, thus become more intelligent. For healthcare enterprises, huge physical data generated by smart devices facilitate to iterate their products. However, traditional data sharing models based on cloud outsourcing meet many security challenges, such as data confidentiality, reliability, and privacy protection, and most existing schemes have high computational complexity for the utilization of time-consuming cryptographic operations, such as bilinear pairing, which is not suitable for those resource-constrained IoT devices. To tackle the abovementioned issues, we present Double Rainbows, a promising data sharing scheme based on pairing-free searchable encryption. It is constructed on the cloud-edge-end architecture, supporting computing task transfer and reliable data storage and retrieval. The experimental results show that it outperforms in efficiency and exhibit more security functionalities.

Regional medical consortium systems facilitates medical information sharing. However, many security issues exposed by the dominant centralized architectures, such as single points of failure, unauthorized operations and illegal access, are increasingly apparent constraints on the security and efficiency of data sharing across domains. Even more, any malicious operation detected, effective measures should be executed promptly for identity tracing. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient cross-domain authentication scheme based on two cooperative blockchains (BCs) for medical consortium systems. Specifically, an intra-domain BC records any legal users’ registration and authentication information while an inter-domain BC is responsible for writing users’ cross-domain authentication information. In each domain, the general hospital acts as a trusted third service provider to achieve cross-chain interactions. For the entire cross-domain authentication procedure, anonymity mechanism is utilized to enhance security, and to trace malicious users, the improved chameleon hash is used in the intra-domain BC to redact the state of the user, and blacklist merkle tree is extended in the inter-domain BC to protect different domains’ services from illegal accessing. In addition, security analysis and performance evaluation are completely given to prove the superior security features and performance compared with other schemes.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has built an information bridge between people and the objective world, wherein wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are an important driving force. For applications based on WSN, such as environment monitoring, smart healthcare, user legitimacy authentication, and data security, are always worth exploring. In recent years, many multifactor user authentication schemes for WSNs have been proposed using smart cards, passwords, as well as biometric features. Unfortunately, these schemes are revealed to various vulnerabilities (e.g., password guessing attack, impersonation attack, and replay attack) due to nonuniform security evaluation criteria. Wang et al. put forward 12 pieces of widely accepted evaluation criteria by investigating quantities of relevant literature. In this paper, we first propose a lightweight multifactor authentication protocol for multigateway WSNs using hash functions and XOR operations. Further, BAN logic and BPR model are employed to formally prove the correctness and security of the proposed scheme, and the informal analysis with Wang et al.’s criteria also indicates that it can resist well-known attacks. Finally, performance analysis of the compared schemes is given, and the evaluation results show that only the proposed scheme can satisfy all 12 evaluation criteria and keep efficient among these schemes.

Broadcast authentication is a fundamental security primitive in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which is a critical sensing component of IoT. Although symmetric-key-based μ TESLA protocol has been proposed, some concerns about the difficulty of predicting the network lifecycle in advance and the security problems caused by an overlong long hash chain still remain. This paper presents a scalable broadcast authentication scheme named DH- μ TESLA, which is an extension and improvement of μ TESLA and Multilevel μ TESLA, to achieve several vital properties, such as infinite lifecycle of hash chains, security authentication, scalability, and strong tolerance of message loss. The proposal consists of the t,n -threshold-based self-reinitializable hash chain scheme (SRHC-TD) and the d -left-counting-Bloom-filter-based authentication scheme (AdlCBF). In comparison to other broadcast authentication protocols, our proposal achieves more security properties such as fresh node’s participation and DoS resistance. Furthermore, the reinitializable hash chain constructed in SRHC-TD is proved to be secure and has less computation and communication overhead compared with typical solutions, and efficient storage is realized based on AdlCBF, which can also defend against DoS attacks.

With the rapid development of Internet services, mobile communications, and IoT applications, Location-Based Service (LBS) has become an indispensable part in our daily life in recent years. However, when users benefit from LBSs, the collection and analysis of users’ location data and trajectory information may jeopardize their privacy. To address this problem, a new privacy-preserving method based on historical proximity locations is proposed. The main idea of this approach is to substitute one existing historical adjacent location around the user for his/her current location and then submit the selected location to the LBS server. This method ensures that the user can obtain location-based services without submitting the real location information to the untrusted LBS server, which can improve the privacy-preserving level while reducing the calculation and communication overhead on the server side. Furthermore, our scheme can not only provide privacy preservation in snapshot queries but also protect trajectory privacy in continuous LBSs. Compared with other location privacy-preserving methods such as k -anonymity and dummy location, our scheme improves the quality of LBS and query efficiency while keeping a satisfactory privacy level.

With the increasing number of smart mobile devices, applications based on mobile network take an indispensable role in the Internet of Things. Due to the limited computing power and restricted storage capacity of mobile devices, it is very necessary to design a secure and lightweight authentication scheme for mobile devices. As a lightweight cryptographic primitive, the hash chain is widely used in various cryptographic protocols and one-time password systems. However, most of the existing research work focuses on solving its inherent limitations and deficiencies, while ignoring its security issues. We propose a novel construction of hash chain that consists of multiple different hash functions of different output lengths and employ it in a time-based one-time password (TOTP) system for mobile device authentication. The security foundation of our construction is that the order of the hash functions is confidential and the security analysis demonstrates that it is more secure than other constructions. Moreover, we discuss the degeneration of our construction and implement the scheme in a mobile device. The simulation experiments show that the attacker cannot increase the probability of guessing the order by eavesdropping on the invalid passwords.