With the rapid development of smart grid technologies, ensuring secure and efficient collaboration among distributed grid units has become a significant challenge. However, existing works suffer from the key escrow problem and single points of failure. Moreover, decentralized alternatives often lack efficient mechanisms to prevent rogue nodes from manipulating collaborative decisions. This paper proposes a certificateless multi-signature scheme named MagicCMS, which is based on a magic square structure. By integrating element-based node collaboration through magic squares, MagicCMS ensures signature generation only when authorized node groups meet predefined constraints. This enhances security against rogue nodes. Additionally, the system utilizes a decentralized key management solution leveraging blockchain technology, thereby eliminating single points of failure. A rigorous security analysis demonstrates that MagicCMS resists both Type-I and Type-II adversaries and provides protection against rogue-key attacks. Performance evaluations show significant improvements in signature verification efficiency compared to existing schemes. In large-scale scenarios, verification computational costs are reduced by up to 73%.

Edge computing paradigm deploys infrastructures on users' edge side, enabling data to be stored in edge storage systems. Thus edge computing finds a balance between remote cloud storage with high latency and local storage with limited resources. However, the frequent update of edge data increases the probability of data corrupting. To ensure availability and integrity of edge data without affecting future use, this paper proposes a certificateLess edge recoverable data auditing (CL-ERDA) approach with corruption localization. First, the certificateless network coding signature in CL-ERDA is utilized to generate the homomorphic authenticator, addressing public key certificate management issues while avoiding insecure key escrow problems. Then, CL-ERDA designs a two-phase auditing method, where only file-level aggregation proofs are respond in first phase of external check and the second phase of self-check is launched only when damaged data is detected, reducing communication overhead of the auditing. Moreover, CL-ERDA combines hierarchical check method with batch localization method to achieve locating efficiently all the corrupted data at one time rather than locating only one corrupted data at once. Finally, security analysis shows that the proposed scheme resists various attacks and supports the unforgeability of authenticators. Experimental results demonstrate that CL-ERDA is efficient in auditing and corruption localization.

Hybrid satellite networks, composed of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) systems, are capable of ensuring seamless and flexible data exchange across entities. However, the inherent heterogeneity presents critical challenges for cross-domain data aggregation. Specifically, the following issues remain unsolved for current cross-domain data aggregation designs, including insufficient adaptability to the dynamic hierarchical network topologies, inflexible leader election for intra-domain data aggregation, and unsound privacy preservation for inter-domain data transmission. To overcome these limitations, a cross-domain heterogeneous data aggregation scheme for hybrid satellite networks is developed, providing dynamic group key agreement. First, an efficient re-authentication mechanism is constructed to ensure de-synchronization resistance. Meanwhile, a flexible and adaptive leader election strategy is proposed to enhance stable and seamless data exchange among dynamic LEO networks. Additionally, a secure dynamic cross-domain data transmission method is designed to resist eavesdropping and replay attacks. The security proofs and discussions regarding vital security properties are presented, while the performance analysis follows. Compared with the state-of-the-art, advantages in terms of security and performance properties can be proved.

In recent years, numerous group authentication and key agreement (GAKA) schemes have been proposed for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoTs). However, the frequent identity updates that are a feature of IIoT environments mean that existing schemes cannot maintain full-lifecycle device anonymity. Meanwhile, static integrity verification approaches cannot effectively cope with the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of industrial networks, making it imperative to design an adaptive data integrity protection mechanism to maintain reliable and resilient communication. Additionally, the simultaneous access of a large number of intelligent industrial devices to gateway nodes creates significant computational and communication challenges, while also increasing the risk of denial-of-service attacks and other concurrent threats. Consequently, current schemes are unable to strike an optimal balance between efficiency and security in large-scale IIoT deployments. In our scheme, we first designed an anonymous token mechanism to achieve sufficient randomness for unlinkability when communicating with the same gateway node across different time periods. Secondly, integrating associated data into the authenticated sponge construction (ASCON) encryption process ensures the legitimacy and integrity of the data during transmission. Third, we conduct rigorous security proofs under the widely accepted Algebraic Group Model (AGM) and Random Oracle Model (ROM), demonstrating that our group authentication mechanism is unforgeable against adaptive chosen-public-key and adaptive chosen-subspace attacks. Finally, the performance evaluation demonstrates that our proposed scheme achieves improvement in computational efficiency, while the communication overhead analysis confirms that the design remains both efficient.

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), considered a pivotal component of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), are susceptible to both established and emerging security vulnerabilities. However, existing authenticated key management schemes fail to provide effective conditional anonymity during decentralized authentication process. Meanwhile, scalable and reliable vehicular pseudonym management is absent, resulting in potential privacy leakage. Furthermore, conventional group key agreement schemes inherently fail to properly accommodate the highly dynamic topological characteristics of vehicular environments, which significantly limits their practical applicability. To address these challenges, the blockchain-assisted anonymous authentication and tree-based group key agreement design is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the pairing-free decentralized authentication mechanism is designed to enable mutual authentication between vehicles and roadside units (RSUs). Secondly, the threshold-varying pseudonym management system is designed, leveraging secret sharing and smart contracts to ensure conditional privacy preservation. This mechanism utilizes the multi-RSU consensus to recover the user's real identity, enabling traceability of malicious entities. Thirdly, the self-balancing tree-based group key agreement mechanism is proposed, optimizing key generation efficiency in dynamic vehicular environments. Crucial security requirements can be satisfied via the security analysis, whereas the performance evaluation substantiates the superiority of the proposed scheme over existing approaches.

Deep learning based side-channel analysis (DL-SCA) has achieved remarkable success in recovering cryptographic keys from embedded devices by exploiting physical leakages such as power consumption and electromagnetic emissions, posing a serious threat to the security of cryptographic implementations. However, a major challenge arises in cross-device attacks, where a model trained on profiling devices cannot be directly applied to attack a different device. This is because domain discrepancies emerge from variations in chip architecture, manufacturing, operational conditions, and data acquisition methods between these two devices. Many existing DL-SCA schemes have not adequately addressed the challenges posed by the differences. Therefore, we propose a novel cross-device SCA framework based on an autoencoder, which leverages the encoder—decoder architecture to align feature distributions across devices in the latent space while simultaneously preserving discriminative leakage features through the reconstruction process. To achieve this, Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) is integrated into the loss function and applied to the latent representations, effectively narrowing the distribution gap between profiling and attack devices. Operating in the latent space allows our approach to avoid the training instability of adversarial methods and provides an efficient end-to-end solution for domain alignment. Building on this framework, we further introduce three multi-domain adaptation methods. Experimental results, evaluated in terms of Partial Guessing Entropy (PGE), demonstrate that cross-device attacks can be effectively executed even with device discrepancies, with most keys being successfully recovered within 1,000 traces. Moreover, the proposed adaptation techniques significantly reduce the number of traces required for successful key recovery.

The continuous evolution of Android malware threatens device security, while existing visualization-based schemes often rely on single or random views, limiting their ability to capture malicious behavior comprehensively. To address this limitation, we propose CansDroid, a multi-view detection scheme integrating three complementary views: API sensitivity, operational context, and runtime environment. Each view is processed with dedicated filtering strategies and deep learning techniques. We introduce a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model that enables early-stage multi-view feature collaboration, regularized by balance loss and expert diversity enhancement loss to ensure balanced expert utilization and representation diversity. Experimental results show that CansDroid achieves a detection accuracy of 99.38%, outperforming state-of-the-art schemes, and successfully identifies 674 previously unseen malware samples, demonstrating its effectiveness in detecting evolving Android threats.

Molecular communication (MC), an innovative paradigm leveraging molecules as information carriers, is gaining traction in the biomedical field, particularly in the context of the Internet of Bio-Nano Things (IoBNT) for targeted drug delivery (TDD) systems. Specifically, the transportation of drug molecules in blood vessels is described as the propagation of information molecules, offering an MC perspective to designing and optimizing TDD processes. However, the existing MC-inspired TDD is predominantly physical-layer-centric, grappling with the pharmacokinetics (PK) and pharmacodynamics (PD) of drug molecules in complex vessel networks and the diversity of drug carrier designs. These complexities result in high-computational demands, posing a significant challenge to implementing personalized TDD strategies. This article introduces a three-layer bio-nano systems interconnection (BNSI) hierarchical model to address these challenges by reducing the computational load and enabling a more precise TDD strategy. Our model extracts parameters from the physical layer, which handles the PK and PD processes, and maps drug dynamics to data transmission at the network layer. This approach draws inspiration from traditional communication systems, where the physical layer manages the propagation of signals, and the network layer oversees packet routing and topology as the path planning in the blood vessel network. The application layer in our model incorporates a feedback mechanism based on drug concentration at the diseased site, allowing for flexible adjustments to achieve the desired therapeutic outcomes. Simulation results demonstrate that the BNSI model enhances computational efficiency without compromising the accuracy of TDD, thus demonstrating its feasibility. This work improves the scalability and flexibility of TDD systems and lays the groundwork for future TDD’s optimization and digital transformation.

With the rapid evolution of wireless communication technology, smart homes have significantly improved the quality of peoples daily lives by taking advantage of the low latency and high transmission rates of 6G communication technology. Users can now conveniently manage the consumer electronics remotely. However, in the pratical smart home scenarios, the users and consumer electronics communicate with each other through an open public channels where charted and uncharted security risks and privacy vulnerabilities exist. To protect users confidential data from malicious interception and modification, diverse authentication protocols have been proposed so far. However, existing protocols often suffer from efficiency issues or vulnerabilities to known attacks. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel three-factor ECC-based anonymous authentication protocol. The protocols security properties can be rigorously proven using the formal analysis under the ROR model. Subsequently, the resistance to numerous types of attacks, including man-in-the-middle and replay attacks, can be demonstrated through informal analysis and the AVISPA verification process. Finally, the protocol is compared with the state-of-the-arts and the results show that the protocol strikes a good balance between security and efficiency and is well suited for smart home environments.

The development of 5G communication, big data technology and intelligent transportation system has driven the rapid development of vehicle network (VANET). However, with the rapid development of vehicle networks, it will be invaded by various security problems, such as privacy disclosure, session key security, forward security, etc. To eliminate the security threats faced by the vehicle network and ensure privacy and secure communication between vehicles and roadside units(RSU), it is necessary to introduce a secure, reliable, and efficient authentication key agreement scheme. Therefore, based on the principle of challenge authentication handshake protocol, we propose a novel security authentication and key agreement scheme for the vehicle networks. The scheme meets mutual authentication, and is the session key of communication protocol between vehicle and roadside unit to resist common attacks. In addition, compared with other schemes, our scheme has the advantage that we can flexibly set time keys to constrain vehicle behaviour and achieve dynamic vehicle management. We also give a formal security proof of the scheme under the random oracle model (ROM). Finally, the efficiency of the protocol is evaluated, and the computing and communication overhead of our scheme is about 35% lower than that of the existing scheme. So, our scheme is more practical.

Nowadays, with the purpose of fulfilling the increasing demands for emerging extensive and ubiquitous accessibility to modern intelligent transportation systems (ITS), the conventional vehicle-to-everything (V2X) paradigms are progressively evolving into the Internet of vehicles (IoVs). As of now, substantial enhancements in IoV technologies have been witnessed, particularly in the era of vehicular data secure exchange and user privacy protection. On the other hand, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are envisioned to provide scalable and adaptive stereoscopic service coverage for IoV implementations. However, the existing approaches intended for the common scenarios mainly rely on the well-established local IoV infrastructures, whereas the specific infrastructure-less IoVs with dysfunctional edge facilities have not been properly investigated. Additionally, the related UAV-assisted IoV schemes still fail to independently perform the secure vehicular data transmission but rather as the auxiliary strategies due to the dependence on the assistance of local edge deployment. Therefore, the practical requirements of reliability and scalability in real-world IoV circumstances cannot be satisfied. In this paper, an efficient UAV certificateless group authentication mechanism is developed in order to facilitate the secure data transmission of infrastructure-less IoV. The proposed design deploys the tethered UAV (TUAV) as the specific mobilized base station so that the active edge IoV infrastructure is not needed. The security analysis regarding the key security features are presented first, followed by the performance evaluation. According to the comparison results with the existing designs, improvements in terms of computational cost and communication overhead for different phases can be demonstrated.

In recent years, growing research interest from both industry and academia has been aroused to the vehicular networks, which is regarded as the fundamental component of the modern intelligent transportation system (ITS). Lots of remarkable research outputs with respect to secure vehicular data interactions and user privacy preservation has been witnessed. However, the existing schemes all focus on the common vehicular communication scenarios where facilities are deployed, whereas the secure data exchange in the abnormal infrastructure-less vehicular environment has not been properly investigated. To deal with unpredictable abnormal situations caused by artificial or natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, a distinctive vehicle-assisted aggregate authentication mechanism for infrastructure-less vehicular networks is presented in this paper. With assistance from the neighboring vehicles, the homomorphic signature involving all requesting vehicles is generated and forwarded to the remaining functional RSUs. Meanwhile, vehicular group communication among the validated entities is enabled. Additionally, the fault-tolerant verification method is adopted such that the ineffective entities can be easily distinguished and removed without interfering with other requesting vehicles. The security proofs and discussions regarding vital security properties are presented, while the performance analysis follows. Compared with the state-of-the-art, advantages in terms of security and performance properties can be proved.

Any person can post arbitrary strings on the bulletin board. Following publication on bulletin board, a party receives a "evidence" that the intended data were posted. The bulletin board is open to the public, which means that anyone can view its contents. The fundamental security criteria for a BB are that its contents cannot be deleted, and that no evidence of publication can be falsified. BB was commonly perceived as a trusted and publicly verifiable channel. It formed the backbone of many important protocols such as e-voting, secure multi-party computation etc. and quite often it was assumed to exist to support the execution of the main protocol. After the advent of blockchain technology, BB systems has found a strong footing regarding its implementation in a distributed manner. In this paper, we aim to provide a concise summary of the evolution of bulletin board, its implementation issues and security analysis with an emphasis on its impact to e-voting systems.

Abstract Normal map‐based microstructure rendering can generate both glint and scratch appearance accurately. However, the extra high‐resolution normal map that defines every microfacet normal may incur high storage and computation costs. We present an example‐based real‐time rendering method for arbitrary microstructure materials, which significantly reduces the required storage space. Our method takes a small‐size normal map sample as input. We implicitly synthesize a high‐resolution normal map from the normal map sample and construct MIP‐mapped 4D position‐normal Gaussian lobes. Based on the above MIP‐mapped 4D lobes and a LUT (lookup table) data structure for the synthesized high‐resolution normal map, an efficient Gaussian query method is presented to evaluate ‐NDFs (position‐normal distribution functions) for shading. We can render complex scenes with glint and scratch surfaces in real time ( 30 fps) with a full high‐definition resolution, and the space required for each microstructure material is decreased to 30 MB.

The construction of an emergency ontology model plays an important role in emergency management, which is an important basis for emergency public opinion management and decision-making. Integration of network public opinion spread elements into the emergency ontology model is crucial for realizing knowledge sharing in the field of emergency and public opinion responses. In this study, we crawl a large amount of emergency data from different data sources and construct an emergency dataset. Based on this dataset, we analyze the public opinion elements of emergencies and propose an emergency ontology model based on network public opinion spread elements (EOM-NPOSESs). Thereafter, we consider the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) emergency as an example to construct the EOM-NPOSESs. Finally, we design some strategies to realize rule reasoning and present the COVID-19 emergency application based on the constructed EOM-NPOSESs and the geographic information system platform. The results demonstrate that EOM-NPOSESs can not only describe the semantic relationship between emergencies and emergency elements but also perform semantic logical reasoning on different emergencies.

Abstract Nowadays, the design and construction of efficient internet of things (IoTs) has become a new strategies for improving living quality of all aspects. Emerging as one of the most significant extension of medical IoTs, wireless body area networks (WBANs) is capable of monitoring crucial physiological and behavioral information through wearable sensors, offering a new paradigm for the next-generation healthcare systems. As a matter of fact, due to the inherent open wireless communicating characteristics, data security and user privacy issues of WBANs have attracted attentions from both industry and academia. So far, lots of relevant researches emphasize on secure transmission and privacy protection. However, the computation and communication limitations for individual WBAN sensor have not been taken proper consideration. Moreover, the implementation of cloud computing infrastructure has provided WBANs with superior transmission and processing qualities. Emphasizing on the above issues, this paper construct a pairing-free authentication and sensor cooperation scheme in cloud-assisted WBANs, where most of the practical requirements for WBAN sensors could be satisfied. Our design guarantee the sensor anonymity in the whole transmission session. Note that our design offers pairing-free validation procedure followed with active sensor cooperation, which is suitable for massive sensor scenarios. The security analysis proves that our designed scheme is capable of achieving desired security properties and offer adequate resistances to the charted malicious attacks. Meanwhile, security comparison demonstrates that the proposed protocol is secure compared with the state-of-the-arts.

Recently, Vijayakumaret al.proposed a dual authentication and key management scheme for secure data transmission in vehicular ad-hoc networks. As described by Vijayakumaret al., a dual authentication scheme and the corresponding group key management mechanism are illustrated successively. The authors claimed that the proposed scheme is resistant to replay attack and masquerade attack. However, we find that the proposed scheme given by Vijayakumaret al.is still vulnerable to replay attack, which could be conducted by reusing previously acquired messages. Moreover, this scheme cannot resist masquerade attack toward the system. For the above consideration, in this paper, modifications toward the existing protocol are presented, so as to provide adequate security assurance toward the mentioned attacks.

As a crucial component of Internet‐of‐Thing (IoT), vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted increasing attentions from both academia and industry fields in recent years. With the extensive VANETs deployment in transportation systems of more and more countries, drivers’ driving experience can be drastically improved. In this case, the real‐time road information needs to be disseminated to the correlated vehicles. However, due to inherent wireless communicating characteristics of VANETs, authentication and group key management strategies are indispensable for security assurance. Furthermore, effective road message dissemination mechanism is of significance. In this paper, we address the above problems by developing a certificateless authentication and road message dissemination protocol. In our design, certificateless signature and the relevant feedback mechanism are adopted for authentication and group key distribution. Subsequently, message evaluating and ranking strategy is introduced. Security analysis shows that our protocol achieves desirable security properties. Additionally, performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol is efficient compared with the state of the art.