With the continuous development of information technology, privacy protection in the Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted people 's attention. This paper summarizes and discusses the privacy and security issues faced by various levels of the IoT, and proposes an overall framework for privacy and security protection; investigates the research progress of ABE search security in the IoT, summarizes the types of firmware implementation defects in the IoT, analyzes the typical defect generation mechanisms, and summarizes the existing firmware defect detection methods from the perspectives of static analysis , symbol execution, fuzzy testing, program validation, and machine learning ; analyzes the existing mainstream access control models in the IoT, and summarizes the issues that need to be addressed in the future for blockchain based access control in the IoT. It further studies the recent achievements and progress of machine learning in the security protection of the IoT, and summarizes the privacy laws, especially the information protection law of the European Union (EU) in enterprises. Finally, we propose the main challenges that current research still faces and point out the direction of future research development.

The rapid development of the social Internet of Things (IoT) enhances interconnectivity but also raises significant network security challenges, particularly from botnet attacks that disrupt system stability. Addressing this issue requires effective strategies to control botnet propagation in social IoT environments. This study develops a social IoT botnet propagation model incorporating social factors to analyze their influences on its propagation dynamics. Based on this, a social IoT botnet propagation control framework is constructed, formulating an optimization problem using Markov games. To solve the optimization problem, we propose SD-DRQN (Social-Dynamics Deep Recurrent Q-Network), a novel deep reinforcement learning algorithm that integrates Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layers to improve learning in dynamic social IoT environments. Experimental results validate the performance of the proposed SD-DRQN across various social IoT scenarios, including complex real-world topologies. The algorithm demonstrates faster convergence, superior generalization, and practical applicability, making it an effective solution for botnet propagation control in real-world social IoT deployments.

String prediction (SP) is a highly efficient screen content coding technique adopted into international and China video coding standards. However, SP requires a high number of SRAM fetches to decode and output a block for display, leading to low throughput (T). Low T results in a high decoder and SRAM clock frequency to output the required number of display pixels, which is determined by the specific display resolution and frame rate. To achieve hardware-decoder-friendly high throughput SP (HTSP), this paper exploits specific SRAM fetch rate constraints for five SRAM-cell sizes commonly used in hardware decoder designs. Additionally, the optimal reference string selection process is formulated as a multi-constraint rate-distortion optimization (MCRDO) problem and a novel reference string searching method is presented. HTSP boosts throughput by up to 4 times compared to the state-of-the- art SP, with only a negligible impact on coding efficiency.

In recent years, the utilization of fog cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) applications has been steadily rising due to the exponential growth of data produced by interconnected smart devices. However, cloud providers who are responsible for these IoT applications face two critical problems: 1) how to protect the system from untrusted users and 2) how to allocate processing units to meet the demands with acceptable costs. The fog–cloud blockchain system (FCB), proposed in past research, provides a perfect solution for the former question by integrating Blockchain’s security qualities into the fog–cloud paradigm. In this article, we address the latter question by proposing an improved version of the life-choice-based optimization algorithm (ILCO) to solve the task scheduling for Bag-of-Task applications in the FCB system. Task scheduling is one of the most prominent problems in resource allocation. Our proposed algorithm not only increases the convergence speed but also maintains diversity better, optimizing the FCB’s power, latency, and cost. Under a single-objective problem setting, ILCO outperforms LCO and similar state-of-the-art methods by achieving better results for FCB’s latency and power consumption.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is used in homes and hospitals and deployed outdoors to control and report environmental changes, prevent fires, and perform many more beneficial functions. However, all these benefits come at the tremendous risk of loss of privacy and security issues. To protect the IoT, much research has been carried out to address these risks and find better ways to eliminate them or at least minimize their impact on user privacy and security requirements. This paper expounds various network security risks faced by the IoT, analyzes their impacts, discusses risk assessment methods, shows the causes and hazards of these threats, and proposes an overall framework of privacy security protection. This paper summarizes the typical defect types in the implementation of IoT firmware, analyzes the generation mechanism of typical defects from the perspectives of fuzzy testing, program verification and machine learning, and compares and expounds the progress of security research for several common IoT protocols. This paper analyzes and summarizes the mainstream access control model in the existing IoT and the access control model after using the blockchain and builds a new integrated AIoT architecture for intelligent information processing. Finally, this paper expounds on the current legal development status of the privacy protection of network information in various countries and discusses the future prospects of the IoT.

Learning to hash is of particular interest in information retrieval for large-scale data due to its high efficiency and effectiveness. Most studies in hashing concentrate on constructing new hashing models, but rarely touch the correlation and redundancy between hash bits derived. In this article, we first introduce a general schema of hash bit reduction to derive compact and informative binary codes for hashing techniques. Further, we take locality sensitive hashing, one of the most widely-used hashing methods, as an example and propose a novel and two-stage binary code refinement method under the reduction schema. Specifically, the proposed method includes two stages, i.e., bit evaluation and bit refinement. The former stage aims to initially extract a small portion of informative hash bits in terms of their importance and quality evaluated by bit balance and similarity preservation. Then, the representation capabilities of the reduced hash bits are strengthened further by refining their binary values. The purpose of refinement is to lessen the correlations and redundancies between the reduced bits, making themselves more discriminative. The experimental results on three widely-used data collections confirm the effectiveness of the proposed bit reduction method and its superiority over the state-of-the-art hashing methods, as well as a bit selection method.

In this article, aiming at a Chinese keyword-based book search service, from a technological perspective, we propose to modify a user query sequence carefully to confuse the user query topics and thus protect the user topic privacy on the untrusted server, without compromising the accuracy of each book search service. First, we propose a client-based framework for the privacy protection of book search, and then a privacy model to formulate the constraints in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and security, which the cover queries generated based on a user query sequence should meet. Second, we present a modification algorithm for a user query sequence, based on some heuristic strategies, which can quickly generate a cover query sequence meeting the privacy model by replacing, deleting, and adding keywords for each user query. Finally, both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, i.e., which can improve the security of users’ topic privacy on the untrusted server without compromising the efficiency, accuracy, and usability of an existing Chinese keyword book search service, so it has a positive impact for the construction of a privacy-preserving text retrieval platform under an untrusted network environment.

The arrival of cloud computing age makes data outsourcing an important and convenient application. More and more individuals and organizations outsource large amounts of graph data to the cloud computing platform (CCP) for the sake of saving cost. As the server on CCP is not completely honest and trustworthy, the outsourcing graph data are usually encrypted before they are sent to CCP. The optimal route finding on graph data is a popular operation which is frequently used in many fields. The optimal route finding with support for semantic search has stronger query capabilities, and a consumer can use similar words of graph vertices as query terms to implement optimal route finding. Due to encrypting the outsourcing graph data before they are sent to CCP, it is not easy for data customers to manipulate and further use the encrypted graph data. In this paper, we present a solution to execute privacy‐guarding optimal route finding with support for semantic search on the encrypted graph in the cloud computing scenario (PORF). We designed a scheme by building secure query index to implement optimal route finding with support for semantic search based on searchable encryption idea and stemmer mechanism. We give formal security analysis for our scheme. We also analyze the efficiency of our scheme through the experimental evaluation.

In a digital library, book search is one of the most important information services. However, with the rapid development of network technologies such as cloud computing, the server‐side of a digital library is becoming more and more untrusted; thus, how to prevent the disclosure of users' book query privacy is causing people's increasingly extensive concern. In this article, we propose to construct a group of plausible fake queries for each user book query to cover up the sensitive subjects behind users' queries. First, we propose a basic framework for the privacy protection in book search, which requires no change to the book search algorithm running on the server‐side, and no compromise to the accuracy of book search. Second, we present a privacy protection model for book search to formulate the constraints that ideal fake queries should satisfy, that is, (i) the feature similarity, which measures the confusion effect of fake queries on users' queries, and (ii) the privacy exposure, which measures the cover‐up effect of fake queries on users' sensitive subjects. Third, we discuss the algorithm implementation for the privacy model. Finally, the effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation.

© 2008-2012 IEEE. Personalized recommendation has demonstrated its effectiveness in improving the problem of information overload on the Internet. However, evidences show that due to the concerns of personal privacy, users' reluctance to disclose their personal information has become a major barrier for the development of personalized recommendation. In this paper, we propose to generate a group of fake preference profiles, so as to cover up the user sensitive subjects, and thus protect user personal privacy in personalized recommendation. First, we present a client-based framework for user privacy protection, which requires not only no change to existing recommendation algorithms, but also no compromise to the recommendation accuracy. Second, based on the framework, we introduce a privacy protection model, which formulates the two requirements that ideal fake preference profiles should satisfy: (1) the similarity of feature distribution, which measures the effectiveness of fake preference profiles to hide a genuine user preference profile; and (2) the exposure degree of sensitive subjects, which measures the effectiveness of fake preference profiles to cover up the sensitive subjects. Finally, based on a subject repository of product classification, we present an implementation algorithm to well meet the privacy protection model. Both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

An e-commerce website provides a platform for merchants to sell products to customers. While most existing research focuses on providing customers with personalized product suggestions by recommender systems, in this paper, we consider the role of merchants and introduce a parallel problem, i.e., how to select the most valuable customers for a merchant? Accurately answering this question can not only help merchants to gain more profits, but also benefit the ecosystem of e-commence platforms. To deal with this problem, we propose a general approach by taking into consideration the interest and profit of each customer to the merchant, i.e., select the customers who are not only interested in the merchant to ensure the visit of the merchant, but also capable of making good profits. Specifically, we first generate candidate customers for a given merchant by using traditional recommendation techniques. Then we select a set of the valuable customers from candidate customers, which has the balanced maximization between the interest and the profit metrics. Given the NP-hardness of the balanced maximization formulation, we further introduce efficient techniques to solve this maximization problem by exploiting the inherent submodularity property. Finally, extensive experimental results on a real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

High dimensional clustering is often encountered in real application and projective clustering is an effective way to deal with high dimensional clustering problems aiming to capture the dense areas embedded in subsets of attributes/subspaces. Most projective clustering algorithms use equal or varying width hyper-rectangle structure to identify the dense areas and their locations. Therefore, it is a crucial task to decide the widths of these hyper-rectangle structures in projective clustering. Naturally, making use of the real data distribution directly to determine the widths of the dense structures is a promising and feasible approach. In this paper, we propose a projective clustering algorithm based on hyper-rectangle structure, whose width is estimated from the kernel distribution of real data. In particular, we first define a structure called Significant Local Dense Area (SLDA) structure by using an efficient kernel density estimator, Rodeo; and then design a greedy search method to find the whole SLDAs covered the data distribution in the high-dimensional space; eventually, we run a single-linkage clustering algorithm on the SLDAs to form the final clusters and identify the outliers. The main strength of the proposed algorithm is validated by the experiments on synthetic and real world data sets.

The current boom of the Web is associated with the revenues originated from Web advertising. As one prevalent type of Web advertising, contextual advertising refers to the placement of the most relevant commercial textual ads within the content of a Web page, so as to provide a better user experience and thereby increase the revenues of Web site owners and an advertising platform. Therefore, in contextual advertising, the relevance of selected ads with a Web page is essential. However, some problems, such as homonymy and polysemy, low intersection of keywords and context mismatch, can lead to the selection of irrelevant textual ads for a Web page, making that a simple keyword matching technique generally gives poor accuracy. To overcome these problems and thus to improve the relevance of contextual ads, in this paper we propose a novel Wikipedia-based matching technique which, using selective matching strategies, selects a certain amount of relevant articles from Wikipedia as an intermediate semantic reference model for matching Web pages and textual ads. We call this technique SIWI: Selective Wikipedia Matching, which, instead of using the whole Wikipedia articles, only matches the most relevant articles for a page (or a textual ad), resulting in the effective improvement of the overall matching performance. An experimental evaluation is conducted, which runs over a set of real textual ads, a set of Web pages from the Internet and a dataset of more than 260 000 articles from Wikipedia. The experimental results show that our method performs better than existing matching strategies, which can deal with the matching over the large dataset of Wikipedia articles efficiently, and achieve a satisfactory contextual advertising effect.

As a prevalent type of Web advertising, contextual advertising refers to the placement of the most relevant ads into a Web page, so as to increase the number of ad-clicks. However, some problems of homonymy and polysemy, low intersection of keywords etc., can lead to the selection of irrelevant ads for a page. In this paper, we present a new contextual advertising approach to overcome the problems, which uses Wikipedia concept and category information to enrich the content representation of an ad (or a page). First, we map each ad and page into a keyword vector, a concept vector and a category vector. Next, we select the relevant ads for a given page based on a similarity metric that combines the above three feature vectors together. Last, we evaluate our approach by using real ads, pages, as well as a great number of concepts and categories of Wikipedia. Experimental results show that our approach can improve the precision of ads-selection effectively.