Human Pose Estimation (HPE) is a core component in real-time decision systems, supporting critical applications such as healthcare monitoring, autonomous driving, and sports analytics. While deep learning models—particularly CNNs and Transformer-based architectures—have significantly improved HPE accuracy, they remain vulnerable to adversarial perturbations that subtly distort keypoint localization, thereby undermining system reliability. To address this challenge, we propose regularization and pruning transferable adversarial attack (RPA), a novel framework designed to enhance the transferability of adversarial samples in Transformer-based HPE models. RPA integrates two synergistic strategies: gradient regularization, which suppresses dominant feature correlations to reduce overfitting, and adaptive weight pruning, which removes redundant parameters to reduce model-specific noise. This dual mechanism enables the generation of transferable adversarial attacks that are effective across diverse model architectures. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art HPE networks demonstrate that RPA consistently outperforms existing attack methods. In white-box settings, RPA reduces average precision (AP) by 0.05-0.30; in black-box scenarios, it yields AP drops of 0.01-0.04. These findings expose critical vulnerabilities in IoT-enabled HPE applications and establish a new benchmark for evaluating adversarial robustness in real-time perception systems.

Dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs) have emerged and been widely deployed in various web applications (e.g., Reddit) to serve users (e.g., personalized content delivery) due to their remarkable ability to learn from complex and dynamic user interaction data. Despite benefiting from high-quality services, users have raised privacy concerns, such as misuse of personal data (e.g., dynamic user-user/item interaction) for model training, requiring DGNNs to "forget" their data to meet AI governance laws (e.g., the "right to be forgotten" in GDPR). However, current static graph unlearning studies cannot unlearn dynamic graph elements and exhibit limitations such as the model-specific design or reliance on pre-processing, which disenable their practicability in dynamic graph unlearning. To this end, we study the dynamic graph unlearning for the first time and propose an effective, efficient, general, and post-processing method to implement DGNN unlearning. Specifically, we first formulate dynamic graph unlearning in the context of continuous-time dynamic graphs, and then propose a method called Gradient Transformation that directly maps the unlearning request to the desired parameter update. Comprehensive evaluations on six real-world datasets and state-of-the-art DGNN backbones demonstrate its effectiveness (e.g., limited drop or obvious improvement in utility) and efficiency (e.g., 7.23× speed-up) advantages. Additionally, our method has the potential to handle future unlearning requests with significant performance gains (e.g., 32.59× speed-up).

Social video anomaly is an observation in video streams that does not conform to a common pattern of dataset's behaviour. Social video anomaly detection plays a critical role in applications from e-commerce to e-Iearning. Traditionally, anomaly detection techniques are applied to find anomalies in video broadcasting. However, they neglect the live social video streams which contain interactive talk, speech, or lecture with audience. In this paper, we propose a generic framework for effectively online detecting Anomalies Over social Video LI ve Streaming (AOVLIS). Specifically, we propose a novel deep neural network model called Coupling Long Short-Term Memory (CLSTM) that adaptively captures the history behaviours of the presenters and audience, and their mutual interactions to predict their behaviour at next time point over streams. Then we well integrate the CLSTM with a decoder layer, and propose a new reconstruction error-based scoring function REI A to calculate the anomaly score of each video segment for anomaly detection. After that, we propose a novel model update scheme that incrementally maintains CLSTM and decoder. Moreover, we design a novel upper bound and ADaptive Optimisation Strategy (ADOS) for improving the efficiency of our solution. Extensive experiments are conducted to prove the superiority of AOVLIS.

The global deployment of the 5G network has led to a substantial increase in the deployment of edge servers to host web applications, catering to the growing demand for low service latency by edge web users. Yet, running edge servers 24/7 leads to enormous energy consumption and excessive carbon emissions. Energy-efficient edge resource provision is desired to achieve sustainable development goals in the new multi-access edge computing (MEC) architecture. Recently, several approaches have been proposed to solve the demand response problem for energy saving in cloud computing and MEC. However, accurate location information of edge web users should always be provided, which sacrifices users' privacy. To protect edge web users' location privacy while saving energy in MEC, we systematically formulate this location privacy-preserving edge demand response (LEDR) problem. To solve the LEDR problem effectively and efficiently, we propose a system named GEES by incorporating differential geo-obfuscation to secure user privacy while maximizing system utility and energy efficiency through inferences with theoretical analysis. Extensive and comprehensive experiments are conducted based on a synthetic real-world dataset, and the results demonstrate that GEES outperforms representative approaches by 23.02%, 31.47%, and 17.29% on average in terms of energy efficiency, user privacy and system utility.

For businesses looking to outsource their data to remote servers, cloud-based data storage is a popular choice. It is popular due to its flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and widespread availability. However, ensuring the confidentiality of data is a critical challenge that must be addressed. As a response to this issue, searchable encryption techniques have been developed. These techniques enable search queries to be performed on encrypted data while still keeping the plaintext confidential. While most existing symmetric searchable encryption schemes are designed for one-dimensional data records or document-keyword inverted indices, this paper introduces MDRSSE, a novel symmetric searchable encryption scheme specifically tailored for multi-dimensional range search. MDRSSE stands out as one of the pioneering SSE schemes to support multi-dimensional range search efficiently, without incurring undetermined additional communication or computation costs. By employing a single round of communication between the client and server, MDRSSE enables an honest-but-curious server to respond to multi-dimensional range queries without gaining knowledge of the data records or revealing the search query. Notably, MDRSSE boasts the lowest overall search complexity compared to existing state-of-the-art symmetric searchable encryption schemes designed for multi-dimensional range search. Extensive experimental tests were conducted to validate the robustness and practicality of our proposed scheme. The results demonstrate that, for a dataset consisting of 100K records with 12 dimensions (with each leaf node holding 500 records), it takes only 2.2 seconds to generate the encrypted dataset, and the overall setup phase completes within 2.5 seconds. Furthermore, for a range query encompassing 50 nodes, the search time is less than 2 ms and 3 ms for the client and server, respectively. MDRSSE achieves semantic security under the IND-CPA assumption, all without requiring additional storage size at the server.

Analytics over social graphs allows to extract valuable knowledge and insights for many fields like community detection, fraud detection, and interest mining. In practice, decentralized social graphs frequently arise, where the social graph is not available to a single entity and is decentralized among a large number of users, each holding only a limited local view about the whole graph. Collecting the local views for analytics of decentralized social graphs raises critical privacy concerns, as they encode private information about the social interactions among individuals. In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate PrivGED, a new system aimed at privacy-preserving analytics over decentralized social graphs. PrivGED focuses on the support for eigendecomposition, one popular and fundamental graph analytics task producing eigenvalues/eigenvectors over the adjacency matrix of a social graph and benefits various practical applications. PrivGED is built from a delicate synergy of insights on graph analytics, lightweight cryptography, and differential privacy, allowing users to securely contribute their local views on a decentralized social graph for a cloud-based eigendecomposition analytics service while gaining strong privacy protection. Extensive experiments over real-world social graph datasets demonstrate that PrivGED achieves accuracy comparable to the plaintext domain, with practically affordable performance superior to prior art.

In this paper we consider the problem where a client wishes to subscribe to some product or service provided by a server, but maintain their anonymity. At the same time, the server must be able to authenticate the client as a genuine user and be able to discontinue (or revoke) the client's access if the subscription fees are not paid. Current solutions for this problem are typically constructed using some combination of blind signature or zero-knowledge proof techniques, which do not directly support client revocation (that is, revoking a user before expiry of their secret value). In this paper, we present a solution for this problem on the basis of the broadcast encryption scheme, suggested by Boneh et al., by which the server can broadcast a secret to a group of legitimate clients. Our solution allows the registered client to log into the server anonymously and also supports client revocation by the server. Our solution can be used in many applications, such as location-based queries. We formally define a model for our anonymous subscription protocol and prove the security of our solution under this model. In addition, we present experimental results from an implementation of our protocol. These experimental results demonstrate that our protocol is practical.

In this paper, we consider a scenario where a user queries a user profile database, maintained by a social networking service provider, to identify users whose profiles match the profile specified by the querying user. A typical example of this application is online dating. Most recently, an online dating website, Ashley Madison, was hacked, which resulted in a disclosure of a large number of dating user profiles. This data breach has urged researchers to explore practical privacy protection for user profiles in a social network. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving solution for profile matching in social networks by using multiple servers. Our solution is built on homomorphic encryption and allows a user to find out matching users with the help of multiple servers without revealing to anyone the query and the queried user profiles in clear. Our solution achieves user profile privacy and user query privacy as long as at least one of the multiple servers is honest. Our experiments demonstrate that our solution is practical.

In Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC), a set of spatio-temporal tasks are outsourced to a set of workers, i.e., individuals with mobile devices who physically travel to task locations. The process of matching workers to tasks is performed by a SC server. To perform matching, the SC server needs access to worker locations. However, the SC server may not be trustworthy. Current solutions for protecting locations of workers assume that a trusted cellular service provider (CSP) knows the identities and locations of workers and sanitizes locations before sharing them with the SC server. In practice, the CSP may not have the technical ability, nor the proper incentives to perform the sanitization task. Thus, location protection must be performed by a Location Privacy Provider (LPP). To prevent identity disclosure to the LPP, we propose a novel solution based on anonymous credentials which preserves worker privacy. Our solution allows registered workers to log on to the LPP and receive tasks from the SC-server anonymously. In addition, our solution assures the confidentiality and integrity of spatial tasks. Our implementation and experiments demonstrate that our solution is practical.

In this paper, we consider a scenario where a user queries a user profile database, maintained by a social networking service provider, to find out some users whose profiles are similar to the profile specified by the querying user. A typical example of this application is online dating. Most recently, an online data site, Ashley Madison, was hacked, which results in disclosure of a large number of dating user profiles. This serious data breach has urged researchers to explore practical privacy protection for user profiles in online dating. In this paper, we give a privacy-preserving solution for user profile matching in social networks by using multiple servers. Our solution is built on homomorphic encryption and allows a user to find out some matching users with the help of the multiple servers without revealing to anyone privacy of the query and the queried user profiles. Our solution achieves user profile privacy and user query privacy as long as at least one of the multiple servers is honest. Our implementation and experiments demonstrate that our solution is practical.

The main goal of a personalized recommender system is to provide useful recommendations on various items to the users. In order to generate recommendations, the service needs to access various types of user data such as previous product purchasing history, demographic and biographical information. However, users are sensitive to disclosure of personal information as it can be easily misused by malicious third parties. Consequently, there are unavoidable security concerns which will become known through attempted unauthorized access while providing the recommendation services. In order to protect against breaches of personal information, it is necessary to obfuscate the user information by means of an efficient encryption technique while simultaneously generating the recommendation by making true information inaccessible to the system. To address these challenges, we propose a privacy-preserving recommender system using homomorphic encryption, by which the system can provide recommendations without knowing the actual ratings. Our approach is based on the ElGamal cryptosystem by which both addition and multiplication of plaintexts can be performed. The performance of the proposed scheme shows significantly high accuracy in-terms of computation and communication costs as well as outperforming other existing solutions.

In mobile communication, spatial queries pose a serious threat to user location privacy because the location of a query may reveal sensitive information about the mobile user. In this paper, we study approximate k nearest neighbor (kNN) queries where the mobile user queries the location-based service (LBS) provider about approximate k nearest points of interest (POIs) on the basis of his current location. We propose a basic solution and a generic solution for the mobile user to preserve his location and query privacy in approximate kNN queries. The proposed solutions are mainly built on the Paillier public-key cryptosystem and can provide both location and query privacy. To preserve query privacy, our basic solution allows the mobile user to retrieve one type of POIs, for example, approximate k nearest car parks, without revealing to the LBS provider what type of points is retrieved. Our generic solution can be applied to multiple discrete type attributes of private location-based queries. Compared with existing solutions for kNN queries with location privacy, our solution is more efficient. Experiments have shown that our solution is practical for kNN queries.

In mobile communication, spatial queries pose a serious threat to user location privacy because the location of a query may reveal sensitive information about the mobile user. In this paper, we study k nearest neighbor (kNN) queries where the mobile user queries the location-based service (LBS) provider about k nearest points of interest (POIs) on the basis of his current location. We propose a solution for the mobile user to preserve his location privacy in kNN queries. The proposed solution is built on the Paillier public-key cryptosystem and can provide both location privacy and data privacy. In particular, our solution allows the mobile user to retrieve one type of POIs, for example, k nearest car parks, without revealing to the LBS provider what type of points is retrieved. For a cloaking region with n×n cells and m types of points, the total communication complexity for the mobile user to retrieve a type of k nearest POIs is O(n+m) while the computation complexities of the mobile user and the LBS provider are O(n + m) and O(n2m), respectively. Compared with existing solutions for kNN queries with location privacy, our solutions are more efficient. Experiments have shown that our solutions are practical for kNN queries.

In this paper we present a solution to one of the location-based query problems. This problem is defined as follows: (i) a user wants to query a database of location data, known as Points Of Interest (POIs), and does not want to reveal his/her location to the server due to privacy concerns; (ii) the owner of the location data, that is, the location server, does not want to simply distribute its data to all users. The location server desires to have some control over its data, since the data is its asset. We propose a major enhancement upon previous solutions by introducing a two stage approach, where the first step is based on Oblivious Transfer and the second step is based on Private Information Retrieval, to achieve a secure solution for both parties. The solution we present is efficient and practical in many scenarios. We implement our solution on a desktop machine and a mobile device to assess the efficiency of our protocol. We also introduce a security model and analyse the security in the context of our protocol. Finally, we highlight a security weakness of our previous work and present a solution to overcome it.

Private Information Retrieval (PIR) allows a user to retrieve the ith bit of an n-bit database without revealing to the database server the value of i. In this paper, we present a PIR protocol with the communication complexity of O(γ logn) bits, where -y is the ciphertext size. Furthermore, we extend the PIR protocol to a private block retrieval (PBR) protocol, a natural and more practical extension of PIR in which the user retrieves a block of bits, instead of retrieving single bit. Our protocols are built on the state-of-the-art fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) techniques and provide privacy for the user if the underlying FHE scheme is semantically secure. The total communication complexity of our PBR is O(γ logm + γn/m) bits, where m is the number of blocks. The total computation complexity of our PBR is O(m logm) modular multiplications plus O(n=2) modular additions. In terms of total protocol execution time, our PBR protocol is more efficient than existing PBR protocols which usually require to compute O(n=2) modular multiplications when the size of a block in the database is large and a high-speed network is available.

In this paper we present a solution to one of the location-based query problems. This problem is defined as follows: (i) a user wants to query a database of location data, known as Points Of Interest (POI), and does not want to reveal his/her location to the server due to privacy concerns, (ii) the owner of the location data, that is, the location server, does not want to simply distribute its data to all users. The location server desires to have some control over its data, since the data is its asset. Previous solutions have used a trusted anonymiser to address privacy, but introduced the impracticality of trusting a third party. More recent solutions have used homomorphic encryption to remove this weakness. Briefly, the user submits his/her encrypted coordinates to the server and the server would determine the user's location homomorphically, and then the user would acquire the corresponding record using Private Information Retrieval techniques. We propose a major enhancement upon this result by introducing a similar two stage approach, where the homomorphic comparison step is replaced with Oblivious Transfer to achieve a more secure solution for both parties. The solution we present is efficient and practical in many scenarios. We also include the results of a working prototype to illustrate the efficiency of our protocol.

Recently, Chien proposed a time-bound hierarchical key assignment scheme based on tamper-resistant devices. Without public key cryptography, Chien's scheme greatly reduces computation load and implementation cost. In this paper, we show that Chien's scheme is insecure against a collusion attack whereby three users conspire to access some secret class keys that they should not know according to Chien's scheme.

Tzeng (2002) proposed a time-bound cryptographic key assignment scheme for access control in a partial-order hierarchy. In this paper, we show that Tzeng's scheme is insecure against the collusion attack whereby three users conspire to access some secret class keys that they should not know according to Tzeng's scheme.