A blockchain based privacy-preserving federated learning scheme for Internet of Vehicles

The application of artificial intelligence technology in Internet of Vehicles(lov)has attracted great research interests with the goal of enabling smart transportation and traffic management.Meanwhile,concerns have been raised over the security and privacy of the tons of traffic and vehicle data.In this regard,Federated Learning(FL)with privacy protection features is considered a highly promising solution.However,in the FL process,the server side may take advantage of its dominant role in model aggregation to steal sensitive information of users,while the client side may also upload malicious data to compromise the training of the global model.Most existing privacy-preserving FL schemes in IoV fail to deal with threats from both of these two sides at the same time.In this paper,we propose a Blockchain based Privacy-preserving Federated Learning scheme named BPFL,which uses blockchain as the underlying distributed framework of FL.We improve the Multi-Krum technology and combine it with the homomorphic encryption to achieve ciphertext-level model aggregation and model filtering,which can enable the verifiability of the local models while achieving privacy-preservation.Additionally,we develop a reputation-based incentive mechanism to encourage users in IoV to actively participate in the federated learning and to practice honesty.The security analysis and performance evaluations are conducted to show that the proposed scheme can meet the security requirements and improve the performance of the FL model.

PARE:Privacy-Preserving Data Reliability Evaluation for Spatial Crowdsourcing in Internet of Things

The proliferation of intelligent,connected Internet of Things(IoT)devices facilitates data collection.However,task workers may be reluctant to participate in data collection due to privacy concerns,and task requesters may be concerned about the validity of the collected data.Hence,it is vital to evaluate the quality of the data collected by the task workers while protecting privacy in spatial crowdsourcing(SC)data collection tasks with IoT.To this end,this paper proposes a privacy-preserving data reliability evaluation for SC in IoT,named PARE.First,we design a data uploading format using blockchain and Paillier homomorphic cryptosystem,providing unchangeable and traceable data while overcoming privacy concerns.Secondly,based on the uploaded data,we propose a method to determine the approximate correct value region without knowing the exact value.Finally,we offer a data filtering mechanism based on the Paillier cryptosystem using this value region.The evaluation and analysis results show that PARE outperforms the existing solution in terms of performance and privacy protection.

A Comprehensive Survey for Privacy-Preserving Biometrics: Recent Approaches, Challenges, and Future Directions

The rapid growth of smart technologies and services has intensified the challenges surrounding identity authenti-cation techniques.Biometric credentials are increasingly being used for verification due to their advantages over traditional methods,making it crucial to safeguard the privacy of people’s biometric data in various scenarios.This paper offers an in-depth exploration for privacy-preserving techniques and potential threats to biometric systems.It proposes a noble and thorough taxonomy survey for privacy-preserving techniques,as well as a systematic framework for categorizing the field’s existing literature.We review the state-of-the-art methods and address their advantages and limitations in the context of various biometric modalities,such as face,fingerprint,and eye detection.The survey encompasses various categories of privacy-preserving mechanisms and examines the trade-offs between security,privacy,and recognition performance,as well as the issues and future research directions.It aims to provide researchers,professionals,and decision-makers with a thorough understanding of the existing privacy-preserving solutions in biometric recognition systems and serves as the foundation of the development of more secure and privacy-preserving biometric technologies.

Towards privacy-preserving and efficient word vector learning for lightweight IoT devices

Nowadays,Internet of Things(IoT)is widely deployed and brings great opportunities to change people's daily life.To realize more effective human-computer interaction in the IoT applications,the Question Answering(QA)systems implanted in the IoT services are supposed to improve the ability to understand natural language.Therefore,the distributed representation of words,which contains more semantic or syntactic information,has been playing a more and more important role in the QA systems.However,learning high-quality distributed word vectors requires lots of storage and computing resources,hence it cannot be deployed on the resource-constrained IoT devices.It is a good choice to outsource the data and computation to the cloud servers.Nevertheless,it could cause privacy risks to directly upload private data to the untrusted cloud.Therefore,realizing the word vector learning process over untrusted cloud servers without privacy leakage is an urgent and challenging task.In this paper,we present a novel efficient word vector learning scheme over encrypted data.We first design a series of arithmetic computation protocols.Then we use two non-colluding cloud servers to implement high-quality word vectors learning over encrypted data.The proposed scheme allows us to perform training word vectors on the remote cloud servers while protecting privacy.Security analysis and experiments over real data sets demonstrate that our scheme is more secure and efficient than existing privacy-preserving word vector learning schemes.

Privacy-Preserving Multi-Keyword Fuzzy Adjacency Search Strategy for Encrypted Graph in Cloud Environment

In a cloud environment,outsourced graph data is widely used in companies,enterprises,medical institutions,and so on.Data owners and users can save costs and improve efficiency by storing large amounts of graph data on cloud servers.Servers on cloud platforms usually have some subjective or objective attacks,which make the outsourced graph data in an insecure state.The issue of privacy data protection has become an important obstacle to data sharing and usage.How to query outsourcing graph data safely and effectively has become the focus of research.Adjacency query is a basic and frequently used operation in graph,and it will effectively promote the query range and query ability if multi-keyword fuzzy search can be supported at the same time.This work proposes to protect the privacy information of outsourcing graph data by encryption,mainly studies the problem of multi-keyword fuzzy adjacency query,and puts forward a solution.In our scheme,we use the Bloom filter and encryption mechanism to build a secure index and query token,and adjacency queries are implemented through indexes and query tokens on the cloud server.Our proposed scheme is proved by formal analysis,and the performance and effectiveness of the scheme are illustrated by experimental analysis.The research results of this work will provide solid theoretical and technical support for the further popularization and application of encrypted graph data processing technology.

Sec-Auditor:A Blockchain-Based Data Auditing Solution for Ensuring Integrity and Semantic Correctness

Currently,there is a growing trend among users to store their data in the cloud.However,the cloud is vulnerable to persistent data corruption risks arising from equipment failures and hacker attacks.Additionally,when users perform file operations,the semantic integrity of the data can be compromised.Ensuring both data integrity and semantic correctness has become a critical issue that requires attention.We introduce a pioneering solution called Sec-Auditor,the first of its kind with the ability to verify data integrity and semantic correctness simultaneously,while maintaining a constant communication cost independent of the audited data volume.Sec-Auditor also supports public auditing,enabling anyone with access to public information to conduct data audits.This feature makes Sec-Auditor highly adaptable to open data environments,such as the cloud.In Sec-Auditor,users are assigned specific rules that are utilized to verify the accuracy of data semantic.Furthermore,users are given the flexibility to update their own rules as needed.We conduct in-depth analyses of the correctness and security of Sec-Auditor.We also compare several important security attributes with existing schemes,demonstrating the superior properties of Sec-Auditor.Evaluation results demonstrate that even for time-consuming file upload operations,our solution is more efficient than the comparison one.

SHT-based public auditing protocol with error tolerance in FDL-empowered IoVs

With the intelligentization of the Internet of Vehicles(lovs),Artificial Intelligence(Al)technology is becoming more and more essential,especially deep learning.Federated Deep Learning(FDL)is a novel distributed machine learning technology and is able to address the challenges like data security,privacy risks,and huge communication overheads from big raw data sets.However,FDL can only guarantee data security and privacy among multiple clients during data training.If the data sets stored locally in clients are corrupted,including being tampered with and lost,the training results of the FDL in intelligent IoVs must be negatively affected.In this paper,we are the first to design a secure data auditing protocol to guarantee the integrity and availability of data sets in FDL-empowered IoVs.Specifically,the cuckoo filter and Reed-Solomon codes are utilized to guarantee error tolerance,including efficient corrupted data locating and recovery.In addition,a novel data structure,Skip Hash Table(SHT)is designed to optimize data dynamics.Finally,we illustrate the security of the scheme with the Computational Diffie-Hellman(CDH)assumption on bilinear groups.Sufficient theoretical analyses and performance evaluations demonstrate the security and efficiency of our scheme for data sets in FDL-empowered IoVs.

Exploration of Interdisciplinary Integration in Teaching Reform of Legal Studies and Auditing

This paper attempts to explore interdisciplinary integration from four aspects:the necessity of interdisciplinary integration between legal studies and auditing,the difficulties and challenges encountered in this integration,the ideas for teaching reform in the context of interdisciplinary integration,and the expected outcomes.The aim is to achieve an organic integration of legal studies and auditing through systematic teaching reforms,thereby providing students with comprehensive and integrated knowledge and skills training,ensuring the quality of talent cultivation,and adapting to the needs of social development.

A Privacy-Preserving TPA-aided Remote Data Integrity Auditing Scheme in Clouds

The remote data integrity auditing technology can guarantee the integrity of outsourced data in clouds. Users can periodically run an integrity auditing protocol by interacting with cloud server, to verify the latest status of outsourced data. Integrity auditing requires user to take massive time-consuming computations, which would not be affordable by weak devices. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving TPA-aided remote data integrity auditing scheme based on Li et al.’s data integrity auditing scheme without bilinear pairings, where a third party auditor (TPA) is employed to perform integrity auditing on outsourced data for users. The privacy of outsourced data can be guaranteed against TPA in the sense that TPA could not infer its contents from the returned proofs in the integrity auditing phase. Our construction is as efficient as Li et al.’s scheme, that is, each procedure takes the same time-consuming operations in both schemes, and our solution does not increase the sizes of processed data, challenge and proof.

VPFL:A verifiable privacy-preserving federated learning scheme for edge computing systems

Federated learning for edge computing is a promising solution in the data booming era,which leverages the computation ability of each edge device to train local models and only shares the model gradients to the central server.However,the frequently transmitted local gradients could also leak the participants’private data.To protect the privacy of local training data,lots of cryptographic-based Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning(PPFL)schemes have been proposed.However,due to the constrained resource nature of mobile devices and complex cryptographic operations,traditional PPFL schemes fail to provide efficient data confidentiality and lightweight integrity verification simultaneously.To tackle this problem,we propose a Verifiable Privacypreserving Federated Learning scheme(VPFL)for edge computing systems to prevent local gradients from leaking over the transmission stage.Firstly,we combine the Distributed Selective Stochastic Gradient Descent(DSSGD)method with Paillier homomorphic cryptosystem to achieve the distributed encryption functionality,so as to reduce the computation cost of the complex cryptosystem.Secondly,we further present an online/offline signature method to realize the lightweight gradients integrity verification,where the offline part can be securely outsourced to the edge server.Comprehensive security analysis demonstrates the proposed VPFL can achieve data confidentiality,authentication,and integrity.At last,we evaluate both communication overhead and computation cost of the proposed VPFL scheme,the experimental results have shown VPFL has low computation costs and communication overheads while maintaining high training accuracy.

Blockchain-Enabled Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation for Fog-Based ITS

As an essential component of intelligent transportation systems(ITS),electric vehicles(EVs)can store massive amounts of electric power in their batteries and send power back to a charging station(CS)at peak hours to balance the power supply and generate profits.However,when the system collects the corresponding power data,several severe security and privacy issues are encountered.The identity and private injection data may be maliciously intercepted by network attackers and be tampered with to damage the services of ITS and smart grids.Existing approaches requiring high computational overhead render them unsuitable for the resource-constrained Internet of Things(IoT)environment.To address above problems,this paper proposes a blockchain-enabled secure and privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme for fog-based ITS.First,a fog computing and blockchain co-aware aggregation framework of power injection data is designed,which provides strong support for ITS to achieve secure and efficient power injection.Second,Paillier homomorphic encryption,the batch aggregation signature mechanism and a Bloom filter are effectively integrated with efficient aggregation of power injection data with security and privacy guarantees.In addition,the fine-grained homomorphic aggregation is designed for power injection data generated by all EVs,which provides solid data support for accurate power dispatching and supply management in ITS.Experiments show that the total computational cost is significantly reduced in the proposed scheme while providing security and privacy guarantees.The proposed scheme is more suitable for ITS with latency-sensitive applications and is also adapted to deploying devices with limited resources.

Multi Attribute Case Based Privacy-preserving for Healthcare Transactional Data Using Cryptography

Medical data mining has become an essential task in healthcare sector to secure the personal and medical data of patients using privacy policy.In this background,several authentication and accessibility issues emerge with an inten-tion to protect the sensitive details of the patients over getting published in open domain.To solve this problem,Multi Attribute Case based Privacy Preservation(MACPP)technique is proposed in this study to enhance the security of privacy-preserving data.Private information can be any attribute information which is categorized as sensitive logs in a patient’s records.The semantic relation between transactional patient records and access rights is estimated based on the mean average value to distinguish sensitive and non-sensitive information.In addition to this,crypto hidden policy is also applied here to encrypt the sensitive data through symmetric standard key log verification that protects the personalized sensitive information.Further,linear integrity verification provides authentication rights to verify the data,improves the performance of privacy preserving techni-que against intruders and assures high security in healthcare setting.

Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning on Big Data in Cloud

In the analysis of big data,deep learn-ing is a crucial technique.Big data analysis tasks are typically carried out on the cloud since it offers strong computer capabilities and storage areas.Nev-ertheless,there is a contradiction between the open nature of the cloud and the demand that data own-ers maintain their privacy.To use cloud resources for privacy-preserving data training,a viable method must be found.A privacy-preserving deep learning model(PPDLM)is suggested in this research to ad-dress this preserving issue.To preserve data privacy,we first encrypted the data using homomorphic en-cryption(HE)approach.Moreover,the deep learn-ing algorithm’s activation function—the sigmoid func-tion—uses the least-squares method to process non-addition and non-multiplication operations that are not allowed by homomorphic.Finally,experimental re-sults show that PPDLM has a significant effect on the protection of data privacy information.Compared with Non-Privacy Preserving Deep Learning Model(NPPDLM),PPDLM has higher computational effi-ciency.

OTFS-Based Efficient Handover Authentication Scheme with Privacy-Preserving for High Mobility Scenarios

Handover authentication in high mobility scenarios is characterized by frequent and shortterm parallel execution.Moreover,the penetration loss and Doppler frequency shift caused by high speed also lead to the deterioration of network link quality.Therefore,high mobility scenarios require handover schemes with less handover overhead.However,some existing schemes that meet this requirement cannot provide strong security guarantees,while some schemes that can provide strong security guarantees have large handover overheads.To solve this dilemma,we propose a privacy-preserving handover authentication scheme that can provide strong security guarantees with less computational cost.Based on Orthogonal Time Frequency Space(OTFS)link and Key Encapsulation Mechanism(KEM),we establish the shared key between protocol entities in the initial authentication phase,thereby reducing the overhead in the handover phase.Our proposed scheme can achieve mutual authentication and key agreement among the user equipment,relay node,and authentication server.We demonstrate that our proposed scheme can achieve user anonymity,unlinkability,perfect forward secrecy,and resistance to various attacks through security analysis including the Tamarin.The performance evaluation results show that our scheme has a small computational cost compared with other schemes and can also provide a strong guarantee of security properties.

A New Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing Algorithm Utilizing Connectivity-Based Outlier Factor and Mondrian Techniques

Developing a privacy-preserving data publishing algorithm that stops individuals from disclosing their identities while not ignoring data utility remains an important goal to achieve.Because finding the trade-off between data privacy and data utility is an NP-hard problem and also a current research area.When existing approaches are investigated,one of the most significant difficulties discovered is the presence of outlier data in the datasets.Outlier data has a negative impact on data utility.Furthermore,k-anonymity algorithms,which are commonly used in the literature,do not provide adequate protection against outlier data.In this study,a new data anonymization algorithm is devised and tested for boosting data utility by incorporating an outlier data detection mechanism into the Mondrian algorithm.The connectivity-based outlier factor(COF)algorithm is used to detect outliers.Mondrian is selected because of its capacity to anonymize multidimensional data while meeting the needs of real-world data.COF,on the other hand,is used to discover outliers in high-dimensional datasets with complicated structures.The proposed algorithm generates more equivalence classes than the Mondrian algorithm and provides greater data utility than previous algorithms based on k-anonymization.In addition,it outperforms other algorithms in the discernibility metric(DM),normalized average equivalence class size(Cavg),global certainty penalty(GCP),query error rate,classification accuracy(CA),and F-measure metrics.Moreover,the increase in the values of theGCPand error ratemetrics demonstrates that the proposed algorithm facilitates obtaining higher data utility by grouping closer data points when compared to other algorithms.

Outsourced Privacy-Preserving kNN Classifier Model Based on Multi-Key Homomorphic Encryption

Outsourcing the k-Nearest Neighbor(kNN)classifier to the cloud is useful,yet it will lead to serious privacy leakage due to sensitive outsourced data and models.In this paper,we design,implement and evaluate a new system employing an outsourced privacy-preserving kNN Classifier Model based on Multi-Key Homomorphic Encryption(kNNCM-MKHE).We firstly propose a security protocol based on Multi-key Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanathan(BGV)for collaborative evaluation of the kNN classifier provided by multiple model owners.Analyze the operations of kNN and extract basic operations,such as addition,multiplication,and comparison.It supports the computation of encrypted data with different public keys.At the same time,we further design a new scheme that outsources evaluation works to a third-party evaluator who should not have access to the models and data.In the evaluation process,each model owner encrypts the model and uploads the encrypted models to the evaluator.After receiving encrypted the kNN classifier and the user’s inputs,the evaluator calculated the aggregated results.The evaluator will perform a secure computing protocol to aggregate the number of each class label.Then,it sends the class labels with their associated counts to the user.Each model owner and user encrypt the result together.No information will be disclosed to the evaluator.The experimental results show that our new system can securely allow multiple model owners to delegate the evaluation of kNN classifier.

Assessment of Appropriateness of Diagnostic Lymph Node Tissue Collection from the Operating Theater and by Interventional Radiologist. A Clinical Audit

Background: Appropriate sample requesting, collecting and timely dispatch to the appropriate laboratory is essential in establishing diagnosis of pathologies with lesions. Much time and effort may be wasted if this is not done according to certain standards. We conducted this study to assess the route of lymph node samples from requests to reaching the laboratories. Methods: We conducted an audit over a period from 4th June until 10th Aug 2023. Data for all the procedures performed over this period on lymph node samples (was entered into and analysed using Excel. Results: A total of eighteen samples for sixteen patients were obtained during this period. Median age of the patients was 34 years (19 - 73) with a M:F ratio of 5:11. Among the IR samples, nine samples were from the neck, three from inguinal area and one from axilla. Seven samples (53.8%) were tru-cut biopsies, six samples (46.15%) were FNA. All samples were sent to the pathology laboratory fixed in formalin. Samples for TB were sent only for five cases (31.25%) and for only two cases (12.5%) were samples sent for bacterial culture. For the OR samples, none were sent for either bacterial culture or TB. Overall, eight patients (50%) were not investigated for any infectious etiologies like brucella, toxoplasmosis, CMV, EBV plus other possible causes. Repeat sampling was required for 25% of patients (within and out of the audit period). Conclusions: to avoid delays in making diagnoses, it is paramount to consider infectious etiologies as possible diagnosis for lymphadenopathy and request appropriate investigations. This requires liaising with infectious diseases/clinical microbiology experts to guide regarding types of samples, types of media and timely dispatch to the correct laboratory.

A Federated Learning Framework with Blockchain-Based Auditable Participant Selection

Federated learning is an important distributed model training technique in Internet of Things(IoT),in which participant selection is a key component that plays a role in improving training efficiency and model accuracy.This module enables a central server to select a subset of participants to performmodel training based on data and device information.By doing so,selected participants are rewarded and actively perform model training,while participants that are detrimental to training efficiency and model accuracy are excluded.However,in practice,participants may suspect that the central server may have miscalculated and thus not made the selection honestly.This lack of trustworthiness problem,which can demotivate participants,has received little attention.Another problem that has received little attention is the leakage of participants’private information during the selection process.We will therefore propose a federated learning framework with auditable participant selection.It supports smart contracts in selecting a set of suitable participants based on their training loss without compromising the privacy.Considering the possibility of malicious campaigning and impersonation of participants,the framework employs commitment schemes and zero-knowledge proofs to counteract these malicious behaviors.Finally,we analyze the security of the framework and conduct a series of experiments to demonstrate that the framework can effectively improve the efficiency of federated learning.

Stability Study of Low Voltage Electrical Distribution Network: Audit and Improvement of DJEGBE Mini Solar Photovoltaic Power Plant in the Commune of OUESSE (Benin)

The supply of quality energy is a major concern for distribution network managers. This is the case for the company ASEMI, whose subscribers on the DJEGBE mini-power station network are faced with problems of current instability, voltage drops, and repetitive outages. This work is part of the search for the stability of the electrical distribution network by focusing on the audit of the DJEGBE mini photovoltaic solar power plant electrical network in the commune of OUESSE (Benin). This aims to highlight malfunctions on the low-voltage network to propose solutions for improving current stability among subscribers. Irregularities were noted, notably the overloading of certain lines of the PV network, implying poor distribution of loads by phase, which is the main cause of voltage drops;repetitive outages linked to overvoltage caused by lightning and overcurrent due to overload;faulty meters, absence of earth connection at subscribers. Peaks in consumption were obtained at night, which shows that consumption is greater in the evening. We examined the existing situation and processed the data collected, then simulated the energy consumption profiles with the network analyzer “LANGLOIS 6830” and “Excel”. The power factor value recorded is an average of 1, and the minimum value is 0.85. The daily output is 131.08 kWh, for a daily demand of 120 kWh and the average daily consumption is 109.92 kWh, or 83.86% of the energy produced per day. These results showed that the dysfunctions are linked to the distribution and the use of produced energy. Finally, we proposed possible solutions for improving the electrical distribution network. Thus, measures without investment and those requiring investment have been proposed.

Constructing a Triangular Linkage Model of Government Audit,Social Audit,and Internal Audit to Promote High-Quality Development of Audit Services

It is a complex and important topic to study the linkage mechanism of government audit,social audit,and internal audit in the context of China’s high-quality economic development.The implementation of measures,such as establishing a sound and perfect organizational safeguard mechanism,strengthening project collaborative audit mechanism,enhancing the mechanism for utilizing audit results,and establishing an audit and rectification joint mechanism can promote the efficient operation of the audit supervision system and the high-quality development of audit services.