Chingfang Hsu

With increasing global demand for vaccines and the changing level of biotechnology, vaccines become an important force to promote the development of the global pharmaceutical market. Vaccine forms an important basis for human self-protection. At present, existing vaccine supply management is mostly established in a centralized manner with a central authority (CA) for assuring trust. This approach requires that a trusted CA be set up, and it incurs overhead costs in communications and storage in networks. At the same time, issues such as the authenticity, integrity, and privacy are still widespread in vaccine supply management. Therefore, it is crucial to study a vaccine supply management traceability scheme that can be supervised in a decentralized manner and whose data cannot be tampered with or forged. In view of the security and efficiency problems in the existing vaccine supply management traceability scheme, a practical blockchain-based vaccine supply management framework with verifiability and traceability is proposed in this paper. This architecture can solve the lack of centralization in the existing vaccine supply management and the problems of data falsification, tampering, and low work efficiency in the current vaccine supply supervision process. At the same time, aiming at the lack of efficiency and security of the existing signature schemes suitable for consortium chains, an improved SM2 digital signature algorithm based on key distribution authentication and modulo-free inverse operation is designed, which improves the signature efficiency and reliability in the signature verification process. Then, we design a new way to store vaccine production records, which can avoid the forgery and modification of production records by treating the production record of each production step as a separate piece of data. Based on the decentralized and traceable feature of the framework, it can well resolve the trust issue between consumers and the vaccine regulators. Consumers can be allowed to verify the authenticity of vaccine supply management process. In addition, the security analysis shows that the proposed framework meets all desired security requirements. Compared with similar solutions, the proposed scheme takes less computation and communication costs. Hence, our construction is more appropriate for practical vaccine supply management.

Implicit authentication for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) refers to the continuous and transparent identity verification of users by utilizing various vehicle intelligent terminals to collect the user’s behavioral characteristics as authentication factors, ensuring that the connected vehicle remains under the control of a legitimate user at all times. Existing research on implicit authentication mainly focuses on enhancing the robustness and accuracy of the system, but ignores the privacy protection of user behavior characteristics. Since behavioral characteristics involve extremely sensitive personal information, it is imperative to design efficient and secure privacy protection protocols. However, there is currently little research that relies on cryptographic technology to ensure a high level of security while achieving efficient privacy protection. In this paper, we propose a provably secure privacy-preserving cryptographic protocol for implicit authentication in a semi-honest and non-colluding dual-cloud environment, where Weighted MinHash and Jaccard similarity are combined for the first time in an implicit authentication framework to achieve effective privacy protection. Weighted MinHash is used to process multimodal behavioral features, which not only solves the problem of behavioral feature exposure but also reduces the computational cost; while Jaccard similarity is used to evaluate the differences between features. The security of the proposed protocol is proven by cryptographic methods, i.e., using formal and informal security analysis as well as the formal security analysis tool AVISPA. Furthermore, the experimental verification and comparative analysis, e.g., the time complexity and communication bandwidth of connected vehicles, demonstrate that the proposed protocol is effective and practical. In contrast with the most advanced scheme, the time complexity and the communication bandwidth are decreased from $O(n^{3})$ to $O(nm)(m\lt n)$ and from $256qn^{2}+4096$ to $768qm$ , respectively.

The smart environment is a crucial application of the Internet of Things (IoT). Due to its growing security and efficiency needs, recent years have seen the proposal of numerous authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols. Unfortunately, most of existing AKA protocols only support one-to-one AKA and rely on the elliptic curve cryptosystem, resulting in huge overhead. In addition, these protocols fail to consider the resource-asymmetric characteristics of this scenario. That is, the resources on the gateway (GW) side are abundant, while the resources on user sides and device sides are limited. In order to achieve efficient and secure one-to-many AKA establishment in this scenario, where one-to-many means that users can realize key agreements with multiple smart devices (SDs) at the same time. For the first time, this article uses the one-to-many computing structure of the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) to design an efficient one-to-many AKA establishment, which is perfectly adapted to resource-asymmetric allocation in smart environments. Compared with existing solutions, this solution has the following advantages. First, our protocol is suitable for resource-asymmetric environments, where the GW acts as an intermediate node and uses rich resources to integrate multiple AKA requests. Second, the solution supports users to negotiate session keys with multiple SDs at the same time. Third, we prove the protocol’s security under the real-or-random (ROR) model. In addition, we perform formal security verification of the protocol using the automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications (AVISPAs) tool. Finally, the security and efficiency of this solution are superior to similar solutions. Specifically, our solution can meet 18 security and functionality requirements. Compared with the latest similar scheme, assuming that the number of SDs is ten, our scheme reduces the computational cost by 75.75%. At the same time, in terms of communication cost, our protocol reduces it by 37.78%.

The vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a basic component of intelligent transportation systems. Due to the growing security and privacy-preserving requirements of the VANET, a lot of conditional privacy-preserving authentication (CPPA) protocols have been proposed in recent years. Unfortunately, the traditional CPPA protocols, which are based on a trusted authority (TA) and rely solely on classical mathematical problems, cannot resist quantum attacks. Moreover, these protocols do not take into account the increasingly complex traffic flow in the VANET and cannot utilize fog nodes (FNs) to assist in the TA’s authentication work. In this paper, we design a lattice-based and fog-assisted conditional privacy-preserving authentication (LFCPPA) protocol to solve the above challenges. Compared to existing solutions, we have made the following improvements. First, our protocol is resistant to quantum attacks. Second, the solution supports batch processing of signature verification and mutual authentication of identity between the TA / FNs and vehicles. Third, in our design, FNs reduce the computing pressure of the TA to improve the efficiency of the system. In addition, we demonstrate the security of the protocol under the random oracle model with provable security. Finally, the efficiency and security of this scheme are better than similar solutions. Specifically, compared with the latest scheme, in terms of computational cost, our scheme is reduced by 74.47%, 85.58%, 19.69%, and 85.90% in the four stages of the protocol. Meanwhile, in terms of communication cost, our protocol reduces it by 89.98%.

As mobile internet and Internet of Things technologies continue to advance, the application scenarios of peer-to-peer Internet of Drones (IoD) are becoming increasingly diverse. However, the development of IoD also faces significant challenges, such as security, privacy protection, and limited computing power, which require technological innovation to overcome. For group secure communication, it is necessary to provide two basic services, user authentication and group key agreement. Due to the limited storage of IoD devices, group key negotiation requires lightweight calculations, and conventional schemes cannot satisfy the requirements of group communication in the IoD. To this end, a new lightweight communication scheme based on ring neighbors is presented in this paper for IoD, which not only realizes the identity verification of user and group key negotiation, but also improves computational efficiency on each group member side. A detailed security analysis substantiates that the designed scheme is capable of withstanding attacks from both internal and external adversaries while satisfying all defined security requirements. More importantly, in our proposal, the computational cost on the user side remains unaffected by the variability of the number of members participating in group communication, as members communicate in a non-interactive manner through broadcasting. As a result, the protocol proposed in this article demonstrates lower computational and communication costs in comparison to other cryptographic schemes. Hence, this proposal presents a more appealing approach to lightweight group key agreement protocol with user authentication for application in the IoD.

Skyline queries is an advanced data mining algorithm suitable for multi-criteria decision-making scenarios (i.e., medical pre-diagnosis). Privacy-preserving skyline queries schemes are usually constructed by certain methods of cryptography such as additive homomorphic cryptosystem, secret sharing technology, etc. Interestingly, these secure skyline queries schemes require that skyline computations do not reveal any message details, including encrypted inter-tuple domination relations, among which privacy schemes based on homomorphic cryptosystems are the most popular due to their strong security. However, existing secure skyline queries schemes not only suffer from low computational efficiency, but also do not have sufficient security for privacy-key management in the system. To address the above issues, this paper designs an efficient and privacy-preserving skyline queries over encrypted data under a blockchain-based audit architecture. Firstly, we propose a blockchain-based audit architecture that not only provides error auditing functionality but also makes our scheme suitable for (distributed) multi-user scenarios while providing secure key management in the system. Secondly, we implement a series of secure sub-protocols using the CRT-Based Paillier encryption algorithm and construct a privacy sparse matrix elimination protocol to reduce the size of the dataset, leading to a significant reduction in computational cost without compromising privacy. Finally, we put forward our secure skyline queries protocol and prove its security. The performance evaluation shows that our proposed method our proposed method is significantly more efficient (at least 7.4 times faster) compared to current methods.