Search Results (10)

Secure cross-domain UAV authentication is challenging because identity verification alone is insufficient to guarantee safe operation. In many UAV applications, it is equally critical to verify that a UAV is currently located within an authorized geographic region. Existing approaches often expose precise GPS coordinates, rely on static identifiers that enable tracking, or fail to guarantee the freshness and authenticity of location evidence. These weaknesses allow replay, location spoofing, and trajectory inference attacks, especially in multi-domain environments. To address these limitations, we propose PrivLocAuth, a zero-knowledge-based cross-domain UAV authentication protocol that enforces geofence restrictions without revealing actual locations. In PrivLocAuth, UAVs encode their current coordinates into fresh Pedersen commitments, which are attested by the home Local Domain Server (LDS) using short-lived Schnorr signatures. Based on these attested commitments, UAVs generate Bulletproof range proofs to demonstrate compliance with cross-domain server-defined geofences. This design ensures that UAVs operate within authorized airspace while preserving strong location privacy. PrivLocAuth further incorporates a lightweight elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and Schnorr signature-based credential framework that enables unlinkable authentication across-domains, preventing session correlation and identity tracking. Formal security analysis demonstrates resistance to impersonation, replay, geofence-bypass, and linkage attacks. Experimental evaluation shows low computational latency and minimal communication overhead, confirming the protocol’s suitability for resource-constrained UAV platforms operating in dynamic cross-domain environments. Full article

In the context of digital certification systems, the demand for privacy-preserving authentication is increasingly vital, particularly for critical applications that involve sensitive personal data. Traditional digital signatures provide a robust means of implementing such systems. However, they raise significant privacy concerns due to their public verifiability, which allows verifiers to prove the authenticity of the received sensitive data to third parties. Universal designated verifier signature (UDVS) schemes address these privacy risks by offering non-transferability, ensuring that only the specified verifier can confirm the validity of the designated verifier signature (DVS). However, despite their advantages, existing UDVS models exhibit vulnerabilities that may allow tracking of the user’s authentications among cooperating verifiers and enable third parties to be convinced of the authenticity of sensitive user data by retrieving DVSs from different, non-cooperating verifiers. This paper presents a strategy to achieve strong non-transferability, which effectively addresses these vulnerabilities, by being the first to extend the concept of randomizability to UDVS schemes and their security properties. Our findings demonstrate that a randomizable UDVS scheme can serve as a solid foundation for constructing strong non-transferable UDVS schemes. Finally, we propose an efficient, strong, non-transferable UDVS scheme as an instantiation of our strategy, utilizing state-of-the-art Type 3 pairings, significantly improving upon previous constructions. Full article

Memory resident malware, particularly fileless and heavily obfuscated types, continues to pose a major problem for endpoint defense tools, as these threats often slip past traditional signature-based detection techniques. Deep learning has shown promise in identifying such malicious activity, but its use in real Security Operations Centers (SOCs) is still limited because the internal reasoning of these neural network models is difficult to interpret or verify. In response to this challenge, we present HAGEN, a hierarchical attention architecture designed to combine strong classification performance with explanations that security analysts can understand and trust. HAGEN processes memory artifacts through a series of attention layers that highlight important behavioral cues at different scales, while a gated mechanism controls how information flows through the network. This structure enables the system to expose the basis of its decisions rather than simply output a label. To further support transparency, the final classification step is guided by representative prototypes, allowing predictions to be related back to concrete examples learned during training. When evaluated on the CIC-MalMem-2022 dataset, HAGEN achieved 99.99% accuracy in distinguishing benign programs from major malware classes such as spyware, ransomware, and trojans, all with modest computational requirements suitable for live environments. Beyond accuracy, HAGEN produces clear visual and numeric explanations—such as attention maps and prototype distances—that help investigators understand which memory patterns contributed to each decision, making it a practical tool for both detection and forensic analysis. Full article

Smart contracts rely on blockchain oracles to access off-chain data, yet existing oracle designs often face challenges such as untrustworthy data sources, weak temporal guarantees, and limited verifiability. This work presents Ivy Oracle, a robust and time-trustworthy data feed framework that enhances the reliability and auditability of off-chain information for smart contracts. Ivy Oracle integrates trusted execution environments (TEEs) for secure data acquisition, an external time server for authenticated timestamps, and a PageRank-based trust model to evaluate source credibility. We implement and evaluate Ivy Oracle on the Ethereum Sepolia testnet, demonstrating that it achieves up to 63.6% lower on-chain gas consumption than Chainlink for signature verification while maintaining only a slight increase in communication overhead due to its dual-attestation mechanism. These results confirm that Ivy Oracle provides strong time trustworthiness and data reliability with minimal performance cost, making it suitable for latency-sensitive blockchain applications. Full article

Hyperspectral imaging systems are widely used in precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, and mineral exploration. However, current systems often suffer from high cost, large size and weight, and considerable system complexity, which hinder their widespread deployment. To overcome these limitations and achieve a better balance between performance, cost, and portability, this work aims to develop a compact, cost-effective visible-to-near-infrared (VNIR, 400–1000 nm) hyperspectral camera based on Schwarzschild configuration and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. The development followed a comprehensive methodology encompassing theoretical design, simulation, prototype assembly, and performance testing. The all-reflective optical system effectively eliminates chromatic aberration and minimizes energy loss, achieving an integration time as short as several milliseconds and a push-broom frame rate of 200 fps. The optical design leveraged optical path length theory and the unobscured Schwarzschild structure to optimize off-axis mirrors and a plane grating. Optical performance was optimized and verified using simulations, which confirmed that spot sizes at all field positions were highly concentrated and that critical distortions such as smile and keystone were controlled within several pixels. A prototype was assembled on a precision optical bench using multi-axis adjustable mounts and then integrated into a precisely machined housing, achieving a total weight less than 2 kg. Calibration verified a spectral coverage of 400–1000 nm and a resolution of 5 nm. Imaging experiments demonstrated the system’s ability to resolve subtle spectral features, successfully distinguishing different vegetations and artificial materials based on their spectral signatures—particularly the strong NIR (780–1000 nm) reflectance of vegetation versus synthetic green materials. The camera offers a high-performance, low-cost solution suitable for applications including precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, mineral exploration, and others. Full article

The traditional Internet has many security problems. It is difficult to guarantee the authenticity, integrity, and synchronization of message transmission, and it lacks a message-traceability mechanism, which is caused by its performance-oriented design. To address these problems, this paper proposes a memorable communication method based on cryptographic accumulators. In this method, both parties in the communication can verify the message data sent and received arbitrarily by virtue of the memory value. As long as a simple memory value comparison is performed, the strong consistency of all message data can be ensured. This method has the security advantages of synchronization, verification, traceability, and non-tamperability, as well as the performance advantages brought by batch signature and verification. In this paper, the memorable communication model, the memory function, and the memorable communication process are designed, and theoretical analysis shows that the memorable communication method has synchronization and traceability and can realize batch signature and authentication. In addition, a chain-key can be constructed based on a memory value to achieve key per-packet updating. Comparative analysis shows the transmission efficiency, traceability efficiency, and security performance of the memorable communication method. Full article

In modern applications, such as Electronic Voting, e-Health, e-Cash, there is a need that the validity of a signature should be verified by only one responsible person. This is opposite to the traditional digital signature scheme where anybody can verify a signature. There have been several solutions for this problem, the first one is we combine a signature scheme with an encryption scheme; the second one is to use the group signature; and the last one is to use the strong designated verifier signature scheme with the undeniable property. In this paper, we extend the traditional digital signature scheme to propose a new solution for the aforementioned problem. Our extension is in the sense that only a designated verifier (responsible person) can verify a signer’s signature, and if necessary (in case the signer refuses to admit his/her signature) the designated verifier without revealing his/her secret key is able to prove to anybody that the signer has actually generated the signature. The comparison between our proposed solution and the three existing solutions shows that our proposed solution is the best one in terms of both security and efficiency. Full article

Strong designated verifier signature can provide an efficient way to protect the identity privacy of the signer and the integrity of the data transmitted over the public channel. These characteristics make it very useful in outsourcing computing, electronic voting, electronic bidding, electronic auction and other fields. However, most strong designated verifier signature schemes are unable to identify the real signature generator when the signer and the designated verifier dispute a signature. In addition, the existing strong designated verifier signature schemes in the standard model rarely satisfy strong unforgeability, and thus cannot prevent the attacker from forging a valid signature on any previously signed message. Therefore, designing a strong designated verifier signature scheme without random oracles that satisfies strong unforgeability and undeniability is very attractive in both practice and theory. Motivated by these concerns, we design the first undeniable strong designated verifier signature scheme without random oracles, in which the arbiter can independently perform the judgment procedure to prove whether a controversial signature is generated by the signer or the designated verifier. Under standard assumptions, the scheme is proved to be strongly unforgeable in standard model. Furthermore, it not only achieves non-transferability and privacy of the signer’s identity but also satisfies the undeniable property of traditional digital signature schemes. Performance analysis results show that the length of the signer’s private key, the designated verifier’s private key and signature length are 40 bits, 40 bits and 384 bits, respectively. Compared with he related schemes, the proposed scheme has higher performance in signature length, private key size and computational overhead. Finally, we show how to apply it to implement outsourcing computation in cloud computing. Full article

With the rapid popularization of the Internet of Things (IoT) in our daily lives, the communication security and identity privacy of IoT devices must be ensured. However, traditional authentication mechanisms utilized in IoT cannot completely ensure a user’s privacy when his/her messages are routed via an untrusted intermediate device. Strong designated-verifier proxy re-signature (SDVPRS) is a new cryptographic technology that combines the advantages of strong designated verifier signature and proxy re-signature. Therefore, SDVPRS is considered to be a better approach to maintain data integrity and protect the identity privacy of the signer in a resource-limited IoT device. Nevertheless, designing a secure SDVPRS scheme without random oracles is still a challenging task. In this paper, we mainly focus on such a construction by providing a new method. We first provide the formal definition of SDVPRS and its security model. Then, we present the first SDVPRS scheme, which is bidirectional, multi-use and non-transferable, and we prove its security under the standard complexity assumptions in the standard model. The analysis results show that our SDVPRS scheme can not only protect the privacy of the signer’s identity, but also provide non-delegatability for signature verification. We present an example of potential application to environmental monitoring systems using our SDVPRS scheme. Full article

We present a novel technique for source authentication of a packet stream in a network, which intends to give guarantees that a specific network flow really comes from a claimed origin. This mechanism, named packet level authentication (PLA), can be an essential tool for addressing Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Based on designated verifier signature schemes, our proposal is an appropriate and unprecedented solution applying digital signatures for DoS prevention. Our scheme does not rely on an expensive public-key infrastructure and makes use of light cryptography machinery that is suitable in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). We analyze our proposed scheme as a defense measure considering known DoS attacks and present a formal proof of its resilience face to eventual adversaries. Furthermore, we compare our solution to already existent strategies, highlighting its advantages and drawbacks. Full article