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Online First, unedited articles published online and citable. The final edited and typeset version of record will appear in the future.
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  • Xu Fei, Ye Cheng, Ouyang Jie, Wu Ziqiang, Chen Haoze, Miao Yajun, Qi Wei
    Accepted: 2026-09-23

    As a key infrastructure for the circulation of data elements, a trusted data space relies on blockchain technology to ensure operational security through data immutability and traceability. However, blockchain security is founded on classical cryptography and conventional consensus mechanisms, and the rise of quantum computing is undermining the security basis of existing blockchain systems. Quantum key distribution (QKD) and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) are currently the two main technical approaches to addressing the threat posed by quantum computing. QKD enables information-theoretically secure key agreement between distant parties. After more than forty years of development, it has made significant progress in both practicality and security, and a prototype of a globally integrated space-ground QKD network has begun to take shape, providing blockchain with a new cryptographic tool for quantum resistance. To address this issue, a secure dynamic consensus mechanism against quantum-computing attacks is designed for permissioned blockchain scenarios. By introducing QKD, it realizes message authentication and signatures among blockchain nodes, significantly enhancing the security of the consensus process. It further adopts an automatic primary-node carousel mechanism based on a consistent hash ring. This mechanism requires only verification of the version of the configuration table carried in messages to achieve secure dynamic node replacement and balanced allocation of authority. Finally, based on the proposed consensus mechanism, a complete blockchain system framework with quantum-resistant security is developed, followed by security analysis and efficiency evaluation. The resulting blockchain system, built on a QKD network, provides a quantum-secure solution for the secure, trustworthy, and scalable operation of trusted data spaces in the era of quantum computing.

  • Peng Yijie, Li Xin, Li Mingfeng, Wu Haobo, Liu Mingshuai, Chen Dongxian, Zhao Xiaofan
    Accepted: 2026-09-10

    Large language models have the fundamental property of responding to user requests as information tools, and this property also brings potential security risks that may be exploited. RIVAL, the Reflective Information-Valued Action Loop framework, strategically accumulates and assembles harmless information fragments scattered across multi-turn dialogues into complete attack sequences that breach safety boundaries, transforming LLMs' core attributes into exploitable security vulnerabilities. The framework employs a query-response synergistic assessment system to continuously quantify information gain and toxicity deviation in each interaction, driving reflective action loops for dynamic strategy optimization. Under rigorous StrongReject evaluation, RIVAL achieves a 93% average success rate across five non-Claude mainstream LLMs, representing a 10 percentage point improvement over the best baseline, with convincingness and specificity scores improving by 15-25%. Even against Claude-3.7-Sonnet with the strongest defenses, RIVAL maintains a 71% success rate. This work reveals the "temporal-cumulative threat" in LLM security mechanisms: seemingly independent harmless interactions can accumulate into high-information-density attack contexts, providing critical insights for developing context-aware defense strategies.

  • Meng Haoyang, Wang Kang, Huang Chenqi, Tang Yunqi, Wang Danlin, Deng Yuyang
    Accepted: 2026-09-01

    In response to the security threats posed by deepfake speech technology to identity authentication, media credibility, and forensic evidence, this paper presents a systematic survey of deepfake speech detection driven by Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) speech representations from 2020 to 2026. First, this paper provides a broad overview of deepfake speech generation techniques and detection tasks, clarifying the key characteristics of the deepfake speech detection problem. Second, it analyzes the pre-training mechanisms and layer-wise representation distribution patterns of representative SSL backbones, including wav2vec 2.0, HuBERT, WavLM, and XLS-R. Then, existing methods are summarized from multiple perspectives, including structural back-end modeling, layer-wise and multi-source feature fusion, open-set learning objectives, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), post-training, lightweight deployment, datasets, and evaluation protocols. Existing studies suggest that different SSL layers may provide complementary characterizations of vocoder artifacts, prosodic abnormalities, and speaker-attribute shifts, and that, in most reported settings, appropriate layer-wise fusion and low-cost adaptation can help improve cross-domain robustness. Finally, this paper summarizes key challenges, including large-model-driven emerging attacks, cross-lingual generalization, adversarial robustness, lightweight real-time deployment, explainability, and compliance, and suggests that continual learning, multimodal verification, and forgery-oriented specialized pre-training may be directions worth further attention.

  • Xie Huabao, Zhou Yanrong, Guan Zhitao
    Accepted: 2026-08-07

    MQTT, a lightweight publish/subscribe protocol widely used in Internet of Things scenarios, was studied for fuzzing of MQTT brokers under multi-party interaction scenarios, where input mutation lacked semantic awareness, state representation was coarse grained, and asynchronous interactions among multiple clients were insufficiently covered. A fuzzing method for MQTT under multi-party interaction scenarios was proposed. An initial seed corpus was built through global temporal interaction scenario modeling, and grammar-aware mutation, multi-client coordinated execution, and fine-grained state extraction with guided scheduling were combined to direct exploration of deep protocol logic in MQTT brokers. Based on this method, a prototype system named MQTTFuzzer was designed and implemented. Comparative experiments and ablation analyses on several open-source MQTT brokers showed that the method outperformed baseline tools in code coverage and state-space exploration and discovered both known and previously unknown security flaws. The results show that the method provides effective support for security testing of publish/subscribe protocol implementations.

  • Gong Yunping, Li Xiong, Wen Bo, Wu Chunling, Lu Xianzhi
    Accepted: 2026-07-29

    Oblivious Random Access Machine (ORAM) is a cryptographic primitive designed to obfuscate memory access patterns, ensuring that access sequences do not divulge sensitive information when data is stored on untrusted servers. Amidst the rapid expansion of cloud computing and the escalating demand for privacy protection, ORAM has transitioned from theoretical constructs to practical technologies, with bandwidth overheads progressively reducing from the square-root order of magnitude to the theoretically optimal logarithmic order. This study aims to systematically review the research advancements in ORAM cryptographic protocols. First, it presents the fundamental model, security definitions, and core performance metrics of ORAM. Second, it delineates classic construction schemes, including tree-based ORAM, hierarchical ORAM, multi-server ORAM, and their evolutionary trajectories. Third, it expounds on performance enhancement techniques such as bandwidth optimization, storage efficiency improvement, interaction round reduction, and hardware co-design. Finally, it summarizes the applications of ORAM in secure cloud storage, trusted execution environments, multi-party computation, blockchain, and federated learning, analyzes the prevailing trade-off dilemmas and side-channel security challenges, and outlines future research directions.

  • Zhang Jingwei, Sun Sa, Yang Shuai, Wu Ying, Zhang Xiaojun
    Accepted: 2026-06-29

    With the rapid development and wide application of cloud computing and the medical Internet of Things, massive medical data have become the core strategic resource in the medical field. While cloud storage supports the management of such data, it also brings the challenges of privacy protection and efficient retrieval. Existing searchable encryption schemes suffer from low retrieval efficiency over massive data, lack of semantic relevance, and unverifiable results, making it difficult to adapt to the retrieval requirements of medical data. This paper proposes a verifiable searchable encryption scheme that supports semantic search over massive medical data. The scheme designs a two-stage retrieval architecture of “coarse matching + fine ranking”. Fast coarse matching of massive high-dimensional semantic vectors is achieved based on locality-sensitive hashing, and accurate sorting in the ciphertext domain is achieved by designing privacy-preserving Euclidean distance comparison mechanism. A batch verification mechanism with public-key encryption and private-key verification is constructed to verify the correctness of retrieval results. Meanwhile, an improved matrix-based Learning with Errors (LWE) encryption mode is exploited to build a full-process ciphertext-domain interaction mechanism, which realizes the confidentiality of medical data features in a quantum-resistant environment, and guarantees the privacy security of medical data and retrieval intentions under multi-subject collaboration. Performance analysis and experimental simulations demonstrate the search computation time of the scheme is no more than 25 seconds for one million data items, which is much lower than existing linear-scan retrieval schemes. In terms of communication overhead, it is reduced by 50% compared with other schemes supporting vector retrieval. The proposed scheme has outstanding performance advantages and can effectively satisfy the privacy-preserving retrieval requirements of massive medical data.

  • Wu Wei, Li Zhonghui, Yang Yang
    Accepted: 2026-06-01

    In today's healthcare environments, protecting sensitive medical data—such as electronic health records and medical images—has become increasingly critical due to the inherent limitations of traditional encryption systems and the rapidly emerging threat of quantum computing attacks. To effectively address these pressing vulnerabilities, this paper proposes a post-quantum medical data protection scheme integrating a Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM) with decentralized Blockchain technology. The proposed scheme employs ML-KEM to facilitate a quantum-resistant key exchange process and introduces an HKDF-based hierarchical key derivation mechanism combined with AES-256 to achieve parallel hybrid encryption. To eliminate single-point storage vulnerabilities, a dual-layer architecture is adopted: the data layer applies Reed-Solomon erasure coding for efficient fault-tolerant sharding, while the control layer applies Shamir's Secret Sharing to the ML-KEM encapsulation ciphertext, with all shares distributed across the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for decentralized storage. Furthermore, the system utilizes Blockchain technology alongside smart contracts to enforce tamper-proof access control and provide transparent log recording for all user activities. Comprehensive security analysis and simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme successfully withstands both classical and quantum cryptographic attacks, thereby guaranteeing data confidentiality and integrity. In addition, the system maintains a relatively low computational overhead during daily operations. Finally, this research improves the fault tolerance and security of distributed medical storage systems while enhancing the practical deployability and long-term scalability of the proposed scheme.

  • Chen Lin, Liu Xize, Li Shaohu, Guo Chong
    Accepted: 2026-06-01

    With the in-depth development of digital transformation, data security risk assessment is confronted with challenges such as incomplete assessment indicators, strong subjectivity in weight distribution, and non-intuitive risk ranking. This paper proposes a data security risk assessment model integrating analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). Based on the national standard GB/T45577-2025, an assessment system is established covering three primary indicators including data security management, data processing activity security and data security technology, as well as 24 secondary indicators. Secondly, the double-layer AHP method is used to calculate index weights, and subjective deviation is reduced via expert scoring and consistency test. Finally, TOPSIS is adopted to comprehensively rank hazard degrees of different data security risks and realize quantitative assessment of data security risks. Case analysis shows that this model can effectively identify hazard degrees of various data security risks, providing a scientific basis for decision-making of data security risk management.

  • Fan Yunhua, Jia Hongyong
    Accepted: 2026-06-01

    Attribute-based signatures facilitate the privacy hiding of signers and can provide cryptographic primitive support for anonymous authentication in networks such as electronic healthcare systems. However, most of the existing attribute-based signature schemes manage the user's attribute key by means of centralized authorization. If the attribute authorization authority is controlled by an adversary, the adversary can forge any user's attribute key and generate legitimate signatures instead of the user in order to gain illegal benefits. Therefore, the attribute key escrow problem has become a security bottleneck limiting the application and development of attribute-based signatures. In view of the above deficiencies, we first present the definition and security model of our certificateless attribute-based threshold signature; Then, we propose a key-escrow-free attribute-based threshold signature scheme, which removes the centralized honest attribute authorization authority and entrusts the management authority of the user's attribute key to the system authorization authority and the attribute authorization authority respectively by adopting the idea of certificateless; Finally, formal security analysis proves that the proposed scheme not only achieves unconditional anonymity, but also ensures that the signature is existentially unforgeable against two types of attackers in the certificateless cryptosystem under the random oracle model.

  • Li Haotian, Su Zhaopin, Yue Feng, Qiao Yatao, Wang Yaofei, Zhang Guofu
    Accepted: 2026-06-01

    With the widespread use of online audio-sharing platforms, audio steganography based covert communication is rapidly shifting from traditional lossless channels to lossy channels. The signal processing, secondary compression, and format conversion applied by these platforms severely affect the reliability of secret information during transmission. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a robust and lightweight audio steganography method to meet the demands of robustness and lightweight deployment in lossy channels such as audio-sharing platforms. Specifically, this paper constructs an “audio-in-audio” steganography framework based on a generative adversarial network (GAN), which consists of an encoder, a decoder, a discriminator, and a simulation attacker. Then, inspired by the lightweight design philosophy of GhostNet, this paper develops new encoder and decoder structures, where low-cost linear transformations are employed to replace traditional convolution operations, significantly reducing model parameters and computational complexity. Furthermore, this paper incorporates residual structures to enhance training stability. Finally, this paper designs a simulation attacker, which leverages an attention mechanism and a volume gain module to mimic the information loss encountered in real-world audio-sharing scenarios, thereby improving robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance in audio imperceptibility, secret information extraction accuracy, and model parameter scale control. By significantly reducing model complexity while maintaining a balance between the concealment and anti-attack capability of audio steganography, the method shows strong potential for practical applications in audio-sharing platforms.

  • Wang Wendong, Cao Xinying, Yuan Chao, Li Dawei, Lü Jiqiang
    Accepted: 2026-05-22

    Neural networks, as powerful nonlinear modeling tools, demonstrate unique advantages across multiple fields and have recently begun to show their potential in the field of cryptography, providing new technical insights for encrypted data analysis. The deep neural network model is utilized to learn the mapping relationship from the internal functions of the known encryption algorithm, and an encryption neural network model functionally equivalent to the original algorithm is constructed based on the chain of thought pattern. Through the meticulous design of efficient neural network structures and the construction of appropriate training datasets, the equivalent neural network simulation of basic operations (XOR, OR, AND, modular addition, cyclic shift, S-box transformation, row shift and column mixing) for block cipher algorithms is realized. On this basis, the learning of encryption and key expansion functions is conducted on four typical block cipher algorithms, namely AES-128, SM4, SIMON32/64 and SPECK64/96, and the accuracy and stability of the model in different application scenarios are verified. Experimental results show that the simulation success rate of the model on AES-128, SM4 and SIMON32/64 reaches 100%, and the success rate on SPECK64/96 reaches 97%. The equivalent neural network learning of block cipher algorithms based on chain of thought cannot only accurately learn the operation logic of the original encryption algorithm, but also effectively simulate its key expansion process, with high simulation accuracy and stability.