Zhe Liu

• University of Luxembourg

Transformer-based models are widely used in natural language processing tasks, and their application has been further extended to computer vision as well. In their usage, data security has become a crucial concern when deploying deep learning services on cloud platforms. To address these security concerns, Multi-party computation (MPC) is employed...

Genomic data is usually stored in a decentralized manner among data providers, who cannot share them publicly due to privacy concerns. A significant technical challenge is to combine machine learning and cryptography techniques to build secure machine learning models over distributed datasets without violating privacy. Therefore, data providers in...

The onerous media sharing task prompts resource-constrained media owners to seek help from a cloud platform, i.e., storing media contents in the cloud and letting the cloud do the sharing. There are three key security/privacy problems that need to be solved in the cloud media sharing scenario, including data privacy leakage and access control in th...

Multiview clustering has become a prominent research topic in data analysis, with wide-ranging applications across various fields. However, the existing late fusion multiview clustering (LFMVC) methods still exhibit some limitations, including variable importance and contributions and a heightened sensitivity to noise and outliers during the alignm...

Probabilistic Hoare logic (PHL) is an extension of Hoare logic and is specifically useful in verifying randomized programs. It allows researchers to formally reason about the behavior of programs with stochastic elements, ensuring the desired probabilistic properties are upheld. The relative completeness of satisfaction-based PHL has been an open p...

The severe challenge encountered in cross-silo federated learning (FL) is the performance degradation caused by data heterogeneity. To overcome it, we propose two methods, FedGDI and FedCI, identifying these clients with unbalanced categories based on an interpretability mechanism. We firstly iteratively generate feature maps of last global model a...

While side-channel attacks (SCAs) have become a significant threat to cryptographic algorithms, masking is considered as an effective countermeasure against SCAs. On the one hand, securely implementing the scheme is a challenging and error-prone task. It is essential to detect leakage in a complicated cryptographic circuit. However, the traditional...

The demand for mobile terminals to participate in data services is increasingly vital. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has established several principled requirements for data services. Existing studies focusing on data service put emphasis on data privacy and accessibility. However, they face challenges in achieving data forgetabilit...

In this paper, we propose a novel physical stealth attack against the person detectors in real world. For the first time, we consider the impacts of those complex and challenging 3D physical constraints ( e.g. , radian, wrinkle, occlusion, angle, etc .) on person stealth attacks, and propose 3D transformations to generate robust 3D invisible clo...

As the most popular consensus algorithm for blockchain, the Proof-of-Work (PoW) is suffering from the inability of handling computing power fluctuations. Meanwhile, PoW consumes a significant amount of energy without producing actual value. To address these issues, this paper proposes a deep learning-based consensus framework called Proof-of-Improv...

Smart contracts are slowly penetrating our society where they are leveraged to support critical business transactions of which financial stakes are high. Smart contract programming is, however, in its infancy, and many failures due to programming defects exploited by malicious attackers and have made the headlines. In recent years, there has been a...

As an essential component part of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) plays a vital role in alleviating traffic issues. Object detection is one of the key technologies in the IoV, which has been widely used to provide traffic management services by analyzing timely and sensitive vehicle-related information. H...

Vertical federated learning is designed to protect user privacy by building local models over disparate datasets and transferring intermediate parameters without directly revealing the underlying data. However, the intermediate parameters uploaded by participants may memorize information about the training data. With the recent legislation on the“r...

With the development of quantum computing, the existing cryptography schemes based on classical cryptographic primitives will no longer be secure. Hence, cryptographers are designing post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) schemes, and ideal lattice-based cryptography has emerged as a prime candidate. Today, as ideal lattice-based cryptography becomes mor...

Website fingerprinting attack is an extensively studied technique used in a web browser to analyze traffic patterns and thus infer confidential information about users. Several website fingerprinting attacks based on machine learning and deep learning tend to use the most typical features to achieve a satisfactory performance of attacking rate. How...

Open-source software has attracted more and more attention from practitioners. At the same time, many Chinese tech companies are embracing open source and opting for open source projects. Most previous research has focused on international companies such as Microsoft or Google, while the actual value of open source projects by Chinese tech companie...

Fix pattern-based patch generation is a promising direction in automated program repair (APR). Notably, it has been demonstrated to produce more acceptable and correct patches than the patches obtained with mutation operators through genetic programming. The performance of pattern-based APR systems, however, depends on the fix ingredients mined fro...

The Multi-receiver Encryption (MRE) scheme can meet the secure data transmission requirements in multicast and broadcast scenarios. To meet compliance, critical information infrastructure in China should be protected with Chinese national commercial cryptographic algorithms. Designing an MRE scheme based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is one...

Outsourcing the heavy decryption computation to a cloud service provider has been a promising solution for a resource-constrained mobile device to deploy an attribute-based encryption scheme. However, the current attribute based encryption with outsourced decryption schemes only enable the mobile device to verify whether the cloud service provider...

Cloud computing, which provides adequate storage and computation capability, has been a prevalent information infrastructure. Secure data sharing is a basic demand when data was outsourced to a cloud server. Attribute-based proxy re-encryption has been a promising approach that allows secure encrypted data sharing on clouds. With attribute-based pr...

Matrix computation is a crucial mathematical tool in scientific fields such as Artificial Intelligence and Cryptographic computation. However, it is difficult for resource-limited devices to execute large-scale matrix computations independently. Outsourcing matrix computation (OMC) is a promising solution that engages a cloud server to process comp...

Clone detection is widely exploited for software vulnerability search. The approaches based on source code analysis cannot be applied to binary clone detection because the same source code can produce significantly different binaries. In this paper, we present BinSeeker, a cross-platform binary seeker that integrates semantic learning and emulation...

Deep learning techniques have achieved promising results in code clone detection in the past decade. Unfortunately, current deep learning-based methods rarely explicitly consider the modeling of long codes. Worse, the code length is increasing due to the increasing requirement of complex functions. Thus, modeling the relationship between code token...

As the pre-trained language models (PLMs) continue to grow, so do the hardware and data requirements for fine-tuning PLMs. Therefore, the researchers have come up with a lighter method called \textit{Prompt Learning}. However, during the investigations, we observe that the prompt learning methods are vulnerable and can easily be attacked by some il...

As the pre-trained language models (PLMs) continue to grow, so do the hardware and data requirements for fine-tuning PLMs. Therefore, the researchers have come up with a lighter method called Prompt Learning. However, during the investigations, we observe that the prompt learning methods are vulnerable and can easily be attacked by some illegally c...

This paper presents an improved Plantard’s modular arithmetic (Plantard arithmetic) tailored for Lattice-Based Cryptography (LBC). Based on the improved Plantard arithmetic, we present faster implementations of two LBC schemes, Kyber and NTTRU, running on Cortex-M4. The intrinsic advantage of Plantard arithmetic is that one multiplication can be sa...

The Toom-Cook method is a well-known strategy for building algorithms to multiply polynomials efficiently. Along with NTT-based polynomial multiplication, Toom-Cook-based or Karatsuba-based polynomial multiplication algorithms still have regained attention since the start of the NIST’s post-quantum standardization procedure. Compared to the compreh...

Federated Learning (FL) is a framework where multiple parties can train a model jointly without sharing private data. Private information protection is a critical problem in FL. However, the communication overheads of existing solutions are too heavy for IoT devices in resource‐constrained environments. Additionally, they cannot ensure robustness w...

A significant body of automated program repair literature relies on test suites to assess the validity of generated patches. Because such oracles are weak, state-of-the-art repair tools can validate some patches that overfit the test cases but are actually incorrect. This situation has become a prime concern in APR, hindering its adoption by the in...

Deep graph learning has achieved remarkable progresses in both business and scientific areas ranging from finance and e-commerce, to drug and advanced material discovery. Despite these progresses, how to ensure various deep graph learning algorithms behave in a socially responsible manner and meet regulatory compliance requirements becomes an emerg...

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are control devices widely used in industrial automation. They can be found in critical infrastructures like power grids, water systems, nuclear plants, manufacturing systems, etc. This paper introduces PLCrypto, a software cryptographic library that implements lightweight symmetric cryptographic algorithms for...

Isogenies between elliptic curves play a very important role in elliptic curve related cryptosystems and cryptanalysis. It is widely known that different models of elliptic curves would induce different computational costs of elliptic curve arithmetic, and several works have been devoted to accelerate the isogeny computation on various curve models...

Smart contracts are becoming more and more popular in financial scenarios like medical insurance. Rather than traditional schemes, using smart contracts as a medium is a better choice for both participants, as it is fairer, more reliable, more efficient, and enables real-time payment. However, medical insurance contracts need to input the patient's...

Saber is a module-lattice-based key encapsulation scheme that has been selected as a finalist in the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization project. As Saber computes on considerably large matrices and vectors of polynomials, its efficient implementation on memory-constrained IoT devices is very challenging. In this paper, we present an imp...

Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly being used in real life, especially in the eHealthcare field. Among eHealthcare, the application of predicting patients' health status based on their daily activity data which is collected by IoT equipment has attracted extensive attentions and researches. In this application, patients' data which are treate...

Recent researches demonstrate that deep learning models are vulnerable to membership inference attacks. Few defenses have been proposed, but suffer from compromising the performance or quality of the target model, or cannot effectively resist membership inference attacks. This paper proposes an adversarial example based privacy-preserving technique...

Tree-based models are wildly adopted in various real-world scenarios. Recently, there is a growing interest in vertical federated tree-based model learning to build tree-based models by exploiting data from multiple organizations without violating data privacy regulations. However, most existing work focuses on batch learning settings where all tra...

Trigger-action programming (TAP) is an intelligent tool, which makes it easy for users to make intelligent rules for IoT devices and applications. Unfortunately, with the popularization of TAP and more and more rules, the rule chain from multiple rules appears gradually and brings more and more threats. Previous work pays more attention to the cons...

EdDSA is a digital signature scheme based on elliptic curves in Edwards form that is supported in the latest incarnation of the TLS protocol (i.e. TLS version 1.3). The straightforward way of verifying an EdDSA signature involves a costly double-scalar multiplication of the form \(kP - lQ\) where P is a “fixed” point (namely the generator of the un...

Distance-bounding (DB) protocols are used to verify the physical proximity of two devices. Thresholds and error correction codes (ECCs) are two methods to provide error-resilience for DB protocols working in noisy environments. However, the threshold method adds overheads and the ECC method increases the adversary success probability, compared to t...

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are control devices widely used in industrial automation. They can be found in critical infrastructures like power grids, water systems, nuclear plants, manufacturing systems, etc. This paper introduces PLCrypto, a software cryptographic library that implements lightweight symmetric cryptographic algorithms for...

Low Entropy Masking Schemes (LEMS) had been proposed to mitigate the high-performance overhead results from the Full Entropy Masking Schemes (FEMS) while offering good protection against side-channel attacks. The masking schemes usually rely on Boolean masking, however, splitting sensitive variables in a multiplicative way is more amenable to non-l...

SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system is widely used in industrial control and the contemporary Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Unfortunately, due to its relatively weak design in terms of data security and access control, SCADA systems are becoming a favorite target for attackers. End-to-end encryption such as SSL/TLS proto...

As quantum computers become more affordable and commonplace, existing security systems that are based on classical cryptographic primitives, such as RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography ( ECC ), will no longer be secure. Hence, there has been interest in designing post-quantum cryptographic ( PQC ) schemes, such as those based on lattice-based crypt...

The advent of the big data era drives the media data owner to seek help from the cloud platform for data hosting and sharing. Sharing media data through the cloud suffers three key security/privacy problems including the leakage of data privacy, the infringement on the data owner's copyright, and the infringement on the user's right. Existing techn...

To manage outsourced encrypted data sharing in clouds, attribute-based proxy re-encryption (ABPRE) has become an elegant primitive. In ABPRE, a cloud server can transform an original recipient's ciphertext to a new one of a shared user's. As the transformation is computation consuming, a malicious cloud server may return an incorrect re-encrypted c...

With the popularity of cloud storage services, people are increasingly accustomed to storing images in the cloud. However, cloud storage services raise privacy concerns, e.g., leakage of images to unauthorized third parties and service providers may exploit image detection technologies to portrait users without permission. Although privacy concerns...

Cloud computing enables enterprises and individu-1 als to outsource and share their data. This way, cloud computing 2 eliminates the heavy workload of local information infrastruc-3 ture. Attribute-based encryption has become a promising solution 4 for encrypted data access control in clouds due to the ability 5 to achieve one-to-many encrypted dat...

Automated Program Repair (APR) has attracted significant attention from software engineering research and practice communities in the last decade. Several teams have recorded promising performance in fixing real bugs and there is a race in the literature to fix as many bugs as possible from established benchmarks. Gradually, repair performance of A...

Software validation is a long battle between software developers and software pirates. License validation is proposed as the protection of both developer’s revenue and intellectual properties. However, as the license model becomes more complex alongside the constant changing of technology and the economic environment, a trusted and auditable softwa...

Mobile payment system has been expected to provide more efficient and convenient payment methods. However, compared to traditional payments, mobile payment issues related to the security of electronic accounts and payment apps present serious challenges. In this paper, we find the potential security risks by analyzing the commonly used tokenized mo...

Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) has been a useful yet challenging task in many real-world applications such as video surveillance, intelligent retail, and smart city. The challenge is how to model long-term temporal dependencies in an efficient manner. Some recent works employ Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to obtain good performance, which, howeve...

In the intelligent manufacturing process of solar photovoltaic (PV) cells, the automatic defect detection system using the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) smart cameras and sensors cooperated in IIoT has become a promising solution. Many works have been devoted to defect detection of PV cells in a data-driven way. However, because of the subje...

Recently, Zhang et al. proposed a lattice-based data outsourcing scheme with public integrity verification (DOPIV), which enables an original data owner to delegate a proxy to generate the signatures of data and outsource them to the cloud server. They employed a third party auditor (TPA) to check the integrity of the outsourced data and any TPA ca...

Recently, the membership inference attack poses a serious threat to the privacy of confidential training data of machine learning models. This paper proposes a novel adversarial example based privacy-preserving technique (AEPPT), which adds the crafted adversarial perturbations to the prediction of the target model to mislead the adversary's member...

In this paper, we propose a novel physical stealth attack against the person detectors in real world. The proposed method generates an adversarial patch, and prints it on real clothes to make a three dimensional (3D) invisible cloak. Anyone wearing the cloak can evade the detection of person detectors and achieve stealth. We consider the impacts of...

The development of 5G has substantially increased the destructiveness of DoS/DDoS attacks because the data processing capability of computers has not been accordingly enhanced, and this contradiction creates a vulnerability for attackers to compromise a server by sending a massive data flow. in practical 5G circumstances, it is difficult to extract...

In recent years, researchers have made a great success on the automatic classification and detection of malware utilizing machine learning methods. However, most machine learning based approaches over rely on the training samples such that a new malware family not belonging to the training set cannot be identified. To address such issue, we propose...

The implementations of post-quantum cryptography have been newly explored, whereas, the protection against side-channel attacks shall be considered upfront. In this paper, the security of supersingular isogeny key encapsulation (SIKE), a second-round candidate of NIST's on-going post-quantum standardization process, is thoroughly evaluated under si...

This paper presents an efficient and secure implementation of SM2, the Chinese elliptic curve cryptography standard that has been adopted by the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 14888-3:2018. Our SM2 implementation uses Intel’s Advanced Vector Extensions version 2.0 (AVX2), a family of three-operand SIMD instructions o...

The impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) to our daily life has become bigger than ever, which can be witnessed from smart homes, smart transportation, and smart personal care. With widespread applications of UAVs in IoT contexts such as delivery and military, protecting communications between UAVs and ground control system is needed so as to resi...

The application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in medical field has brought unprecedented convenience to human beings. However, attackers can use device configuration vulnerabilities to hijack devices, control services, steal medical data, or make devices operate illegally. These restrictions have led to huge security risks for IoT, and have chall...

Embedded systems are increasingly interconnected in the emerging application scenarios. Many of these applications are safety critical, making it a high priority to ensure that the systems are free from malicious attacks. This work aims to detect vulnerabilities, that could be exploited by adversaries to compromise functional correctness, in the em...

The identity‐based signature (IBS) scheme is one of the most promising secure and widely used cryptographic primitives for electronic commerce applications. For example, ID‐based signing in a multi‐party setting, without ever revealing any private and secret information, has received considerable interest in distributed applications such as a globa...

With the high popularity of IoT devices, industrial IoT platforms such as smart factories and oilfield industrial control systems have become a new trend in the development of smart city. Although various manufacturers pay wide attention to the different functional requirements of IoT platforms, they seldom consider security issues, especially in t...

Natural language processing (NLP) allows a computer program to understand human language as it is spoken, and has been increasingly deployed in a growing number of applications, such as machine translation, sentiment analysis, and electronic voice assistant. While information obtained from different sources can enhance the accuracy of NLP models, t...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new manifestation of data science. To ensure the credibility of data about IoT devices, authentication has gradually become an important research topic in the IoT ecosystem. However, traditional graphical passwords and text passwords can cause user’s serious memory burdens. Therefore, a convenient method for determ...

Big data and artificial intelligence develop rapidly. Big data analysis has been applied in many fields of smart healthcare. Once these data are leaked or modified during transmission, it will not only invade the privacy of patients, but also endanger their lives. Many researchers worked on encrypted personal health records (PHR). However, there ar...

An optimized AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) implementation of Galois Counter Mode of operation (GCM) on low-end microcontrollers is presented in this paper. Two optimization methods are applied to proposed implementations. First, the AES counter (CTR) mode of operation is speed-optimized and ensures constant timing. The main idea is replacing e...

The papers in this special section focus on cyber security threats and efforts to ensure secure communications. With rapid and ongoing advances in information and communications technology (ICT) and “expansion” of cyber space, cyber security is, and will continue to be, of crucial importance to the stability of our Internet-connected society. For e...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the core infrastructure of the smart city information system. With the explosive growth of IoT devices, how to securely maintain the important data generated by IoT devices has become an important issue. In the conventional IoT-cloud based infrastructure, the sensitive IoT data was stored in a third cloud service pro...

In this paper, we revisited the previous Fast AES–CTR mode Encryption (FACE) method for high-end processors and tailored the method to the microcontrollers, namely FACE–LIGHT. We targeted the 32-bit counter mode of operation for AES in constant timing. This optimized technique pre-computes the 2 Add-RoundKey, 2 Sub-Bytes, 2 Shift-Rows and 1 Mix-Col...

In this paper, we present high-speed and secure implementations of HIGHT block cipher on 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 microcontrollers. We utilized both data parallelism and task parallelism to reduce the execution timing. In particular, we used the 32-bit wise ARM–SIMD instruction sets to perform the parallel computations in efficient way. Since the HIGHT...

Botmasters generate a large number of malicious Algorithmically Generated Domains (mAGDs) through Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs) to infect a large number of hosts on a network, which creates inconvenience in people's network lives. The workload of detecting mAGDs by collecting the responses of the Domain Name System (DNS) is considerable. In t...

The emergence of cloud infrastructure has significantly reduced the costs of hardware and software resources in computing infrastructure. To ensure security, the data is usually encrypted before it's outsourced to the cloud. Unlike searching and sharing the plain data, it is challenging to search and share the data after encryption. Nevertheless, i...