Verification Mechanism Research Articles

Scan-free verifiable public-key searchable encryption supporting efficient user updates in distributed systems

Searchable encryption (SE) is a promising technology that provides search functions while preserving information privacy. A small number of SE schemes can be applied to a distributed system. In such systems, multiple owners provide data that is encrypted by their secret keys to the system for retrieval by users. In this setup, however, users need to scan a searchable index for retrievals, which leads to linear search complexity. Moreover, updates of users (e.g., revoking an expired user from the system) generally incur substantial overhead to re-build the index. Accordingly, we propose a scan-free verifiable public-key searchable encryption scheme with an efficient user update function in a distributed system (i.e., in a multi-owner multi-user model). First, owners self-select secret keys to encrypt keywords. A master secret key is designed to support keyword searches among these keys. Additionally, a searchable index with an implicit relationship between the same keyword is proposed. There is no need to scan the index for keyword retrieval, which achieves sub-linear search complexity. It is also important that the updates of owners do not exert an influence on users and the other owners in our proposed scheme. As the key revocation mechanism, the master secret key is split into more partial secret keys that are distributed to users. Accordingly, the system only needs to re-split and re-distribute the key rather than re-building the index for updates of users. When making queries, not only are the content of queries and the master secret key concealed, but collusion between some users and the cloud server is resisted. The proposed scheme also supports an efficient result verification mechanism. The security and utility of our scheme were confirmed thru analysis and evaluation.

Innovation Scheme Design of Personal Income Tax Collection and Administration Based on Blockchain Technology

This paper sorts out the application status and technical characteristics of blockchain, and aiming at the problems of long and complicated tax payment process, lack of sufficient verification mechanism and serious loss of personal income tax in China's personal income tax collection and management, puts forward the idea of personal income tax collection and management combined with blockchain technology. Then, this paper designs a personal income tax collection and administration scheme based on alliance chain and intelligent contract to assist the tax authorities to conduct efficient, safe and automated tax collection.

An evolutionary algorithmic framework cloud based evidence collection architecture

Forensic in cloud computing is an advancement of evolutionary modern forensic science that protects against cyber criminals. Single centralize point compilation and storage of data, however, overcome the authenticity of digital evidence. In order to address this serious issue, this article suggests a evolutionary modern algorithm automated forensic platform leveraging infrastructure as a cloud service (IaaS) based on Blockchain concept. This proposed forensic structural design, evidence collection of evidence and stored on a blockchain which is circulated around several peer blocks. Secure Block Verification Mechanism (SBVM) is proposed to Safeguarding the device from unauthorised users. Using the Backtracking Search Optimization Algorithm search optimization algorithm for strengthening of the cloud environment, secret keys are optimally generated. On the bases of level of confidentiality, all data is stored and encrypted at cloud authentication server. Confidentiality-based Algebraically Homomorphic Cryptosystems learning is presented with a fast-forwarding algorithm for encryption. A block in the SDN controller is created for every data and information is stored in the cloud service provider and the history is recorded as metadata data about data. A hash based tree is constructed in each block by Secure Hash Algorithm version - 3 of 512 bits. By implementing graph theory-based graph neural networks in Smart Contracts, our framework enables users to track their data (GNNSC). Finally, the construction of a evidence graph using blockchain data enables evidence analysis. Experiments was carried out in a Python programming and blockchain integrated cloud environment with network simulator-3.30 (for Software Defined Network). As part of result our newly designed forensic architecture using blochchain (FAuB) good results in terms of evidence response time, insertion times of cloud evidence, verification time of evidence, computational overhead of evidence, hashes calculation time, keys generations times of evidence, evidence encryption time, evidence decryptions time, and total overall change rate of evidence, according to a comprehensive comparative study.

Trusted Framework for Online Banking in Public Cloud Using Multi-Factor Authentication Using Block-Chain Framework

There are always potential hazards from hackers, adware, malware, and viruses. Many big international corporations have experienced hacking and security breaches in the previous few years. In certain instances, this has resulted in the leakage of private and confidential information, such as bank account information, addresses, and transactions, but there are security measures in place that can block these things before they get too close to the company's private data. This is crucial for both secrecy and to avoid paying the steep fines levied on businesses that fail to adequately safeguard customer information. The project is a verification mechanism that only allows users with the proper input credentials to access the system. The project involves modules or user certificates. Security credentials come in a variety of forms. Thus, we incorporate a unique blockchain for banking security and user authentication in this proposed methodology. This degree of authentication reduces the possibility of hacking and the loss of sensitive data. Also, in the current environment, safer bank transactions are necessary due to advancements in security technologies. They have also made advances into industries, healthcare, telecommunications, and home automation, among others. A distributed ledger is basically what a blockchain is. It can keep information about who owns a certain piece of property or, for example, a bond. A permanent record of ownership can be maintained using technology, which also makes it possible for parties with a low level of trust to exchange the asset. Key Words: Custom Blockchain, Distributed Ledger, Authentications, Confidentiality, Transactions, Security System, Credentials, Banking Security, etc.

Optional Verification and Signaling in Online Matching Markets: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

Online matching platforms could lack common informational mechanisms, such as ratings and reviews, that serve to reduce information asymmetry in transactional platforms. The lack of verified information about participants further exacerbates issues of information asymmetry in such markets. Our study focuses on a novel role of verification in such matching markets—its ability to serve as a credible signal for a user, when such verification is made optional and visible to other users. In collaboration with a leading online dating platform with no reputation mechanisms and where most of the information is self-disclosed, we design and conduct a randomized field experiment to examine not only who chooses to verify but also, the effectiveness of such optional verification for different types of users. We identify that a simple-to-implement mechanism, such as phone verification, when made optional can take on additional significance in platforms that lack alternate reputation and transaction-assurance mechanisms, especially for those in early years or those that lack other credible mechanisms to verify important information about participants. Our findings also provide insights into how optional verification has heterogeneous impacts on different platform users and can also facilitate desirable matching and benefit the platform as a whole, paving the way for examining other similar verification mechanisms.

A Weakly Supervised Learning Framework for Salient Object Detection via Hybrid Labels

Fully-supervised salient object detection (SOD) methods have made great progress, but such methods often rely on a large number of pixel-level annotations, which are time-consuming and labour-intensive. In this paper, we focus on a new weakly-supervised SOD task under hybrid labels, where the supervision labels include a large number of coarse labels generated by the traditional unsupervised method and a small number of real labels. To address the issues of label noise and quantity imbalance in this task, we design a new pipeline framework with three sophisticated training strategies. In terms of model framework, we decouple the task into label refinement sub-task and salient object detection sub-task, which cooperate with each other and train alternately. Specifically, the R-Net is designed as a two-stream encoder-decoder model equipped with Blender with Guidance and Aggregation Mechanisms (BGA), aiming to rectify the coarse labels for more reliable pseudo-labels, while the S-Net is a replaceable SOD network supervised by the pseudo labels generated by the current R-Net. Note that, we only need to use the trained S-Net for testing. Moreover, in order to guarantee the effectiveness and efficiency of network training, we design three training strategies, including alternate iteration mechanism, group-wise incremental mechanism, and credibility verification mechanism. Experiments on five SOD benchmarks show that our method achieves competitive performance against weakly-supervised/unsupervised methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. The code and results can be found from the link of <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://rmcong.github.io/proj_Hybrid-Label-SOD.html</uri> .

Benzene: Scaling Blockchain With Cooperation-Based Sharding

Sharding has been considered as a prominent approach to enhance the limited performance of blockchain. However, most sharding systems leverage a non-cooperative design, which lowers the fault tolerance resilience due to the decreased mining power as the consensus execution is limited to each separated shard. To this end, we present Benzene, a novel sharding system that enhances the performance by cooperation-based sharding while defending the per-shard security. First, we establish a double-chain architecture for function decoupling. This architecture separates transaction-recording functions from consensus-execution functions, thereby enabling the cross-shard cooperation during consensus execution while preserving the concurrency nature of sharding. Second, we design a cross-shard block verification mechanism leveraging Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), via which miners can verify blocks from other shards during the cooperation process with the minimized overheads. Finally, we design a voting-based consensus protocol for cross-shard cooperation. Transactions in each shard are confirmed by all shards that simultaneously cast votes, consequently achieving an enhanced fault tolerance and lowering the confirmation latency. We implement Benzene and conduct both prototype experiments and large-scale simulations to evaluate the performance of Benzene. Results show that Benzene achieves superior performance than existing sharding/non-sharding blockchain protocols. In particular, Benzene achieves a linearly-improved throughput with the increased number of shards (e.g., 32,370 transactions per second with 50 shards) and maintains a lower confirmation latency than Bitcoin (with more than 50 shards). Meanwhile, Benzene maintains a fixed fault tolerance at 1/3 even with the increased number of shards.

Feedback-Directed Metamorphic Testing

Over the past decade, metamorphic testing has gained rapidly increasing attention from both academia and industry, particularly thanks to its high efficacy on revealing real-life software faults in a wide variety of application domains. On the basis of a set of metamorphic relations among multiple software inputs and their expected outputs, metamorphic testing not only provides a test case generation strategy by constructing new (or follow-up) test cases from some original (or source) test cases, but also a test result verification mechanism through checking the relationship between the outputs of source and follow-up test cases. Many efforts have been made to further improve the cost-effectiveness of metamorphic testing from different perspectives. Some studies attempted to identify “good” metamorphic relations, while other studies were focused on applying effective test case generation strategies especially for source test cases. In this article, we propose improving the cost-effectiveness of metamorphic testing by leveraging the feedback information obtained in the test execution process. Consequently, we develop a new approach, namely feedback-directed metamorphic testing, which makes use of test execution information to dynamically adjust the selection of metamorphic relations and selection of source test cases. We conduct an empirical study to evaluate the proposed approach based on four laboratory programs, one GNU program, and one industry program. The empirical results show that feedback-directed metamorphic testing can use fewer test cases and take less time than the traditional metamorphic testing for detecting the same number of faults. It is clearly demonstrated that the use of feedback information about test execution does help enhance the cost-effectiveness of metamorphic testing. Our work provides a new perspective to improve the efficacy and applicability of metamorphic testing as well as many other software testing techniques.

Immutable Log Storage as a Service on Private and Public Blockchains

Service Level Agreements (SLA) are employed to ensure the performance of Cloud solutions. When a component fails, the importance of logs increases significantly. All departments may turn to logs to determine the cause of the issue and find the party at fault. The party at fault may be motivated to tamper with the logs to hide their role. We argue that the critical nature of Cloud logs calls for immutability and verification mechanism without the presence of a single trusted party. This article proposes such a mechanism by describing a blockchain-based log storage system, called Logchain, which can be integrated with existing private and public blockchain solutions. Logchain uses the immutability feature of blockchain to provide a tamper-resistance platform for log storage. Additionally, we propose a hierarchical structure to address blockchains’ scalability issues. To validate the mechanism, we integrate Logchain into Ethereum and IBM Blockchain. We show that the solution is scalable and perform the analysis of the cost of ownership to help a reader select an implementation that would address their needs. The Logchain's scalability improvement on a blockchain is achieved without any alteration of blockchains’ fundamental architecture. As shown in this work, it can function on private and public blockchains and, therefore, can be a suitable alternative for organizations that need a secure, immutable log storage platform.

"Involvement of the University Ethics Commissions regarding the existence of plagiarism from different perspectives: MEC Order no. 5229/2020 and ME Order no. 5255/2021"

The preoccupation of the Romanian Ministry of Education regarding ethics and integrity in higher education began with the highest level of studies, the doctoral studies. In time, the standards and implementation of anti-plagiarism mechanisms were also adapted to the masters and bachelors works, in parallel with their introduction as a compulsory discipline in the university curriculum as „Ethics and Integrity”. The first measures were adopted in 2016 were to verify and sanction plagiarism in Doctoral Theses on the occasion of their completion and public defense. In 2021, based on the rules established in 2016, the central authorities retroactively extend this rule for all doctoral theses defended since 1990, through the mechanism of identification and verification of similarities between theses. At the same time there was the development of the platform with public access to all doctoral theses, a platform supported by the Portal Integrated Educational Register (https://rei.gov.ro), motivated by the need to increase transparency in the field of academic integrity. These administrative measures, although being applied retroactively and anachronic to the previous procedures, try to bring equity in the verification of doctoral theses from the perspective of similarities.

Study on novel cross-chain mechanism in internet healthcare environment

The scalability and interoperability of traditional blockchain can hardly meet the value delivery of multiple systems in internet healthcare. Therefore, to enable the interaction of values between heterogeneous blockchains, we propose a cross-chain mechanism based on a generic global relay chain strategy and a scalable heterogeneous multi-chain system. Also, an unused transaction output (UTXO) verification mechanism based on RSA accumulator is proposed to address the shortcomings of using simplified payment verification (SPV) to verify transactions. In this paper, five experimental tests were performed: pressure, stability, response time, throughput, and latency. Experiments show that its computational complexity for cross-chain transaction validation remains constant as the number of transactions increases. Thus, an efficient cross-chain value transfer is achieved.

Zero-Knowledge Proof of Traffic: A Deterministic and Privacy-Preserving Cross Verification Mechanism for Cooperative Perception Data

Zero-Knowledge Proof of Traffic: A Deterministic and Privacy-Preserving Cross Verification Mechanism for Cooperative Perception Data

Towards Reliable Utilization of AIGC: Blockchain-Empowered Ownership Verification Mechanism

Towards Reliable Utilization of AIGC: Blockchain-Empowered Ownership Verification Mechanism

Проблема сокращения стратегических вооружений в контексте современных российско-американских отношений

Introduction. The article presents an analysis of the process of reducing strategic arms of Russia and the United States. The author gives an assessment of the Soviet-American détente and the Soviet-American disarmament treaties as laying the political normative and legal foundation for the development of the disarmament process after the end of the Cold War. The study analyzes the Russian-American New START Treaty concluded by Presidents B. Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in 2010. Particular attention is paid to the problem of mutual inspections by Russia and the United States during the implementation of START-3. Materials and methods. The study is based on the analysis of Soviet-American and Russian-American treaties in the field of disarmament, materials from the Russian Foreign Ministry, the American administration of J. Biden, and publications in the American press. A systematic integrated approach, specific historical and comparative historical methods were used. Analysis. According to official data from the Russian Foreign Ministry, the American side resorted to certain “tricks” - not only actually reducing weapons, but achieving final results by converting some weapons into non-nuclear or training ones. The Russian department could not confirm that these strategic weapons were rendered unusable as provided for by the treaty. In the context of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis and the beginning of the Russian SVO the following issues became particularly difficult in the process of mutual verification of disarmament: the cessation of regular air traffic, the extension of flight times, which could contribute to the “leakage” of confidential information; the complexity of the visa regime for Russian specialists, especially in transit countries; difficulties in making Russian payments for verification services; the lack of unambiguous guarantees of providing the opportunity for aircraft of the Russian Ministry of Defense with inspectors on board to fly through the airspace of Western countries closed to Russia. Results. A conclusion is drawn about the importance of signing New START treaty, which became a major milestone in the development of relations between Moscow and Washington in the military-political sphere. Violation of mutual inspection activities in the context of sanctions imposed by the West against Russia violated the principles of equal access to the Treaty verification mechanisms, created clear advantages for the American side and led to the suspension of Russia participation in New START.

VerSA: Verifiable Secure Aggregation for Cross-Device Federated Learning

In privacy-preserving cross-device federated learning, users train a global model on their local data and submit encrypted local models, while an untrusted central server aggregates the encrypted models to obtain an updated global model. Prior work has demonstrated how to verify the correctness of aggregation in such a setting. However, such verification relies on strong assumptions, such as a trusted setup among all users under unreliable network conditions, or it suffers from expensive cryptographic operations, such as bilinear pairing. In this paper, we scrutinize the verification mechanism of prior work and propose a model recovery attack, demonstrating that most local models can be leaked within a reasonable time (e.g., <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$98\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> of encrypted local models are recovered within 21 h). Then, we propose <small>VerSA</small> , a verifiable secure aggregation protocol for cross-device federated learning. <small>VerSA</small> does not require any trusted setup for verification between users while minimizing the verification cost by enabling both the central server and users to utilize only a lightweight pseudorandom generator to prove and verify the correctness of model aggregation. We experimentally confirm the efficiency of <small>VerSA</small> under diverse datasets, demonstrating that <small>VerSA</small> is orders of magnitude faster than verification in prior work.

Achieving Privacy-Preserving and Verifiable Support Vector Machine Training in the Cloud

With the proliferation of machine learning, the cloud server has been employed to collect massive data and train machine learning models. Several privacy-preserving machine learning schemes have been suggested recently to guarantee data and model privacy in the cloud. However, these schemes either mandate the involvement of the data owner in model training or utilize high-cost cryptographic techniques, resulting in excessive computational and communication overheads. Furthermore, none of the existing work considers the malicious behavior of the cloud server during model training. In this paper, we propose the first privacy-preserving and verifiable support vector machine training scheme by employing a two-cloud platform. Specifically, based on the homomorphic verification tag, we design a verification mechanism to enable verifiable machine learning training. Meanwhile, to improve the efficiency of model training, we combine homomorphic encryption and data perturbation to design an efficient multiplication operation for the encryption domain. A rigorous theoretical analysis demonstrates the security and reliability of our scheme. The experimental results indicate that our scheme can reduce computational and communication overheads by at least 43.94% and 99.58%, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art SVM training methods.

Block Verification Mechanism Based on Zero-Knowledge Proof in Blockchain

Since transactions in blockchain are based on public ledger verification, this raises security concerns about privacy protection. And it will cause the accumulation of data on the chain and resulting in the low efficiency of block verification, when the whole transaction on the chain is verified. In order to improve the efficiency and privacy protection of block data verification, this paper proposes an efficient block verification mechanism with privacy protection based on zero-knowledge proof (ZKP), which not only protects the privacy of users but also improves the speed of data block verification. There is no need to put the whole transaction on the chain when verifying block data. It just needs to generate the ZKP and root hash with the transaction information, then save them to the smart contract for verification. Moreover, the ZKP verification in smart contract is carried out to realize the privacy protection of the transaction and efficient verification of the block. When the data is validated, the buffer accepts the complete transaction, updates the transaction status in the cloud database, and packages up the chain. So, the ZKP strengthens the privacy protection ability of blockchain, and the smart contracts save the time cost of block verification.

Verification of Peace Accords and Military Expenditures in Post-Conflict Societies

ABSTRACT Why is it that some governments ending a civil war in a negotiated settlement succeed in reducing military spending while others fail? Civil wars ending in peace agreements result in relatively low military expenditures; however, not all governments succeed in the reduction. I argue that implementing a third-party verification mechanism of peace accords helps reduce military spending in post-conflict societies because the verification mechanism facilitates the peace accord implementation by enabling reciprocal implementation and by increasing the cost of noncompliance through active information flow. Implementation of peace agreements reduces threats posed by both former and outside rebel groups. This makes the government decrease the military expenditure allocated to appease internal security threats. I tested this argument using 32 civil wars with a comprehensive peace agreement between 1992 and 2011. The results indicate that initiating a verification mechanism leads to lower military spending.

THE MECHANISM OF VERIFICATION OF THE REPORTING OF THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF ECONOMIC ENTITIES AS A COMPONENT OF THE STATE ADMINISTRATION SYSTEM

The article analyzed the mechanism of verification of sustainable development reporting as an element of the state management system. Since the modern world is characterized by a complex of complex socio-political and economic problems and challenges, which are faced both by individual states and peoples, and by society as a whole. The illusory nature of the "fantastic" opportunities of the new stage of civilizational development of mankind - the information society - in practice manifested itself in the growth of socio-economic problems, which, in a certain way, led to the strengthening of polarization and stratification of world society. As a result of the research, a mechanism for the verification of sustainable development reporting as an element of the public administration system was proposed, including verification subjects, the leading influence of the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine, information communication at the stages of processing input and output information. Keywords: verification, intellectual human capital, economic entities, functional mechanism of verification, functional mechanism of analysis, the conditions of preservation, analysis of the results of a complex audit, complex analysis, confirmation of authenticity.

Environmental considerations in the European Union's pharmaceuticals legislation: Key instruments and their challenges in addressing global manufacturing supply chains

AbstractThis article analyses how two key instruments of European Union pharmaceuticals legislation—good manufacturing practices and environmental risk assessment of pharmaceuticals—address known risks posed by the release of pharmaceuticals in the environment to human health and the environment and identifies the challenges that they face in regulating global manufacturing supply chains. The analysis reveals that these instruments fail to address the environmental challenges posed by pharmaceuticals within global manufacturing supply chains. Based on these findings, we propose to revise European pharmaceuticals legislation by expanding the scope and information requirements of both human and veterinary environmental risk assessment and increasing its weight in the risk–benefit analysis for human pharmaceuticals; by including direct environmental requirements for certain prioritized pharmaceuticals; and by integrating environmental considerations and related verification mechanisms into good manufacturing practices.