Journal of Information Security and Applications最新文献

{"title":"MIE-SMC: Multiple images encryption scheme based on secure multiple-party computation","authors":"Meng Li ,&nbsp;Haojie Li ,&nbsp;Xiaozeng Xu ,&nbsp;Huanhuan Wang","doi":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104366","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104366","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The protection of privacy for images uploaded to the Internet platform has attracted increasing public concern. As a popular protection technology, multiple-images encryption (MIE) has been widely explored in academic and practical applications. However, existing schemes rarely consider secure key management and selective image decryption. To this end, we propose a multi-user-oriented MIE framework, which achieves selective decryption and enhances key security management. Firstly, we design a novel computing protocol (PCP-UI) based on secure multiple-party computation (SMC). All users obtain the share key without relying on network transmission. Based on PCP-UI, we propose a multiple-stages encryption scheme including pre-encryption, joint encryption, and exclusive encryption. The pre-encrypted results are confused into the joint ciphertext, which is served as the public key to re-encrypt the images. Compared with many other MIE schemes, our scheme achieves permission control for each image and prevents privacy leakage caused by a single key. In addition, the shared key can be obtained via PCP-UI, thus avoiding leakage risk of keys caused by network transmission. To test the encryption performance, various classic attacks analysis and experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48638,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Security and Applications","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 104366"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145926055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"HALO: Heterogeneous evaluation of arithmetic-and-logic circuit via unified homomorphic instruction set","authors":"Zian Zhao,&nbsp;Zhou Zhang,&nbsp;Ran Mao,&nbsp;Song Bian,&nbsp;Jianwei Liu","doi":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104297","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104297","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is a type of cryptographic primitives known for its high-computation but low-communication costs in carrying out secure multi-party computation. However, due to the large ciphertext expansions and complex computing paradigm, designs and implementations of foundational FHE infrastructures still have much to be desired. In this work, we propose HALO, the first homomorphic instruction set architecture that supports efficient evaluations of both arithmetic and logic circuits over FHE ciphertexts. We construct a new layer of abstraction for FHE by identifying unique data structures, cryptographic primitives and homomorphic operators. We provide an open-source implementation for all instructions and data types in HALO, and demonstrate that our implementation can be <span><math><mrow><mn>1</mn><mo>.</mo><mn>7</mn><mo>×</mo></mrow></math></span>–<span><math><mrow><mn>11</mn><mo>×</mo></mrow></math></span> faster than similar implementations across test benchmarks. Moreover, we show that HALO can be <span><math><mrow><mn>1</mn><mo>.</mo><mn>7</mn><mo>×</mo></mrow></math></span>–<span><math><mrow><mn>5</mn><mo>.</mo><mn>4</mn><mo>×</mo></mrow></math></span> faster than the prior work over a set of end-to-end neural network benchmarks.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48638,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Security and Applications","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 104297"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145841429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Security analysis of a novel image encryption algorithm based on 3D chaos","authors":"Rong Zhou,&nbsp;Simin Yu","doi":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104332","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104332","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The paper analyzes the security of a novel encryption algorithm based on a 3D chaos from three aspects. The algorithm uses a typical two-round permutation-diffusion structure and consists of three parts: key selection, permutation, and diffusion with feedback. The keys consist of three initial values, three control parameters, one interference parameter, and two correlation coefficients of 3D chaos. The algorithm has passed the tests for histogram, correlation, difference analysis, and trend fluctuation analysis, and its security has been verified. However, after analysis in this paper, it has three major vulnerabilities: first, the algorithm has an equivalent key because the original key is irrelevant to plaintext. Second, diffusion is a linear operation, it results in the separability between the pixel values of the plaintext and the keys that form the pixel values of the ciphertext. Hence, the plaintext can be reconstructed according to the characteristics of ciphertext. Third, the feedback in diffusion makes ciphertext have a strong sensitivity to plaintext, but the sensitivity of plaintext to ciphertext is low and there is no avalanche effect. Therefore, it cannot resist differential attack. This paper analyzes the algorithm from three vulnerabilities, respectively, and proposes three decoding methods. Meanwhile, targeted measures are discussed to resist common attacks. Finally, the three methods are extended to cryptanalysis on general encryption algorithm with similar vulnerabilities. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that these three decoding methods are effective.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48638,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Security and Applications","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 104332"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145738762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Improved LSB substitution based semi-blind fragile watermarking for high-accuracy tamper localization","authors":"Pengfei Li ,&nbsp;Weijia Cao ,&nbsp;Tao Yu","doi":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104330","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104330","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Fragile watermarking is an effective technique for detecting image tampering, yet current block-based fragile watermarking methods often struggle with limited watermarked image quality and high false-positive rates. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes an enhanced semi-blind fragile watermarking method based on an improved least significant bit (LSB) substitution (ILSBS), named TLFW. First, the original image is divided into non-overlapping blocks, within which a novel rule-based ILSBS approach dynamically adjusts the watermark embedding bits to minimize pixel distortion effectively. This significantly enhances the visual quality of the watermarked image. Next, a tamper localization optimization (TLO) strategy is introduced to substantially reduce false positives by refining detection results around reference points. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the TLFW approach improves the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of watermarked images from 44 dB to 46 dB, consistently reduces the false positive rate (FPR) across multiple attack scenarios while achieving 45 % FPR reduction and 52 % tamper detection rate (TDR) gain specifically for the text-addition attack, and lowers computational costs significantly compared to existing methods. The proposed TLFW scheme is compatible with both grayscale and color images and does not require the original image during watermark extraction, making it highly suitable for practical image authentication applications.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48638,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Security and Applications","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 104330"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145738764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"LTMIA: a loss trajectory-based membership inference attack method in federated learning","authors":"Jia Song ,&nbsp;Jianting Yuan ,&nbsp;Guanxin Chen ,&nbsp;Yipeng Liu ,&nbsp;Nan Yang","doi":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104364","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104364","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Federated Learning (FL) preserves privacy by avoiding direct data sharing, yet trained models remain vulnerable to information leakage through Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) and Source Inference Attacks (SIAs). Existing MIA methods in FL demand substantial storage space and computational resources by requiring complete client updates across multiple rounds, while SIAs typically depend on impractical assumptions such as auxiliary datasets. To address these limitations, we propose LTMIA (Loss Trajectory-based Membership Inference Attack), a unified framework capable of performing both MIA and SIA efficiently. Our method exploits loss trajectory discrepancies during early FL training stages. By extracting temporal loss patterns from initial rounds, LTMIA trains a lightweight inference model for membership prediction. For SIA, we introduce a statistical averaging strategy that enables accurate source attribution without requiring auxiliary datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that LTMIA achieves more than 94% attack accuracy in MIA while using only the first half of client updates. For SIA tasks, LTMIA consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines across various configurations. The method shows particular strength in scenarios with limited computational resources and storage capacity. These findings underscore LTMIA’s effectiveness, efficiency, and practicality for assessing privacy risks in FL systems.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48638,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Security and Applications","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 104364"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145926105","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Block-based image encryption inspired by NTRU using self-invertible matrices","authors":"Ammar Ali Neamah","doi":"10.1016/j.jisa.2026.104374","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jisa.2026.104374","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The secure transmission and storage of digital images pose a serious problem in today’s communication systems, particularly in fields such as defense, healthcare, and surveillance. Existing image encryption methods, such as traditional polynomial-based NTRU (Nth degree Truncated polynomial Ring Units) cryptosystem, often suffer from high computational complexity or limited applicability to large-scale image data. To address these limitations, we propose a block-based image encryption method inspired by the NTRU cryptosystem and adapted to matrix algebra for enhanced efficiency and security. The main contribution of this paper is the replacement of operations in a traditional polynomial ring with self-invertible matrices defined over modular rings, allowing for efficient blockwise encryption of grayscale images in a secure manner. The key generation process of the proposed scheme first creates a secret self-invertible matrix and its corresponding inverse under a dual-modulo <span><math><mrow><mi>p</mi><mo>=</mo><mn>256</mn></mrow></math></span> and <em>q</em> framework. The encryption occurs by ciphering each 8 × 8 image block through a system of structured matrix operations, within the dual-modulo, where the pixel domain is <em>Z</em>₂₅₆ and the encryption space is a large prime field <em>Z_q</em>. In the decryption stage, the self-invertibility property of the secret key eliminates the need for expensive matrix inversion while ensuring accurate image recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the system achieves strong statistical security, high entropy, minimal pixel correlation, and excellent resistance to known attacks. Furthermore, the scheme is lightweight and well-suited for real-time image protection, owing to its computational efficiency and the use of fixed-size block-wise modular operations that enable fast, parallelizable processing. This work presents a practical, secure, and computationally efficient alternative to traditional image encryption methods, and may provide considerable benefits in situations where reliable image security and speed are a priority.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48638,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Security and Applications","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 104374"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146023004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"SchoCo: Schnorr signature concatenation for extensible tokens","authors":"Marco Antonio Marques ,&nbsp;Lucas Cupertino Cardoso ,&nbsp;Pedro H. Barcha Correia ,&nbsp;Charles Christian Miers ,&nbsp;Marcos Antonio Simplicio Junior","doi":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104327","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104327","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The increasing adoption of extensible and decentralized token systems demands efficient and flexible signature schemes. Aggregate signatures enable the combination of multiple signatures on various messages into a single aggregate. Existing techniques often lack support for features such as delegation and extension, or introduce significant complexity without clear advantages over non-aggregated schemes. This paper presents SchoCo, a Schnorr-based half-aggregate scheme designed for extensible tokens. Its security is proven in the random oracle model through a reduction to the existential unforgeability under adaptive chosen-message attacks of the Schnorr signature scheme. The proposed scheme is inspired by the identity-based signature technique developed by Galindo and Garcia. It achieves signature sizes comparable to existing schemes while cutting verification costs by up to 50 %. Furthermore, we show that SchoCo is well-suited for integrating token-based authorization frameworks, using the Biscuit token as a concrete instantiation, with practical gains in both token size and verification efficiency.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48638,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Security and Applications","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 104327"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145791478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"CallTrust: A federated system for call authentication in telephony networks","authors":"Francesco Buccafurri ,&nbsp;Vincenzo De Angelis ,&nbsp;Sara Lazzaro ,&nbsp;Carmen Licciardi","doi":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104365","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104365","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Voice phishing (vishing) remains a critical security threat in telephone communications, where users cannot reliably authenticate calling parties. Despite technical efforts like STIR/SHAKEN, traditional telephony still lacks application-layer mechanisms to detect spoofed or hijacked calls. In this paper, we present CallTrust, a novel, deployable, and infrastructure-agnostic solution that enables real-time verification of incoming and outgoing calls between users and Certified Services, i.e., trusted entities publicly certified to own specific phone numbers. Our protocol operates entirely at the application layer and leverages time-slotted, privacy-preserving credentials published by Certified Services to detect spoofed or hijacked calls. We detail the protocol design and show that it satisfies the intended security properties. To demonstrate the practical relevance of our approach, we propose a federated design that enables cross-realm (i.e., cross-border) adoption. As a concrete example, we apply it to the European eIDAS framework by extending Qualified Website Authentication Certificates (QWACs) to support the binding of telephone numbers to legally recognized entities. Through a mobile-based proof-of-concept implementation, we show that call authentication can be completed in under two seconds, thus providing users with timely warnings before engaging with potentially phone scammers. Experimental results confirm the practicality of our approach, offering a viable path toward securing telephony communication against impersonation-based threats.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48638,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Security and Applications","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 104365"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145926039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Practical collusion-resistant conjunctive dynamic searchable encryption with result pattern hiding","authors":"Mingyue Li ,&nbsp;Honggang Wan ,&nbsp;Ruizhong Du ,&nbsp;Guanxiong Ha ,&nbsp;Xiaoyun Guang","doi":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104363","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104363","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>With the rapid development of cloud computing security, multi-user conjunctive dynamic searchable encryption is receiving more and more attention. However, existing schemes mainly rely on the <em>XSet</em> structure to implement conjunctive queries, which brings significant additional computational costs such as exponentiation, an extra round of communication. In addition, the leakage of keyword pair result pattern (<em>KPRP</em>) has been overlooked. In this work, a practical multi-user conjunction dynamic searchable encryption scheme (named <em>MORF-MUDSE</em>) is proposed, which can against a passive attack by a server colluding with any search user while ensuring the two basic attributes of both forward and backward security. Specifically, a mask-obfuscation random function protocol (named <em>MORF</em>) that includes document keyword set information is designed to implement a new subset validation method of conjunctive queries. This method only completes one round of communication to obtain results, which greatly improves computational efficiency while protecting <em>KPRP</em>. Moreover, a delayed update strategy is proposed, which address the issue of information synchronization between data owner and users during those updates. Through theoretical and experimental analysis, it has been shown that the proposed scheme in this paper has better efficiency in computation and communication compared to the state-of-the-art schemes.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48638,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Security and Applications","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 104363"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146023003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"MFDPN: A multimodal feature dynamic prototype network for few-Shot malware classification","authors":"Huiwu Huang ,&nbsp;Jiale Li ,&nbsp;Jiahui Chen ,&nbsp;Terry Shue Chien Lau","doi":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104354","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jisa.2025.104354","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The rapid evolution of malware, particularly the emergence of novel families, poses a significant challenge for conventional detection systems, which struggle to classify threats from a limited number of labeled samples. This data scarcity often leads to issues such as feature differences and overfitting. To address this, MFDPN, a Multimodal Feature Dynamic Prototype Network, is proposed. The core of MFDPN is its use of Affinity Propagation (AP) clustering to generate adaptive dynamic prototypes, overcoming the limitations of conventional methods like K-Means. This approach reduces prototype misalignment, enabling the model to capture discriminative features adapted to each query. The model integrates a hierarchical fusion of multimodal features, including grayscale textures, Dynamic-link Library (DLL) information, and Application Programming Interface (API) call sequences. By leveraging AP within a contrastive learning framework, MFDPN achieves strong feature alignment and enhances inter-class separation. On the MOTIF dataset, MFDPN achieves 94.78 % accuracy in a 5-way 10-shot setting, better than state-of-the-art methods by 4.75 percentage points. This improvement comes from better handling of intra-class variance in polymorphic malware via dynamic prototypes, while the 25.7-fold inference speed increase over K-Means-based methods highlights efficiency gains from adaptive clustering. Cross-dataset validation on MFD-WPE (accuracies of 65.09 % for 5-way 1-shot, 80.67 % for 5-way 5-shot, and 82.85 % for 5-way 10-shot) shows strong generalization to unseen categories, showing the model’s ability to transfer learned feature alignments across distributions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48638,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Information Security and Applications","volume":"97 ","pages":"Article 104354"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145884188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}