Ben Niu

Xidian University · School of Telecommunications Engineering

The Class-1 Internet of Things (IoT) device is difficult to protect because of the lack of minimal hardware and extension support. Researchers have proposed several remote attestation schemes to protect IoT devices. However, hardware-assisted remote attestation methods require the support of minimal hardware, which is not suitable for Class-1 IoT d...

Device-to-device (D2D) communication, as a traffic offloading technology in the fifth-generation (5G) network, can be widely used in several scenarios to provide 5G characteristics of higher speed, lower latency, and larger capacity. D2D data transmission over wireless channels among mobile devices is vulnerable to security threats and privacy viol...

In the pursuit of autonomous driving and intelligent traffic management, the core goal of 5G Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication is to enhance the safety and efficiency of transportation systems. Modern transportation networks have evolved into three-dimensional structures including bridges and tunnels from traditional two-dimensional ones, w...

Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with base stations can assist ground User Equipments (UEs) in accessing the 5G/6G network. Due to the UAV’s high autonomy, easy configuration, and strong dynamic deployment capabilities, UAV-assisted ground UEs to access the 5G/6G network can effectively expand the communication network coverage. However,...

Controller Area Network (CAN) is the most wide-used bus system in Intra-Vehicle Networks(IVN). However, the nature of broadcast communication and the lack of security mechanisms make the CAN bus extremely fragile against malicious attacks. Although there are works protecting IVN, most of them are not feasible when applied to real vehicles because t...

Differential privacy has become a golden standard for designing privacy-preserving randomized algorithms. However, such algorithms are subtle to design, as many of them are found to have incorrect privacy claim. To help identify this problem, one approach is designing disprovers to search for counterexamples that demonstrate high violation of claim...

As a supplement to terrestrial networks, satellite communication networks have a lot of advantages, such as wide coverage, large communication capacity, reliable communication quality, and seamless global connectivity, which are highly competitive with traditional communication technologies. However, there are still many security issues and efficie...

Distributed machine learning allows different parties to learn a single model over all data sets without disclosing their own data. In this paper, we propose a weighted distributed differentially private (WD-DP) empirical risk minimization (ERM) method to train a model in distributed setting, considering different weights of different clients. For...

Location privacy has been one of the most important research areas over recent years, and many location Privacy Preserving Mechanisms (PPMs) have been proposed. Each PPM typically achieves certain tradeoffs between privacy protection and resource consumption, and no PPM performs perfectly in all cases. Instead of designing one PPM that works for al...

Group activities on social networks are increasing rapidly with the development of mobile devices and IoT terminals, creating a huge demand for group recommendation. However, group recommender systems are facing an important problem of privacy leakage on user's historical data and preference. Existing solutions always pay attention to protect the h...

Mechanisms built upon geo-indistinguishability render location privacy, where a user can submit obfuscated locations to Location-Based Service providers but still be able to correctly utilize services. However, these mechanisms are vulnerable under inference attacks. Particularly, with background knowledge of a user’s obfuscated locations, an attac...

LBSs have been prospering over recent years. Although many LPPMs are proposed to solve specific problems under certain settings, it is still hard to satisfy the different demands of users due to the diverse requirements for quality of service (QoS) and privacy preservation. In this article, we propose an adaptive scheme to achieve fine-grained QoS...

Device-to-device (D2D) communication as direct communication technology has many application scenarios and plays a very important role in the fifth-generation (5G) era. Using D2D communication in third generation partnership project (3GPP) 5G Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) can effectively relieve the network traffic pressure and reduce the energy c...

Crowdsourced bus service provides the customized bus for a group of users with similar itineraries by designing the route based on the users’ trip plans. With crowdsourced bus service, the users with similar trips can enjoy the customized bus route efficiently and inexpensively. However, serious privacy concerns (e.g., the exposure of users’ curren...

Mobile social network has become a necessary part in our daily life, and location‐based services (LBSs) provide unprecedented convenience to mobile users. However, these attracting services are accompanied with privacy disclosures, including location privacy and query privacy. Mobile users have to expose their personal information to untrusted loca...

The concerns about location privacy has received considerable attention with the development of Location-based Services (LBSs) over the recent years. Most smartphone users ignore the fact that Apps can infer their locations through accessing WiFi list, although they carefully set location-related permissions to preserve their privacy. Therefore, it...

The rapid development of communication and network technologies including mobile networks and GPS presents new characteristics of OSNs. These new characteristics pose extra requirements on the access control schemes of OSNs, which cannot be satisfied by relationship-based access control currently. In this paper, we propose a hybrid access control m...

Ride-Sharing Services (RSSs) assist drivers to find proper riders for vacant seats on the road, providing appealing benefits of shared travel cost and improved vehicle occupancy, which have revolutionized transportation business, as witnessed by the success of Lyft Line, UberPool and Waze Carpool. Selecting proper ride-share partners for drivers ba...

With the development of online social networks (OSNs) and modern smartphones, sharing photos with friends has become one of the most popular social activities. Since people usually prefer to give others a positive impression, impression management during photo sharing is becoming increasingly important. However, most of the existing privacy-aware s...

While providing plenty of convenience for users in daily life, the increasingly popular location-based service(LBS) posed a serious threat to users' privacy. The research about privacy-preserving techniques for LBS is becoming a hot spot, and there are a large number of research results. First, background information of privacy protection for LBS w...

Private set intersection(PSI) enables parties to compute the intersection of their input sets privately, which has wide applications. Nowadays, with the development of cloud computing, several server-aided PSI protocols have been proposed. Unfortunately, all existing server-aided PSI protocols assume the server provider does not collude with any us...

The explosive growths of Social Networks and smart devices over the past decade have refined the way people interact with their friends and build social connections with physical-proximate others. Unfortunately, increasing backbone network traffic and privacy concerns of the information leakage during the friend matching process limit the expansion...

With the rapid development of mobile smartphone and its built-in location-aware devices, people are possible to establish trust relationships and further interaction with each other based their matched interests, hobbies, experiences, or spatiotemporal profiles. However, the possibility of sensitive information leakage and heavy computation overhea...

Although Proximity-based Mobile Social Networks (PMSNs) bring mobile users novel ways to discover their similarities, they enjoy this kind of conveniences at the cost of user privacy and system overhead etc. To address these problems, we propose Match-MORE, which employs the concept of friends-of-friends to find some ones in common from friends and...

Cloud computing is regarded as a promising computing paradigm. More and more people store their sensitive data on the cloud. However, it is a great challenge for data security and accessing the sensitive data on the cloud. In this paper, we propose a novel access control scheme, termed LTS-ACCESS, which achieves Lightweight, Time-specific and Secur...

Privacy issues in continuous Location-Based Services (LBSs) have gained attractive attentions in literature over recent years. In this paper, we illustrate the limitations of existing work and define an entropy-based privacy metric to quantify the privacy degree based on a set of vital observations. To tackle the privacy issues, we propose an effic...

With rapid developments of mobile devices and online social networks, users of proximity-based mobile social networks (PMSN) could easily discover and make new social interactions with others, but they enjoyed this kind of conveniences at the cost of user privacy and system overhead, etc. To address this problem, a third party free and lightweight...

As one of the most important information in location-based services (LBS), the trajectory privacy for smart devices users has gained increasingly popularity over recent years. To address this problem, (k-1) dummy trajectories to achieve trajectory k-anonymity with comprehensively considering side information were generated, user's mobility pattern...

We propose an exactly spatiotemporal matching scheme for privacy-aware users in MSNs. Based on the carefully designed spatiotemporal profile, our scheme employs a weight-aware pre-matching module to filter out the users with less similarity and some potential adversaries, thus guarantees that no useful information is revealed before determining the...

A privacy-preserving scheme was proposed based on proxy gateway, which avoided using the trusted center and provided high quality privacy-protecting services. First of all, based on the existing architecture of mobile Internet, the proxy gateway was employed to cache relevant service information and adopt different privacy-preserving methods for va...

The ubiquity of modern mobile devices with GPS modules and Internet connectivity such as 3G/4G techniques have resulted in rapid development of Location-Based Services (LBSs). However, users enjoy the convenience provided by the untrusted LBS server at the cost of their privacy. To protect user's sensitive information against adversaries with side...

Location-Based Services (LBSs) have become one of the most popular activities and affected our daily life a lot. Mobile users can enjoy kinds of conveniences by submitting their location and interest-related queries to the LBS server. However, since these queries may expose sensitive information to the untrusted LBS server, privacy concerns arise....

Location-based services (LBSs) have been one of the novel uses and most popular activities in internet of things (IoT). In such location-based applications, mobile users enjoy plenty of conveniences at the cost of privacy. To protect user’s location privacy, many research solutions have been proposed. In this paper, we focus on an important class o...

With the development of the broadband wireless access technology and mobile terminal technology, mobile internet arises at the historic moment and has been rapid development, by which users can easily obtain information and services from the internet anywhere at any time. However, owing to the openness of cloud computing platform, the mobile commun...

Security and privacy issues in RFID technology gain tremendous popularity recently. However, existing work on RFID authentication problems always make assumptions such as (1) hash function can be fully employed in designing RFID protocols; (2) channels between readers and server are always secure. The first assumption is not suitable for EPC Class-...

In Location-Based Services (LBSs) mobile users submit location-related queries to the untrusted LBS server to get service. However, such queries increasingly induce privacy concerns from mobile users. To address this problem, we propose FGcloak, a novel fine-grained spatial cloaking scheme for privacy-aware mobile users in LBSs. Based on a novel us...

Location-Based Services (LBSs) have been one of the most popular activities in our daily life. Users can send queries to the LBS server easily to learn their surroundings. However, these location-related queries may result in serious privacy concerns since the un-trusted LBS server has all the information about users and may track them in various w...

Location-Based Service (LBS) has become a vital part of our daily life. While enjoying the convenience provided by LBS, users may lose privacy since the untrusted LBS server has all the information about users in LBS and it may track them in various ways or release their personal data to third parties. To address the privacy issue, we propose a Dum...

The rapid developments of mobile devices and online social networks have resulted in increasing attention to Mobile Social Networking (MSN). The explosive growth of mobile-connected and location-aware devices makes it possible and meaningful to do the Proximity-based Mobile Social Networks (PMSNs). Users can discover and make new social interaction...

Location-Based Services (LBSs) gain increasing popularity with the development of social networks and mobile devices. The mobile users enjoy convenience by submitting their private information. Nonetheless, the users' sensitive information may be abused by an un-trusted LBS server. Privacy concerned in LBSs can be categorized into two major types:...

Location-Based Services (LBSs) are becoming increasingly popular in our daily life. In some scenarios, multiple users may seek data of same interest from a LBS server simultaneously or one by one, and they may need to provide their exact locations to the un-trusted LBS server in order to enjoy such a location-based service. Unfortunately, this will...

With rapid developments of mobile devices and online social networks, users of Proximity-based Mobile Social Networks (PMSNs) can easily discover and make new social interactions with others at the cost of their growing privacy concerns. To address this problem, we propose a third party free scheme, P-match, to privately match the similarity with p...

With the rapid development of location-aware devices such as smart phones, Location-Based Services (LBSs) are becoming increasingly popular. Users can enjoy convenience by sending queries to LBS servers and obtaining service information that is nearby. However, these queries may leak the users' locations and interests to the un-trusted LBS servers,...

Existing work on RFID authentication problems always make assumptions that 1) hash function can be fully used in designing RFID protocols; 2) channels between readers and the server are always secure. However, the first assumption is not suitable for EPC Class-1 Gen-2 tags, which has been challenged in many research work, while the second one canno...

Authentication and key distribution (AKD) protocols have become more important in the design of communication systems. The design criteria of the AKD protocols include the scalability, the communication efficiency, the computational efficiency, and the robustness of security. In this paper, we first analyze the vulnerability of an AKD protocol unde...

RFID systems have many security risks as an insecure wireless communication channel exists between tag and reader. Kulseng et al. have proposed several lightweight secure search protocols for low-cost systems: the basic protocol and the synchronisation-based protocol. To attack these two protocols successfully, the adversary needs to eavesdrop on t...

Radio frequency identification technology has been increasingly used in many applications. However, there are many threats and security risks in the RFID systems since an insecure wireless channel exists between the reader and the tags. The security of RFID protocols must be designed and proved with careful cryptanalysis. In this paper, we analyze...

Batina et al. have proposed a privacy-preserving grouping-proof RFID protocol with colluding tag prevention (CTP) recently which relies exclusively on the use of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). In this paper, we show that this proposed protocol is not secure against the tracking attack. To make this attack successfully, the adversary needs to ex...