arXiv subjects

Chuan Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Chuan Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Distribution Statistics Analytics on Mobile Spatial Data

With the rapid development of mobile computing technology, massive amounts of spatial data are continuously generated from various mobile terminals and sensing devices, such as smartphones, connected vehicles, and drones. Performing efficient distributed statistical analysis on this data is crucial for real-time mobile computing applications. However, the constrained and dynamic nature of mobile environments exacerbates the privacy challenge: centralizing sensitive data for analysis risks severe privacy leaks, while existing privacy-preserving techniques often introduce excessive overhead or inaccuracies. In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate the first system that supports efficient and privacy-preserving distribution statistics analysis for mobile spatial data. First, we propose eSpat-B, which leverages two non-colluding servers and a newly designed improved distributed point functions (DPF) with octree partitioning. Furthermore, considering the frequent updates of spatial data, we propose another more efficient scheme, eSpat+. The core idea of this scheme is to utilize a K-Dimensional tree for spatial partitioning, combine it with incremental DPF for performing statistics analysis, and design an efficient update algorithm. Security analysis demonstrates that our schemes effectively protect data privacy throughout the statistical process. Extensive experiments on real-world trajectory datasets demonstrate that the proposed schemes significantly outperform existing approaches, reducing computation overhead by up to 1.2x and communication overhead by up to 20x while maintaining 100% statistical accuracy.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Bridging Metal Additive Manufacturing and RF Accelerator Design: Development of a 704.4 MHz Crossbar H-Mode Linac for Efficient Beam Acceleration

The development of Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) linear accelerators via Metal Additive Manufacturing (MAM) is a strategic research focus of the RACERS team at GSI. The 704.4 MHz Crossbar H-mode (CH) cavity, proposed in 2021 to facilitate efficient frequency jumps and downsize accelerator footprints, represents both the highest-frequency CH structure to date and the first of its kind fabricated entirely through MAM. This study demonstrates the structure's capability for efficient beam acceleration in both Continuous Wave (CW) applications (e.g., accelerator-driven systems) and pulsed operations (e.g., spallation neutron sources). By operating in the UHF regime, the cavity inherently enhances sparking resistance, shifting the physical bottleneck away from surface electric field constraints to enable higher accelerating gradients. To manage the resulting thermal loads within compact dimensions, this study utilizes the design freedom of MAM to integrate a sophisticated "lotus-root-like" cooling network, which is a geometry unachievable through conventional subtractive machining. In combination with a kind of high-strength and high-conductivity alloy, CuCr1Zr, the cavity can achieve energy gain rates of 1.4-1.5 MeV/m (CW) and 4.6-4.8 MeV/m (pulsed), while maintaining a peak surface temperature of approximately 60 degrees Celsius. These results indicate that bridging additive manufacturing with advanced RF design provides a robust framework for next-generation UHF linac structures to go beyond current accelerating-gradient limits.

physics.acc-ph↗

arXiv2026

Client-Verifiable and Efficient Federated Unlearning in Low-Altitude Wireless Networks

In low-altitude wireless networks (LAWN), federated learning (FL) enables collaborative intelligence among unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) devices while keeping raw sensing data local. Due to the "right to be forgotten" requirements and the high mobility of ISAC devices that frequently enter or leave the coverage region of UAV-assisted servers, the influence of departing devices must be removed from trained models. This necessity motivates the adoption of federated unlearning (FUL) to eliminate historical device contributions from the global model in LAWN. However, existing FUL approaches implicitly assume that the UAV-assisted server executes unlearning operations honestly. Without client-verifiable guarantees, an untrusted server may retain residual device information, leading to potential privacy leakage and undermining trust. To address this issue, we propose VerFU, a privacy-preserving and client-verifiable federated unlearning framework designed for LAWN. It empowers ISAC devices to validate the server-side unlearning operations without relying on original data samples. By integrating linear homomorphic hash (LHH) with commitment schemes, VerFU constructs tamper-proof records of historical updates. ISAC devices ensure the integrity of unlearning results by verifying decommitment parameters and utilizing the linear composability of LHH to check whether the global model accurately removes their historical contributions. Furthermore, VerFU is capable of efficiently processing parallel unlearning requests and verification from multiple ISAC devices. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework efficiently preserves model utility post-unlearning while maintaining low communication and verification overhead.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

ShadowBlock: Efficient Dynamic Anonymous Blocklisting and Its Cross-chain Application

Online harassment, incitement to violence, racist behavior, and other harmful content on social media can damage social harmony and even break the law. Traditional blocklisting technologies can block malicious users, but this comes at the expense of identity privacy. The anonymous blocklisting has emerged as an effective mechanism to restrict the abuse of freedom of speech while protecting user identity privacy. However, the state-of-the-art anonymous blocklisting schemes suffer from either poor dynamism or low efficiency. In this paper, we propose $\mathsf{ShadowBlock}$, an efficient dynamic anonymous blocklisting scheme. Specifically, we utilize the pseudorandom function and cryptographic accumulator to construct the public blocklisting, enabling users to prove they are not on the blocklisting in an anonymous manner. To improve verification efficiency, we design an aggregation zero-knowledge proof mechanism that converts multiple verification operations into a single one. In addition, we leverage the accumulator's property to achieve efficient updates of the blocklisting, i.e., the original proof can be reused with minimal updates rather than regenerating the entire proof. Experiments show that $\mathsf{ShadowBlock}$ has better dynamics and efficiency than the existing schemes. Finally, the discussion on applications indicates that $\mathsf{ShadowBlock}$ also holds significant value and has broad prospects in emerging fields such as cross-chain identity management.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

From Concept to Reality: Additive Manufacturing in Particle Accelerator and Storage Ring R&D at GSI and for FAIR

State-of-the-art additive manufacturing technologies are not only finding ever-wider applications in everyday life, but also assuming an increasingly important role in scientific research. This kind of advanced manufacturing method eliminates many of the constraints of conventional processes in fabricating components with complex external shapes or intricate internal structures, thereby providing enhanced flexibility for the design and realization of a new generation of more efficient particle accelerators and storage rings. The RACERS team initiated by the Stochastic Cooling Group at GSI, Germany, is worldwide one of the first teams working on this topic. Based on the metal 3D-printing technology, two novel accelerating structures and one efficient cooling plate for a future stochastic cooling system are under development at GSI and for the FAIR project, respectively. Some successful experience as well as learnt lessons will be presented.

physics.acc-ph↗

arXiv2025

Epass: Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Asynchronous Payment on Blockchain

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) is a rapidly proliferating e-commerce model, offering consumers to get the product immediately and defer payments. Meanwhile, emerging blockchain technologies endow BNPL platforms with digital currency transactions, allowing BNPL platforms to integrate with digital wallets. However, the transparency of transactions causes critical privacy concerns because malicious participants may derive consumers' financial statuses from on-chain asynchronous payments. Furthermore, the newly created transactions for deferred payments introduce additional time overheads, which weaken the scalability of BNPL services. To address these issues, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving blockchain-based asynchronous payment scheme (Epass), which has promising scalability while protecting the privacy of on-chain consumer transactions. Specifically, Epass leverages locally verifiable signatures to guarantee the privacy of consumer transactions against malicious acts. Then, a privacy-preserving asynchronous payment scheme can be further constructed by leveraging time-release encryption to control trapdoors of redactable blockchain, reducing time overheads by modifying transactions for deferred payment. We give formal definitions and security models, generic structures, and formal proofs for Epass. Extensive comparisons and experimental analysis show that \textsf{Epass} achieves KB-level communication costs, and reduces time overhead by more than four times in comparisons with locally verifiable signatures and Go-Ethereum private test networks.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

BESA: Boosting Encoder Stealing Attack with Perturbation Recovery

To boost the encoder stealing attack under the perturbation-based defense that hinders the attack performance, we propose a boosting encoder stealing attack with perturbation recovery named BESA. It aims to overcome perturbation-based defenses. The core of BESA consists of two modules: perturbation detection and perturbation recovery, which can be combined with canonical encoder stealing attacks. The perturbation detection module utilizes the feature vectors obtained from the target encoder to infer the defense mechanism employed by the service provider. Once the defense mechanism is detected, the perturbation recovery module leverages the well-designed generative model to restore a clean feature vector from the perturbed one. Through extensive evaluations based on various datasets, we demonstrate that BESA significantly enhances the surrogate encoder accuracy of existing encoder stealing attacks by up to 24.63\% when facing state-of-the-art defenses and combinations of multiple defenses.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

EPSpatial: Achieving Efficient and Private Statistical Analytics of Geospatial Data

Geospatial data statistics involve the aggregation and analysis of location data to derive the distribution of clients within geospatial. The need for privacy protection in geospatial data analysis has become paramount due to concerns over the misuse or unauthorized access of client location information. However, existing private geospatial data statistics mainly rely on privacy computing techniques such as cryptographic tools and differential privacy, which leads to significant overhead and inaccurate results. In practical applications, geospatial data is frequently generated by mobile devices such as smartphones and IoT sensors. The continuous mobility of clients and the need for real-time updates introduce additional complexity. To address these issues, we first design \textit{spatially distributed point functions (SDPF)}, which combines a quad-tree structure with distributed point functions, allowing clients to succinctly secret-share values on the nodes of an exponentially large quad-tree. Then, we use Gray code to partition the region and combine SDPF with it to propose $\mathtt{EPSpatial}$, a scheme for accurate, efficient, and private statistical analytics of geospatial data. Moreover, considering clients' frequent movement requires continuous location updates, we leverage the region encoding property to present an efficient update algorithm.Security analysis shows that $\mathtt{EPSpatial}$ effectively protects client location privacy. Theoretical analysis and experimental results on real datasets demonstrate that $\mathtt{EPSpatial}$ reduces computational and communication overhead by at least $50\%$ compared to existing statistical schemes.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Large Language Model-driven Security Assistant for Internet of Things via Chain-of-Thought

The rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has transformed people's way of life and has a profound impact on both production and daily activities. However, with the rapid advancement of IoT technology, the security of IoT devices has become an unavoidable issue in both research and applications. Although some efforts have been made to detect or mitigate IoT security vulnerabilities, they often struggle to adapt to the complexity of IoT environments, especially when dealing with dynamic security scenarios. How to automatically, efficiently, and accurately understand these vulnerabilities remains a challenge. To address this, we propose an IoT security assistant driven by Large Language Model (LLM), which enhances the LLM's understanding of IoT security vulnerabilities and related threats. The aim of the ICoT method we propose is to enable the LLM to understand security issues by breaking down the various dimensions of security vulnerabilities and generating responses tailored to the user's specific needs and expertise level. By incorporating ICoT, LLM can gradually analyze and reason through complex security scenarios, resulting in more accurate, in-depth, and personalized security recommendations and solutions. Experimental results show that, compared to methods relying solely on LLM, our proposed LLM-driven IoT security assistant significantly improves the understanding of IoT security issues through the ICoT approach and provides personalized solutions based on the user's identity, demonstrating higher accuracy and reliability.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Prescribed-time boundary control of second-order hyperbolic PDEs modeled flexible string systems via backstepping design

This paper presents a boundary control scheme for prescribed-time (PT) stable of flexible string systems via backstepping method, and the dynamics of such systems modeled by Hamilton's principle is described as second-order hyperbolic partial differential equations (PDEs). Initially, to construct a boundary controller with PT stabilization capacity, a PT stable hyperbolic PDEs system with time-varying coefficient is chosen as the target system, and a corresponding Volterra integral transform with time-varying kernel function is considered. Then, to identify the boundary controller, the well-posedness of kernel equation is derived by means of successive approximation and mathematical induction, and the upper bound of kernel function is estimated. Furthermore, the inverse transform is proved with the help of a similar process for kernel function. Subsequently, the PT stability of closed-loop system is proved by PT stability of target system and reversible integral transform. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme.

math.OC↗

arXiv2024

Switching Event-Triggered Control of Nonlinear Parabolic PDE Systems via Galerkin/Neural-Network-Based Modeling Approach

This paper focuses on switching event-triggered output feedback control for a class of parabolic partial differential equation (PDE) systems subject to unknown nonlinearities and external bounded disturbance. Initially, the PDE systems is properly separated into a finite-dimensional ordinary differential equation (ODE) slow system and an infinite-dimensional ODE fast system based on Galerkin technique, especially the slow system can characterize the dominated dynamics. Then, a three-layer neural network is employed to approximate the unknown nonlinearities, and Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is adopted to get a relative accurate slow system. Subsequentaly, a switching event-triggered control scheme is developed, and a waiting time subject to the triggered condition is implemented to avoid the Zeno behavior and convert the slow system into a switching system. In the following, the stability and $\textbf{\textit{H}}_\infty$ performance issues of the closed-loop system are discussed, and the controllers are displayed in terms of bilinear matrix inequalities (BMIs). Novel algorithms are proposed to convert the BMIs into linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Additionally, a sub-optimal switching event-triggered controller is obtained using an iterative optimization approach based on LMIs. Finally, simulation on the catalytic rod reaction model and traffic flow model demonstrate the effectiveness of switching event-triggered control strategy.

math.OC↗

arXiv2024

Two-layer consensus based on master-slave consortium chain data sharing for Internet of Vehicles

Due to insufficient scalability, the existing consortium chain cannot meet the requirements of low latency, high throughput, and high security when applied to Internet of Vehicles (IoV) data sharing. Therefore, we propose a two-layer consensus algorithm based on the master-slave consortium chain - Weighted Raft and Byzantine Fault Tolerance (WRBFT). The intra-group consensus of the WRBFT algorithm adopts weighted Raft, and the best node is selected as the master node to lead the intra-group consensus by comprehensively evaluating the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), data processing capacity and storage capacity of the nodes. The inter-group consensus adopts practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) based on BLS aggregate signature with nonlinear coefficients to ensure that the inter-group consensus can tolerate 1/3 of Byzantine nodes. At the same time, the verifiable random function (VRF) is used to select the master node of the inter-group consensus to ensure the randomness of the master node. A large number of experimental results show that the proposed WRBFT algorithm reduces delay, and improves throughput and system security.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Task Offloading for Vehicular Edge Computing Based on Improved Hotstuff under Parking Assistance

Parked-assisted vehicular edge computing (PVEC) fully leverages communication and computing resources of parking vehicles, thereby significantly alleviating the pressure on edge servers. However, resource sharing and trading for vehicular task offloading in the PVEC environment usually occur between untrustworthy entities, which compromises the security of data sharing and transactions by vehicles and edge devices. To address these concerns, blockchain is introduced to provide a secure and trustworthy environment for offloading and transactions in PVEC. Nevertheless, due to the mobility of the vehicles, the processes of computing offloading and blockchain transactions are interrupted, which greatly reduces the reliability of the blockchain in edge computing process. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based PVEC (BPVEC) offloading framework to enhance the security and reliability of the task offloading and transaction. Specifically, a consensus node selection algorithm based on the connected dominating set (CDS) is designed to improve the Hotstuff consensus according to parking time, computing capability and communication quality, which enhances blockchain reliability in computing offloading and transactions. Meanwhile, a Stackelberg game model, establishing the roadside units (RSUs) and parking vehicles (PVs) as leaders and the requesting vehicles (RVs) as follower, is utilized to optimize the offloading strategy and pricing. Subsequently, a BPVEC offloading strategy algorithm with gradient descent method is designed to maximize system revenue. Simulation results show that the proposed BPVEC offloading scheme is secure and reliable while ensuring maximum benefits.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Distributed Collaborative Inference System in Next-Generation Networks and Communication

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, generative artificial intelligence (GAI) has taken a leading role in transforming data processing methods. However, the high computational demands of GAI present challenges for devices with limited resources. As we move towards the sixth generation of mobile networks (6G), the higher data rates and improved energy efficiency of 6G create a need for more efficient data processing in GAI. Traditional GAI, however, shows its limitations in meeting these demands. To address these challenges, we introduce a multi-level collaborative inference system designed for next-generation networks and communication. Our proposed system features a deployment strategy that assigns models of varying sizes to devices at different network layers. Then, we design a task offloading strategy to optimise both efficiency and latency. Furthermore, a modified early exit mechanism is implemented to enhance the inference process for single models. Experimental results demonstrate that our system effectively reduces inference latency while maintaining high-quality output. Specifically, compared to existing work, our system can reduce inference time by up to 17% without sacrificing the inference accuracy.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

A Node-Based Polar List Decoder with Frame Interleaving and Ensemble Decoding Support

Node-based successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding has received considerable attention in wireless communications for its significant reduction in decoding latency, particularly with 5G New Radio (NR) polar codes. However, the existing node-based SCL decoders are constrained by sequential processing, leading to complicated and data-dependent computational units that introduce unavoidable stalls, reducing hardware efficiency. In this paper, we present a frame-interleaving hardware architecture for a generalized node-based SCL decoder. By efficiently reusing otherwise idle computational units, two independent frames can be decoded simultaneously, resulting in a significant throughput gain. Based on this new architecture, we further exploit graph ensembles to diversify the decoding space, thus enhancing the error-correcting performance with a limited list size. Two dynamic strategies are proposed to eliminate the residual stalls in the decoding schedule, which eventually results in nearly 2x throughput compared to the state-of-the-art baseline node-based SCL decoder. To impart the decoder rate flexibility, we develop a novel online instruction generator to identify the generalized nodes and produce instructions on-the-fly. The corresponding 28nm FD-SOI ASIC SCL decoder with a list size of 8 has a core area of 1.28 mm2 and operates at 692 MHz. It is compatible with all 5G NR polar codes and achieves a throughput of 3.34 Gbps and an area efficiency of 2.62 Gbps/mm2 for uplink (1024, 512) codes, which is 1.41x and 1.69x better than the state-of-the-art node-based SCL decoders.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2024

Explicit Performance Bound of Finite Blocklength Coded MIMO: Time-Domain versus Spatiotemporal Channel Coding

In the sixth generation (6G), ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) will be further developed to achieve TKu extreme connectivity. On the premise of ensuring the same rate and reliability, the spatial domain advantage of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has the potential to further shorten the time-domain code length and is expected to be a key enabler for the realization of TKu. Different coded MIMO schemes exhibit disparities in exploiting the spatial domain characteristics, so we consider two extreme MIMO coding schemes, namely, time-domain coding in which the codewords on multiple spatial channels are independent of each other, and spatiotemporal coding in which multiple spatial channels are jointly coded. By analyzing the statistical characteristics of information density and utilizing the normal approximation, we provide explicit performance bounds for finite blocklength coded MIMO under time-domain coding and spatiotemporal coding. It is found that, different from the phenomenon in time-domain coding where the performance declines as the blocklengths decrease, spatiotemporal coding can effectively compensate for the performance loss caused by short blocklengths by improving the spatial degrees of freedom (DoF). These results indicate that spatiotemporal coding can optimally exploit the spatial dimension advantages of MIMO systems, enabling extremely low error-rate communication under stringent blocklengths constraint.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2024

MFA-Net: Multi-Scale feature fusion attention network for liver tumor segmentation

Segmentation of organs of interest in medical CT images is beneficial for diagnosis of diseases. Though recent methods based on Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (F-CNNs) have shown success in many segmentation tasks, fusing features from images with different scales is still a challenge: (1) Due to the lack of spatial awareness, F-CNNs share the same weights at different spatial locations. (2) F-CNNs can only obtain surrounding information through local receptive fields. To address the above challenge, we propose a new segmentation framework based on attention mechanisms, named MFA-Net (Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Attention Network). The proposed framework can learn more meaningful feature maps among multiple scales and result in more accurate automatic segmentation. We compare our proposed MFA-Net with SOTA methods on two 2D liver CT datasets. The experimental results show that our MFA-Net produces more precise segmentation on images with different scales.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Parallel in-memory wireless computing

Parallel wireless digital communication with ultralow power consumption is critical for emerging edge technologies such as 5G and Internet of Things. However, the physical separation between digital computing units and analogue transmission units in traditional wireless technology leads to high power consumption. Here we report a parallel in-memory wireless computing scheme. The approach combines in-memory computing with wireless communication using memristive crossbar arrays. We show that the system can be used for the radio transmission of a binary stream of 480 bits with a bit error rate of 0. The in-memory wireless computing uses two orders of magnitude less power than conventional technology (based on digital-to-analogue and analogue-to-digital converters). We also show that the approach can be applied to acoustic and optical wireless communications

cs.AR↗