Yucong Ma

Ms. Yucong Ma


Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

1Year (2026-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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22 June 2026 in Preprints.org
Verified
Preprint
Open access
PDF file
HHHuiying Hou
Huiying Hou
YMYucong Ma
Yucong Ma
ZZZisu Zhao
Zisu Zhao
XGXinrui Ge
Xinrui Ge
Sensor-network, Internet of Things, industrial-monitoring, and cyber-physical security graphs are increasingly outsourced to clouds, where similarity search should be supported without exposing graph content, query graphs, update contents, or database evolution. Existing privacy-preserving graph similarity schemes mainly target static encrypted databases and therefore handle insertions, deletions, label updates, and long-running index maintenance poorly. This paper proposes DFB-PPGSQ, a dynamic forward/backward-private graph similarity matching scheme that moves branch-based lower-bound filtering into a structured-encryption framework. DFB-PPGSQ uses epoch-local feature tokens, per-record occurrence handles, one-time update labels, update buffers, deletion tombstones, and shuffle-based branch-tree re-randomization to preserve pruning efficiency while bounding temporal leakage. We formalize the system model, leakage functions, algorithms, and security interpretation, and implement a reproducible Python prototype with HMAC-SHA256 token generation and multi-profile dynamic sensor-topology workloads. Across five random seeds, DFB-PPGSQ keeps query latency close to the static branch-tree baseline (46.60 ms versus 44.72 ms at 4000 graphs), avoids immediate full-rebuild updates (0.091 ms insertion and 0.092 ms label update), and keeps metadata-assisted cross-epoch token linkage below 5.6% attack success after refresh in additional industrial and campus IoT stress workloads.

1 September 2026 in Big Data and Cognitive Computing
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
HHHuiying Hou
Huiying Hou
YMYucong Ma
Yucong Ma
JMJianyu Miao
Jianyu Miao
Large language model (LLM) agents are becoming cognitive interfaces to data lakes, enterprise knowledge bases, vector memories, browsers, files, and software tools. This shift creates a data-governance gap: an agent may reason over large private context, yet the protected resource often lacks a verifiable record of which user intent, data object, action, destination, and semantic release were authorized. This paper proposes CapAgent, a semantic data-flow governance middleware for LLM agents in big-data cognitive-computing environments. CapAgent maps human-attested task intent into signed, attenuable, and purpose-bound capability tokens that are checked by a reference monitor before sensitive tool invocation, memory retrieval, data export, and inter-agent delegation. Its policy layer combines task templates, resource labels, destination rules, caveats, semantic release modes, and audit obligations; its runtime enforces both symbolic scope checks and semantic recoverability checks over protected facts. We present formal governance semantics, a conservative intent compiler, an explainable data-flow decision workflow, and a runnable Python middleware. A reproducible trace-replay benchmark with 600 benign and adversarial traces across five data-intensive agent scenarios reports attack success, benign success, false blocking, latency, component ablations, and audit quality. In this synthetic trace-replay evaluation, the full monitor reduces measured attack success from 100.00% under ambient execution and 12.50% under scope-only authorization to 0.00% (Wilson 95% CI [0.00, 0.95]), while retaining 75.00% benign success. In addition, we conduct a 520-trial end-to-end tool-calling benchmark with representative prompt-only, task-shield-style, CaMeL-style, scope-only, and full-CapAgent configurations; a 210-task compiler gold-standard evaluation; a 240-item semantic-release calibration set; and a 12-cell BDCC-style scalability microbenchmark. In these supplemental tests, full CapAgent obtains 0.00% ASR (95% CI [0.00, 1.06]) in the tool-calling benchmark, 87.50% exact-policy compiler match with 0.00% over-authorization, 88.89% semantic-release recall with 0.00% false-block rate, and sub-millisecond in-process authorization latency up to 100,000 resources. The results support CapAgent as an auditable governance layer for cognitive LLM agents rather than as a replacement for model-level alignment or public end-to-end agent benchmarks.

28 July 2026 in Sensors
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
HHHuiying Hou
Huiying Hou
YMYucong Ma
Yucong Ma
ZZZisu Zhao
Zisu Zhao
XGXinrui Ge
Xinrui Ge
In applications pertaining to sensor network, the Internet of Things, industrial monitoring, and cyber–physical security, graphs are increasingly being outsourced to clouds, where similarity search should be supported without exposing graph content, query graphs, update contents, or database evolution. Existing privacy-preserving graph similarity schemes mainly target static encrypted databases, and as such struggle to handle insertions, deletions, label updates, and long-running index maintenance. This paper proposes DFB-PPGSQ, a dynamic forward-private and epochal backward-private graph similarity matching scheme that moves branch-based lower-bound filtering into a structured encryption framework. DFB-PPGSQ uses epoch-local feature tokens, per-record occurrence handles, one-time update labels, update buffers, deletion tombstones, and shuffle-based branch–tree re-randomization to preserve pruning efficiency while making same-epoch tombstone, traversal, size, timing, and refresh leakage explicit. We formalize the system model, leakage functions, algorithms, and security interpretation, then implement a reproducible Python prototype with HMAC-SHA256 token generation and multi-profile dynamic sensor-topology workloads. Across five random seeds, DFB-PPGSQ keeps server-side filtering latency close to the static branch–tree baseline (46.60 ms versus 44.72 ms at 4000 graphs), avoids immediate full-rebuild updates (0.091 ms insertion and 0.092 ms label update), and keeps metadata-assisted cross-epoch token linkage below 5.6% attack success after refresh in additional industrial and campus IoT stress workloads. Storage, communication, exact GED refinement, side-channel hardening, and verifiable-result protection are treated as deployment costs and limitations rather than being included in the headline latency.

19 May 2026 in Algorithms
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
YMYucong Ma
Yucong Ma
HHHuiying Hou
Huiying Hou
XGXuerui Gan
Xuerui Gan
ZZZisu Zhao
Zisu Zhao
With digital assets increasingly comprising a significant portion of personal wealth, the secure management and transfer of digital legacies have emerged as a pressing concern. Secret sharing offers a solution to this problem. However, distributing shares containing the unique private key for digital assets poses significant risks of theft or tampering, potentially leading to the illegal appropriation of user assets. This paper presents a leakage-resistant digital inheritance distribution scheme based on sparse-matrix secret sharing. It employs an efficient thresholding scheme that uses sparse matrices, achieving near-linear complexity for share reconstruction via a random striped matrix. Reconstruction time is significantly reduced compared to traditional polynomial interpolation methods. To address the realistic scenario where an asset owner holds multiple independent digital accounts, we propose a multi-account blinding and aggregation mechanism. This mechanism allows the dealer to establish isolated group keys for each account in a single round of communication, while preventing adversaries from linking different accounts to the same owner. A key-derivation and encrypted-transmission mechanism is then designed based on the aggregated group keys. Group keys are established by consensus among heirs, from which each heir derives a unique session key. Authenticated encryption ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and identity-bound transmission of shares. Through security proofs and experimental performance evaluation, it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme satisfies adaptive security requirements with the hash function H modeled as a random oracle, while all other cryptographic primitives (PRF, AES-GCM, HMAC) are assumed to be secure under standard computational assumptions.

3 July 2026 in Preprints.org
Verified
Preprint
Open access
PDF file
HHHuiying Hou
Huiying Hou
JMJianyu Miao
Jianyu Miao
YMYucong Ma
Yucong Ma
XGXuerui Gan
Xuerui Gan
XLXuefeng Li
Xuefeng Li
IoT-connected healthcare sensor networks require authenticated and privacy-preserving data exchange among wearable sensors, mobile medical terminals, edge gateways, cloud servers, and medical institutions. Existing authentication schemes for healthcare IoT often bind signatures directly to user identities, exposing sensitive personal or institutional information and imposing heavy verification costs on resource-constrained sensing devices. To address this problem, we propose a fine-grained and flexible dual authentication scheme for healthcare sensor networks. In the proposed scheme, health data and diagnoses are signed with a fresh signing key and a fine-grained access control policy each time, so that the signer identity remains hidden while authorized entities can still modify permitted parts of signed data. No entity other than an authorized entity can trace a malicious signer or modify signed data without changing the data source. To support lightweight verification in sensor-edge-cloud deployments, we further present a verifiable outsourced authentication scheme that outsources time-consuming pairing operations to cloud servers; the online verification process then requires only six multiplication operations. As a fundamental technical component, we present a practical attribute-based sanitizable signature with shorter signature and key lengths and more efficient signing and signature-changing operations than the state-of-the-art policy-based sanitizable signature (P3S). Formal security analysis and experiments demonstrate the security and practicality of the proposed scheme for privacy-preserving healthcare sensing and medical data exchange.

18 August 2026 in Sensors
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
HHHuiying Hou
Huiying Hou
JMJianyu Miao
Jianyu Miao
YMYucong Ma
Yucong Ma
XGXuerui Gan
Xuerui Gan
XLXuefeng Li
Xuefeng Li
IoT-connected healthcare sensor networks require authenticated and privacy-preserving data exchange among wearable sensors, mobile medical terminals, edge gateways, cloud servers, and medical institutions. Existing authentication schemes for healthcare IoT often bind signatures directly to user identities, exposing sensitive personal or institutional information and imposing heavy verification costs on resource-constrained sensing devices. To address this problem, we propose a fine-grained and flexible dual authentication scheme for healthcare sensor networks. In the proposed scheme, health data and diagnoses are signed with a fresh signing key and a fine-grained access control policy each time, so that the signer identity remains hidden while authorized entities can still modify permitted parts of signed data. No entity other than an authorized entity can trace a malicious signer or modify signed data without changing the data source. To support lightweight verification in sensor-edge-cloud deployments, we further present a verifiable outsourced authentication scheme that outsources time-consuming pairing operations to cloud servers; the online verification process then requires only six multiplication operations. As a fundamental technical component, we present a practical attribute-based sanitizable signature with shorter signature and key lengths and more efficient signing and signature-changing operations than the state-of-the-art policy-based sanitizable signature (P3S). Formal security analysis and experiments demonstrate the security and practicality of the proposed scheme for privacy-preserving healthcare sensing and medical data exchange.