Zhihao Zhang^1,#, Zhuodong Liu^1,#, Xiangyu Li², Lei Zhang^1,*

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.88, No.2, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2026.081922 - 15 June 2026

Abstract Financial fraud detection across institutions faces a fundamental tension between the need for diverse training data and regulatory prohibitions on sharing sensitive records. Existing federated learning approaches suffer from performance degradation under non-IID distributions and substantial utility losses when uniform differential privacy is applied to inherently sparse fraud signals. To this end, this paper proposes HiFraud, a hierarchical federated framework featuring three key components: fraud-aware dynamic clustering with complementarity regularization to group institutions by fraud pattern similarity while preserving rare-type representation; star-chain knowledge transfer augmented by not-true-class distillation to propagate novel fraud patterns rapidly within… More >

Akmalbek Abdusalomov¹, Kudratjon Zohirov², Sojida Ochilova², Jakhongir Oramov³, Zafar Ruziyev³, Malika Rustamova⁴, Gulrukh Sherboboyeva⁵, Komil Tashev^6,7, Young Im Cho^1,*

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.88, No.2, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2026.081292 - 15 June 2026

Abstract Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are also increasingly becoming more often in the transportation infrastructure of smart cities, so that they can successfully achieve real-time observation of traffic, emergency coordination, and two-way communication relaying. However, the security and privacy risks arising in open, highly mobile intelligent transportation systems (ITS) enabled by UAVs are critical, as they pose threats of impersonation, replay, Sybil, and tracking attacks. Secondly, standard static authentication mechanisms are unable to support dynamic risk environments and excessive resource consumption on UAV platforms with limited capacity. To address these challenges, this study introduces a Generative-AI-assisted… More >

Ammar Odeh^*, Osama Alhaj Hassan, Anas Abu Taleb

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.88, No.2, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2026.080940 - 15 June 2026

Abstract The rapid growth of sophisticated malware and the increasing diversity of computing environments have exposed critical limitations in traditional centralized malware detection systems, particularly in data privacy, scalability, and adaptability. This study proposes a privacy-preserving, collaborative malware-detection framework that leverages federated learning to improve detection accuracy while keeping sensitive data local to participating devices. The objective is to address emerging malware threats by combining behavioral and memory-based analysis within a decentralized learning paradigm. The proposed framework employs federated learning to train a global malware detection model without transferring raw data. Each client locally extracts discriminative… More >

Alanoud Al Mazroa¹, Fahad Masood², Bakri Hussain Awaji³, Mohammad Alhefdi⁴, Abeer Aljohani⁵, Jawad Ahmad^6,*

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.147, No.2, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmes.2026.080134 - 27 May 2026

Abstract The rapid integration of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and distributed energy resources into smart grids has improved monitoring, control, and energy efficiency. However, it also exposes the grid to cyberattacks and privacy risks, as increased connectivity and data exchange can significantly disrupt energy management and system stability. Studies focused on centralized cybersecurity mechanisms that lacked scalability and did not emphasize the inherent graph structure of power networks. This study proposes a privacy-preserving and cyber-resilient energy-optimization framework, FedGNN, for IoT-enabled smart grids that jointly integrates federated learning, graph neural network-based trust inference, and trust-aware energy dispatch.… More >

Ghadi Almaktoom, Suliman Aladhadh, Salim El Khediri^*

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.147, No.2, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmes.2026.078774 - 27 May 2026

Abstract The rapid growth of phishing attempts in the enterprise could potentially lead to bankruptcy. The primary focus of the research is on detecting phishing attacks, with no interest in how the data is processed. Attackers use fraudulent methods to obtain valuable, confidential information, resulting in billions of dollars in financial losses for enterprises. In our review, we examined the methods used in phishing-detection studies. We concluded that the two main sections, centralized and decentralized methods, were the centralized ones, which aggregate data in a central server and thus violate data protection regulations, such as GDPR.… More >

Tao Bai¹, Yang Tang², Kuan Shao³, Zhenyong Zhang^3,*, Yuanteng Liu⁴

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.88, No.1, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2026.078473 - 08 May 2026

Abstract In recent years, the rapid development of artificial intelligence has greatly promoted the application of Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS). Users can upload their requirements through front-end applications, and the server provides model inference services after receiving the user input. However, MLaaS may lead to serious privacy breaches. Large language model services are typical representatives of MLaaS, and the Transformer is a typical structure in large language models. Therefore, this paper proposes a privacy-protected Transformer inference scheme based on the CKKS fully homomorphic encryption scheme to optimize computational and communication efficiency. Firstly, this paper… More >

Nomangwane Angelina Tshabalala¹, Ping Guo^2,*

Journal on Internet of Things, Vol.8, pp. 87-107, 2026, DOI:10.32604/jiot.2026.078248 - 06 May 2026

Abstract Type 2 Diabetes mellitus is a disease that afflicts approximately 537 million individuals all over the world, and continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) systems have become very important in the management of the disease. Nonetheless, the existing centralized data architecture of CGM generates high privacy and security risks, as sensitive patient health data can be easily abused. This paper introduces an original structure that incorporates both federated learning and blockchain technology and allows for predicting glucose safely and preserving privacy without affecting the integrity of the data. Our model uses the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural… More >

Samar Abbas Mangi^1,*, Samina Rajper¹, Noor Ahmed Shaikh¹, Shehzad Ashraf Chaudhry^2,3

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.87, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2026.077337 - 09 April 2026

Abstract Malicious domain detection (MDD) from DNS telemetry enables early threat hunting but is constrained by privacy and data-sharing barriers across organizations. We present a deployable federated learning (FL) pipeline that trains a compact deep neural network (DNN; 64-32-16 with ReLU and dropout 0.3) locally at each client and exchanges only masked model updates. Privacy is enforced via secure aggregation (the server observes only an aggregate of masked updates) and optional server-side differential privacy (DP) via clipping and Gaussian noise. Our feature schema combines DNS-specific lexical cues (character n-grams, entropy, TLD indicators) with lightweight behavioral signals More >

Abuzar Khan¹, Abid Iqbal^2,*, Ghassan Husnain^1,*, Fahad Masood¹, Mohammed Al-Naeem³, Sajid Iqbal⁴

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.87, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2026.077222 - 09 April 2026

Abstract Cloud computing now supports large-scale maritime analytics, yet offloading rich Automatic Identification System (AIS) data to the cloud exposes sensitive operational patterns and complicates compliance with cross-border privacy regulations. This work addresses the gap between growing demand for AI-driven vessel intelligence and the limited availability of practical, privacy-preserving cloud solutions. We introduce a privacy-by-design edge-cloud framework in which ports and vessels serve as federated clients, training vessel-type classifiers on local AIS trajectories while transmitting only clipped, Gaussian-perturbed updates to a zero-trust cloud coordinator employing secure and robust aggregation. Using a public AIS corpus with realistic… More >

Wenxuan Yu¹, Wenjing Gao¹, Jiuru Wang², Rong Hao^1,*, Jia Yu^1,*

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.87, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2026.076731 - 09 April 2026

Abstract Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a computationally intensive matrix operation that resource-constrained clients struggle to complete locally. Privacy-preserving outsourcing allows clients to offload heavy computing tasks to powerful servers, effectively solving the problem of local computing difficulties. However, the existing privacy-preserving NMF outsourcing schemes only allow one server to perform outsourcing computation, resulting in low efficiency on the server side. In order to improve the efficiency of outsourcing computation, we propose a privacy-preserving parallel NMF outsourcing scheme with multiple edge servers. We adopt the matrix blocking technique to divide the computation task into multiple subtasks, More >