Nazatul Haque Sultan

Alsharif Abuadbba, Nazatul Sultan, Surya Nepal et al.

AI is moving from domain-specific autonomy in closed, predictable settings to large-language-model-driven agents that plan and act in open, cross-organizational environments. As a result, the cybersecurity risk landscape is changing in fundamental ways. Agentic AI systems can plan, act, collaborate, and persist over time, functioning as participants in complex socio-technical ecosystems rather than as isolated software components. Although recent work has strengthened defenses against model and pipeline level vulnerabilities such as prompt injection, data poisoning, and tool misuse, these system centric approaches may fail to capture risks that arise from autonomy, interaction, and emergent behavior. This article introduces the 4C Framework for multi-agent AI security, inspired by societal governance. It organizes agentic risks across four interdependent dimensions: Core (system, infrastructure, and environmental integrity), Connection (communication, coordination, and trust), Cognition (belief, goal, and reasoning integrity), and Compliance (ethical, legal, and institutional governance). By shifting AI security from a narrow focus on system-centric protection to the broader preservation of behavioral integrity and intent, the framework complements existing AI security strategies and offers a principled foundation for building agentic AI systems that are trustworthy, governable, and aligned with human values.

Nazatul Haque Sultan, Yan Bo, Yansong Gao et al.

Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple users to collaboratively train a machine learning model without sharing raw data, making it suitable for privacy-sensitive applications. However, local model or weight updates can still leak sensitive information. Secure aggregation protocols mitigate this risk by ensuring that only the aggregated updates are revealed. Among these, single-setup protocols, where key generation and exchange occur only once, are the most efficient due to reduced communication and computation overhead. However, existing single-setup protocols often lack support for dynamic user participation and do not provide strong privacy guarantees such as forward and backward secrecy. \par In this paper, we present a novel secure aggregation protocol that requires only a single setup for the entire FL training. Our protocol supports dynamic user participation, tolerates dropouts, and achieves both forward and backward secrecy. It leverages lightweight symmetric homomorphic encryption with a key negation technique to mask updates efficiently, eliminating the need for user-to-user communication. To defend against model inconsistency attacks, we introduce a low-overhead verification mechanism using message authentication codes (MACs). We provide formal security proofs under both semi-honest and malicious adversarial models and implement a full prototype. Experimental results show that our protocol reduces user-side computation by up to $99\%$ compared to state-of-the-art protocols like e-SeaFL (ACSAC'24), while maintaining competitive model accuracy. These features make our protocol highly practical for real-world FL deployments, especially on resource-constrained devices.

Nazatul Haque Sultan, Maryline Laurent, Vijay Varadharajan

For better data availability and accessibility while ensuring data secrecy, organizations often tend to outsource their encrypted data to the cloud storage servers, thus bringing the challenge of keyword search over encrypted data. In this paper, we propose a novel authorized keyword search scheme using Role-Based Encryption (RBE) technique in a cloud environment. The contributions of this paper are multi-fold. First, it presents a keyword search scheme which enables only the authorized users, having proper assigned roles, to delegate keyword-based data search capabilities over encrypted data to the cloud providers without disclosing any sensitive information. Second, it supports a multi-organization cloud environment, where the users can be associated with more than one organization. Third, the proposed scheme provides efficient decryption, conjunctive keyword search and revocation mechanisms. Fourth, the proposed scheme outsources expensive cryptographic operations in decryption to the cloud in a secure manner. Fifth, we have provided a formal security analysis to prove that the proposed scheme is semantically secure against Chosen Plaintext and Chosen Keyword Attacks. Finally, our performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is suitable for practical applications.

Nazatul Haque Sultan, Vijay Varadharajan, Lan Zhou et al.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is a popular model which maps roles to access permissions for resources and then roles to the users to provide access control. Role-Based Encryption (RBE) is a cryptographic form of RBAC model that integrates traditional RBAC with the cryptographic encryption method, where RBAC access policies are embedded in encrypted data itself so that any user holding a qualified role can access the data by decrypting it. However, the existing RBE schemes have been focusing on the single-organization cloud storage system, where the stored data can be accessed by users of the same organization. This paper presents a novel RBE scheme with efficient user revocation for the multi-organization cloud storage system, where the data from multiple independent organizations are stored and can be accessed by the authorized users from any other organization. Additionally, an outsourced decryption mechanism is introduced which enables the users to delegate expensive cryptographic operations to the cloud, thereby reducing the overhead on the end-users. Security and performance analyses of the proposed scheme demonstrate that it is provably secure against Chosen Plaintext Attack and can be useful for practical applications due to its low computation overhead.