Recently, at the flagship conference in the field of communications, the IEEE International Conference on Communications (IEEE ICC) 2024, which was held in the United States, the research achievement "Secure, Availability, Verifiable, and Efficient Range Query Processing on Outsourced Datasets" by Associate Researcher Li Meng's team from our institute stood out among many papers and won the Best Paper Award at this conference. This is also the only paper in communication and information system security that received an award at this conference. The second author is Gao Jianbo, a master's graduate from our class of 2023, who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the School of Cyberspace Security, Beijing Institute of Technology. The paper focuses on the verifiable result problem of secure range queries. Range queries allow data users to outsource their data to cloud servers, which respond to data users submitting requests with range conditions. However, security issues have hindered its widespread use. Existing work ignores the availability of query items and fails to provide security verification protection, or sacrifices search accuracy for efficiency. This study proposes a secure, available, verifiable, and efficient range query scheme (SAVE) with three notable features: it checks the security usability against malicious cloud servers and designs a key-based indexing and secure verification mechanism to check the availability of matching nodes, including validity and freshness checks; it designs a targeted verification mechanism for the correctness and completeness of query results without compromising security; and it devises a layered encoding method to improve search efficiency and accuracy. The study formally states and proves the security of SAVE in the random oracle model and conducts extensive experiments on multiple datasets to verify its efficiency.

As one of the two flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society, the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) has become one of the largest and most influential academic conferences in global communications networks. It covers next-generation networks, mobile internet, cognitive wireless networks, information theory, wireless communications, communications signal processing, optical communications, multimedia communications, and information security. Each year, it attracts approximately 2000 scientists, researchers, and industry professionals to participate. This conference edition received more than 2364 scholarly papers from around the world, with 939 papers accepted for presentation, and 15 were selected as the best papers, making the award rate only 0.6% of the submissions.