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Open research questions in Cryptography and Data Security

157 gap statements mined from Cryptography and Data Security papers in our 7.9M-paper local library, which holds 2,206 papers on the topic — drawn mostly from each paper's own stated research gap, future-work, challenge and limitation notes, and its abstract. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one.

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What the literature leaves open

  • Future work will focus on two extensions: (1) achieving full Byzantine fault tolerance against malicious adversaries, and (2) adapting our recursive patching mechanism to expressive FSS primitives, such as distributed comparison functions (DCFs), to support privacy-preserving range queries and complex analytics.

    Fault-Tolerant Private Information Retrieval via Threshold Distributed Point Functions · 2026 · DOI

  • The need to prevent cross-component correlation attacks. The challenge of achieving dynamic extension security in the presence of adaptive chosen-message attacks.

    Traceable conditional privacy-preserving multi-designated verifier signature scheme · 2026 · DOI

  • There is a lack of schemes that can simultaneously achieve selective security and black-box traceability in the random oracle model.

    Efficient revocable attribute-based encryption with black-box traceability · 2026 · DOI

  • The lack of a provably secure and efficient identity privacy scheme for IoT-enabled 3GPP mobile networks.

    Strongly unforgeable and lightweight identity privacy scheme for the IoT-enabled 3GPP mobile networks · 2026 · DOI

  • While the obtained results confirm the computational efficiency of the proposed method, future experiments on real IoT devices and distributed cloud infrastructures are necessary to fully validate its applicability under resource-constrained conditions. Another important direction for future research is the extension of the threat model to active adversaries acting in collusion.

    Secret Sharing Scheme with Share Verification Capability · 2025 · DOI

  • The majority of existing studies lack ZKP-based verification, tool-level analysis, and formalized mappings between attack typologies and evaluation metrics.

    Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning Techniques: Cryptographic Approaches, Challenges, and Future Directions · 2025 · DOI

  • Understanding how to extend it to a new scheme that enables dynamic sharing and verifiability remains an interesting open problem.

    Practical Verifiable Multi-Key Searchable Encryption with Optimal Overhead · 2026 · DOI

  • The lack of support for dynamic updates and concealment of access patterns.

    A Bloom filter-based dynamic symmetric searchable encryption scheme over cloud data · 2026 · DOI

  • The lack of efficient and scalable solutions for searching encrypted data in cloud computing. The need for a secure and privacy-preserving data retrieval scheme that addresses the security and privacy concerns related to data confidentiality, unauthorized access, and privacy preservation.

    UNLOCKING SECURE SEARCH: KEY-AGGREGATE TECHNIQUES FOR ENCRYPTED CLOUD DATA RETRIEVAL · 2026 · DOI

  • The experimental evaluation lacks testing on realistic large-scale cloud datasets with millions of documents and dynamic insertion/deletion operations; scalability of the key-aggregate mechanism and optimized indexing to production-scale encrypted cloud environments remains unvalidated.

    UNLOCKING SECURE SEARCH: KEY-AGGREGATE TECHNIQUES FOR ENCRYPTED CLOUD DATA RETRIEVAL · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research can focus on optimizing the performance of DSKAG-IT-SIG. Future research can also explore the application of DSKAG-IT-SIG in other domains, such as secure multi-party computation.

    DSKAG-IT-SIG: Information-Theoretic Transaction Signatures with Hardware-Bound Policy Binding and Permissionless Zero-Knowledge On-Chain Verification · 2026 · DOI

  • The lack of a secure and efficient broadcast encryption scheme that can prevent malicious encryptors and data leakage. The need for a public tracing mechanism to identify colluding malicious users. The requirement for a smart contract system to implement authentication services and store relevant data.

    Traceable and Revocable Broadcast Encryption Scheme for Preventing Malicious Encryptors · 2026 · DOI

  • The lack of robustness in managing irrational updates in existing encrypted spatial-textual data retrieval schemes. The need for a novel scheme that achieves forward security, Type-I backward security, and enhanced robustness for boolean range queries.

    REACTS: robust encrypted search for dynamic spatial-textual data with permission control · 2026 · DOI

  • Existing decentralized reputation frameworks do not reconcile anonymity, reputation binding, and scalability. There is a need for a framework that achieves these requirements in fully decentralized crowdsourcing systems.

    DARTIC: Decentralized Anonymous Reputation at Scale for Trustworthy Crowdsourcing · 2026

  • Due to DP's inability to have zeros in the mechanism, the design of privacy mechanisms that optimize the worst-case utility is underexplored, and this work shows that PML is a privacy measure that is perfectly suited for this purpose.

    Worst-Case Utility Privacy Mechanism via Pointwise Maximal Leakage · 2026

  • Existing schemes are simultaneously too large, computationally secure rather than unconditionally secure, and architecturally disconnected from the compliance policy layer.

    DSKAG-IT-SIG: Information-Theoretic Transaction Signatures with Hardware-Bound Policy Binding and Permissionless Zero-Knowledge On-Chain Verification · 2026 · DOI

  • Existing cryptographic infrastructures are not suitable for heterogeneous defense settings. Traditional public-key algorithms are vulnerable to quantum attacks.

    DEF-CRYPT-Q: a quantum-enhanced hybrid encryption framework for privacy-preserving distributed defense communications · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research will focus on improving the security and compression performance of cipher images, 1 3International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics (2026)…

    DBRA-Net: privacy-preserving cipher image retrieval via dual-branch residual attention network · 2026 · DOI

  • Most NIZKs do not natively support proving knowledge of a secret witness that is distributed over multiple provers - Increased proof generation times - Significant increase in the number of constraints needed to encode…

    Collaborative CP-NIZKs: modular, composable proofs for distributed secrets · 2026 · DOI

  • Investigating the notion of composability in collaborative proofs - Constructing MPC protocols for collaborative CP-NIZKs - Evaluating the practicality of collaborative CP-NIZKs in various computational…

    Collaborative CP-NIZKs: modular, composable proofs for distributed secrets · 2026 · DOI

  • Investigating the construction of an adaptively secure ABE scheme in the standard model with efficient revocation and black-box traceability simultaneously, - Exploring the application of the proposed RT-CP-ABE scheme in various…

    Efficient revocable attribute-based encryption with black-box traceability · 2026 · DOI

  • Investigating the application of the scheme in other security architectures, - Exploring the use of other cryptographic schemes to further reduce communication…

    Strongly unforgeable and lightweight identity privacy scheme for the IoT-enabled 3GPP mobile networks · 2026 · DOI

  • Investigating the growth of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs)-based verification, - Developing domain-specific hybrid architectures, - Examining the efficiency of PPML systems running on edge devices with limited processing power, - Exploring the trade-off between privacy and accuracy in PPML…

    Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning Techniques: Cryptographic Approaches, Challenges, and Future Directions · 2025 · DOI

  • Bidirectional authorization raises concerns - Existing ORE schemes have…

    Unidirectional order-revealing encryption for flexible cross-database range queries · 2026 · DOI

  • Third, Future research should focus on (1) reducing the proof size of Zero-Knowledge proofs for deep neural networks, (2) integrating hardware security modules (HSMs) optimized for lattice-based cryptography to accelerate edge authentication, and (3) developing migration strategies for legacy IoT devices that lack the computational resources for ML-DSA, potentially relying on hybrid mode where gateways perform…

    Privacy Preserving Federated Or Post-Quantum Authentication Scheme · 2026 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Cryptography and Data Security

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Open questions raised by papers listed on this page include: (1) There is a lack of schemes that can simultaneously achieve selective security and black-box traceability in the random oracle model (“Efficient revocable attribute-based encryption with black-box traceability”, 2026); (2) The lack of a provably secure and efficient identity privacy scheme for IoT-enabled 3GPP mobile networks (“Strongly unforgeable and lightweight identity privacy scheme for the…”, 2026); (3) The lack of support for dynamic updates and concealment of access patterns (“A Bloom filter-based dynamic symmetric searchable encryption scheme over cloud…”, 2026); (4) The lack of efficient and scalable solutions for searching encrypted data in cloud computing (“UNLOCKING SECURE SEARCH: KEY-AGGREGATE TECHNIQUES FOR ENCRYPTED CLOUD DATA…”, 2026); (5) Future research can focus on optimizing the performance of DSKAG-IT-SIG (“DSKAG-IT-SIG: Information-Theoretic Transaction Signatures with Hardware-Bound…”, 2026). 157 gap statements have been mined from Cryptography and Data Security papers in our 7.9M-paper local library, which holds 2,206 papers on the topic; the gaps come from whichever of those papers state one. They are mostly the research gaps the authors state and the papers' abstracts, plus future-work, limitations and challenges passages. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one, so you can read the original claim in context.

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