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Alvaro Navarro Martínez, Sara N. Matheu, Antonio Skármeta
No abstract is available for this record.
Hassan Touheed
Foundational agent interoperability standards, notably the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), have advanced multi-agent system communication, and complementary identity frameworks leveraging W3C Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) provide cryptographic agent authentication. However, no existing protocol supports content-based semantic routing of agent payloads across organisational trust boundaries without requiring the routing intermediary to decrypt the payload, which is a hard constraint in compliance-sensitive environments governed by GDPR, HIPAA, and MiFID II. We propose SS-ZKR, a three-mechanism privacy-preserving routing protocol designed as a complementary layer atop A2A/MCP. Mechanism I introduces blind routing via differentially private semantic intent vectors cryptographically bound to zero-knowledge proofs of payload-schema consistency. Mechanism II offers vector-weighted adaptive payload sanitisation with formal (epsilon, delta)-differential privacy for numerical fields and heuristic semantic aggregation for textual fields. Mechanism III presents a spatial-to-cryptographic policy compiler that translates visually defined trust-zone topologies into deterministic zero-knowledge access circuits. We provide a formal threat model, analyse information leakage bounds of intent vectors, present pseudocode for all three mechanisms, and give analytical complexity comparisons against TEE-based and homomorphic encryption-based routing baselines. SS-ZKR lets enterprises in financial services, healthcare, and defence orchestrate heterogeneous AI agents across regulatory boundaries without exposing proprietary data to routing infrastructure.
Konstantinos Sgantzos, Massimiliano Ferrara
Abstract As AI agents evolve into autonomous economic actors, verifiable and legally binding identity frameworks become critical. This paper presents Ricardian-TEA , a novel architecture combining Triple-Entry Accounting (TEA), Ricardian Contracts, and Distributed Ledger Technology to assign “Legal-Technical Identities” to AI agents. We provide rigorous mathematical foundations: a Ricardian-TEA Integrity Theorem proving that constraint enforcement, non-disputability, and identity binding hold with overwhelming probability under standard cryptographic assumptions, and a Cyber-Chama Convergence Proposition characterising reputation-based trust dynamics. The framework ensures GDPR compliance via Zero-Knowledge Architecture and Crypto-Shredding. Proof-of-concept implementations on Ethereum Sepolia and Bitcoin SV testnets demonstrate chain-agnostic applicability, achieving at worst 1.4 s latency per transaction while maintaining 100% auditability of AI transactions.
Benjamin P. Duncan
PARALLAX-5 is a transition-level obligation interface for value-bearing decentralized systems. The interface consists of five primitive obligations: value conservation, authorization closure, signature integrity, temporal distinctness, and external-attestation trust. Under an explicit security-interface adequacy condition, every trust-base-respecting loss-inducing transition has a non-empty violation signature; the claim is falsifiable by basis counterexamples that are precisely defined. The substrate composes with a production EVM semantics via a typeclass-based refinement: nineteen abstract theorems lift to compiled Lean 4 proof terms over EvmYulLean's EvmYul.EVM.State (Cancun fork). The Lean 4 module compiles to 95 theorems with zero sorry; 129 Python fire tests pass across three suites; a 53-incident empirical catalog (2016–2026, $5.97 billion aggregate losses) classifies each entry by minimum observability set. The package also defines a step-secure execution-time shield, an AI-Agent Containment Theorem, a five-component PARALLAX-CROPS trust-surface vector, a 19-field machine-checkable certificate schema with seven-state lifecycle, an onchain certificate registry (Solidity 0.8.24, live on Sepolia at 0x8015A98dF9037Cd79a03B291a6fF3C2841992D5b), and three worked examples covering value conservation, bridge attestation, and AI-agent runtime gating. The standard text is dedicated under CC0 with structurally irrevocable non-capturability commitments; code artifacts are released under Apache-2.0; this paper is licensed under CC-BY 4.0. v1.0.1 changes (vs v1.0.0, doi:10.5281/zenodo.20400525): repository-hygiene release. Removed four non-substrate subsystems (hse, product, economics, chronos) that were not paper-aligned. Standardized fire-test count from 134 to 129 to reflect the cleaned codebase. Restructured standalone specifications under docs/ directory with canonical names (CHARTER.md, FORK_PROTOCOL.md, CERTIFICATE_SCHEMA.md, etc.). Converted forge-std to a proper git submodule. Added CITATION.cff, CHANGELOG.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, SECURITY.md. The substrate's mathematical content, theorems, and verification gates are unchanged from v1.0.0.
R Elavarasi
The rapid expansion of decentralized financial applications has increased the importance of understanding user trust in crypto wallet platforms. This study examines trust expressions in multilingual Phantom Wallet reviews using a hybrid classification framework that integrates BERT-based contextual embeddings with an XGBoost model. A total of 12,422 English and Indonesian reviews were collected and processed to construct a multilingual dataset for trust analysis. Exploratory findings reveal a highly polarized distribution of user ratings, indicating that trust in crypto wallets is strongly influenced by clear satisfaction or dissatisfaction rather than moderate evaluations. Cross-linguistic analysis indicates that Indonesian users express a higher proportion of low-trust reviews compared to English users, suggesting greater sensitivity to transaction errors and perceived asset safety concerns. Lexical patterns demonstrate that positive trust is associated with usability and performance stability, while negative trust is primarily driven by system failures, delays, and missing balance incidents. The results confirm that the BERT–XGBoost hybrid model is well-suited for decoding trust-related signals by combining contextual semantic understanding with structured metadata. This study contributes to the broader discourse on digital trust within Web3 environments by demonstrating an effective multilingual machine learning approach for analysing user perceptions in decentralized financial technologies.
Stefan Stefanović
Validators on generic Proof of Stake chains earn the same fees whether they handle attestation work correctly or selectively censor it. For chains whose main activity is moving tokens around, that indifference is fine. For chains whose primary economic activity is recording attestations (content provenance, AI-output attribution, threshold-signed credentials, supply-chain receipts), the indifference becomes a problem. Proof of Useful Attestation (PoUA) makes attestation handling first-class in the consensus weighting itself. Validator vote weight is the product of bonded stake and a reputation scalar in [r_min, r_max] that accumulates from valid attestation work. The reputation update is additive, fee-weighted, non-transferable, and capped per epoch. We prove a cost-to-grind floor (Lemma 1): under chain-wide adaptive burn fraction tau_burn, the non-recoverable cost an adversary pays to inflate reputation by Delta_r is bounded below by tau_burn * Delta_r / (eta * alpha_eff). Under the recommended v0 calibration (r_max/r_min in [4, 10]), the cost premium against a capital adversary is 4x to 10x over equivalent pure-stake PoS at steady state. The paper specifies the mechanism, six layered Sybil and grinding defenses, empirical Monte Carlo strategy-search across the full layered defense, and grinding detectors with explicit threshold derivations. It is a mechanism-design proposal with a formal economic floor and inherited BFT safety and liveness, not a complete cryptographic security proof. This release incorporates feedback from Jiangshan Yu (University of Sydney) and Marko Vukolić (Bitcoin Scaling Labs).
Mohammed Al Qurashi, Ibtihaj Al Qarni
Sybil attacks remain a primary challenge for Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain systems, as low-cost identity creation can distort validator participation and limit consensus reliability. This study proposes a hybrid participation–governance framework that integrates Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) and Reputation-Based Access Control (RpBAC) with a trust-based PoS workflow to reduce the influence of suspicious identities during validator selection and block validation. The proposed framework also incorporates graylisting and dynamic reward–penalty updates to support adaptive participation control. The strategy was evaluated in a simulation environment informed by Ethereum-derived block metadata, using network sizes ranging from 100 to 1000 nodes and Sybil attack ratios of 30%, 40%, and 50%. Its performance was compared with PoS-only and PoS + ABAC baselines using both security and performance indicators. The results show that the full ABAC + RpBAC configuration achieved the strongest and most stable security performance across the evaluated settings while introducing additional overhead at larger network sizes. These findings suggest that combining policy-based eligibility control with behavior-based reputation control strengthens the resilience against Sybil in PoS-like blockchain environments. However, this improvement requires a measurable trade-off between security and performance.
Syed Abrar Ahmed, Ricardo Correia Bezerra, Simon Lewerenz, Henrique Martins
The EHDS Regulation establishes patient opt-out rights for data use, yet current implementations face fragmented registries and limited tamper-proof mechanisms. In this context, opt-out refers to a patient's proactive right to object to the reuse of their health data for purposes beyond direct clinical care. We propose a distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based architecture to enhance opt-out management. Using design research and regulatory analysis of EHDS and TEHDAS, we developed a proof-of-concept leveraging permissioned DLT, smart contracts, and decentralised identifiers for an immutable registry. This architecture aligns with EHDS requirements for tamper-evident audit trails and cross-border verification. This work bridges regulatory mandates with patient-centric governance across the EU.
James D. Benton
Autonomous actors, including AI agents, decentralized autonomous organizations, decentralized unincorporated nonprofit associations, algorithmically managed funds, and individuals operating through programmatic interfaces, are increasingly executing financial transactions on distributed ledger networks without governance oversight. Existing approaches rely on application-level middleware operating within the same trust boundary as the actors being governed, post-transaction monitoring that detects violations after irreversible execution, or multi-party computation systems that provide distributed key management without policy evaluation. This paper presents SovereignGate, a deterministic governance enforcement system that achieves structural enforcement through protocol-native multi-signature co-signing with disabled master keys. The system comprises a Rust enforcement kernel with layered crate dependencies, a deterministic policy evaluation engine with deny dominance and independent fact inference, a bylaws-as-code domain-specific language for encoding entity governance rules as content-addressed policy bundles, a cryptographic receipt chain with Ed25519-signed Merkle-anchored attestation, and a structural co-signing mechanism making transaction execution without governance approval structurally impossible at the consensus layer. The preferred embodiment integrates with the XRP Ledger. The architecture is chain-agnostic. No existing system combines deterministic policy enforcement, Merkle-chained cryptographic attestation, and structural protocol-level co-signing for autonomous financial actors.
Vishwa Priya V, Dafik Dafik, Sunder R, Agustin Ika Hesti · 10 authors
The tremendous progress of medical foundation models has proven to be groundbreaking in meta-analysis of clinical prediction, diagnosis, and multimodal healthcare analytics, but the development of medical foundation models is limited due to stringent data privacy concerns, cross-institutional trust issues, and security risks in a collaborative learning environment. Traditional federated learning allows for distributed training of the model with no central sharing of data but is prone to poisoning of the model, inference attacks, and low verifiability of participating institutions. This study proposes an idea of Autonomous Trust and Zero-Knowledge Blockchain Framework (AT-ZKBF) for Federated Medical Foundation Models, to establish decentralized trust, cryptographic verifiability and secure collaboration among heterogeneous healthcare providers. The framework combines the foundation model training in a federated peer-to-peer setup, the permissioned blockchain network for trust orchestration and mechanisms using the zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) for model updates to avoid the content of sensitive parameters of the model. Every local update is cryptographically authenticated with zk-SNARK-based zero-knowledge proofs that check proper gradient descent running and limited limit on updates without exposing private gradients or data. A reputation-driven trust scoring module automatically scores the reliability of participants. Experimental evaluation done on a BraTs, a multi-institutional medical imaging dataset shows that the proposed framework can get 96.4% classification accuracy (up 4.8% vs. standard federated learning) with poisoning model control decreased by 63% and communication overhead reduced by 21% by optimized blockchain batching. Security analysis makes sure of the robustness from gradient inferences and Byzantine attacks. The validation upon integration of autonomous trust computation, and zero-knowledge cryptography to blockchain enabled federated learning substantially adds to security, transparency and scalability for collaborative medical foundation model training providing a probable way forward to privacy preserving trust worthy AI in healthcare ecosystems.
Nadeem Bhati
Autonomous trading agents can read markets and place orders faster than humans can supervise them. On a permissionless exchange, the usual answer is to give the agent a signing key. That is a large amount of trust. Anything that can steer the agent's prompt, memory, or context can also steer how the key is used. Recent attacks on Web3 agents show that this is not a hypothetical risk. Checking every order on the settlement chain gives a public record, but it also puts block latency in the order path. A continuous limit-order book cannot spend that. Bounded Authority puts the authority check where the order enters the venue. The user's wallet registers a risk policy on the settlement chain and authorizes a short-lived public session key. Agents propose orders. The off-chain sequencer accepts an order only after it verifies the session-key signature and runs the policy before any exchange state changes. For every accepted order, the sequencer signs the order, sequence number, risk-input hash, policy transition, match event, and append-only log leaf. Epoch roots are posted to settlement. Watchers can then challenge unauthorized orders, bad risk inputs, broken reserve or margin transitions, equivocation, or invalid matching with Merkle proofs and replayed execution. This gives agents a permissionless analogue of direct-market-access risk control. If a prompt-injected or memory-poisoned agent produces an order outside the user's policy, the result is slashable evidence against the venue rather than loss against the user. We give the protocol, threat model, accountability arguments, Solidity gas measurements for settlement challenges, and AWS measurements for the execution path. On two c7i.metal-24xl hosts, the directly measured kernel-TCP path returns signed Ed25519 acknowledgements for accepted resting orders in 124.17 microseconds median and 128.34 microseconds p99. A bounded-HMAC variant reduces this to 105.31 microseconds median, but it needs delayed key disclosure, threshold ingress, or an equivalent origin-accountability assumption.
Oyelokiki George Egbedayo
A framework for reusable compliance attestation in regulated industries based on cryptographic primitives, vector commitments with selective-opening proofs, re-randomisable signatures, zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge, and cryptographic accumulators with succinct non-membership proofs, composed into a protocol structure adapted to the specific structure of multidimensional compliance state. We identify five gaps that separate the generic primitives from a deployable solution for compliance attestation: multidimensional state binding, temporal freshness without correlation, revocation under reuse, cross-issuer aggregation, and verifier predicate richness. We sketch the protocol structure that addresses these gaps, analyse its security and privacy properties, and discuss applications in age verification, right-to-work assurance, and continuous-compliance monitoring. Companion preprint to UK Patent Application GB2611280.5 filed at the UK Intellectual Property Office on 14 May 2026.
MJ Stephenson
No abstract is available for this record.
Sofana Alfuhaid
Context: Legal contracts have served as the bedrock of business transactions for millennia. They are core to modern supply chains, and their execution can now be automated through the use of i) smart contracts, supported by blockchain technology that safeguards data integrity, and ii) Internet-of-Things technologies to support their monitoring functions. Symboleo is a specification language used to formalize legal contracts, enable property analysis, and generate smart contracts for a permissioned blockchain platform (Hyperledger Fabric). However, automation around resulting smart contracts poses security challenges, particularly regarding who should have access to operate on contract elements. Additionally, how such smart contract should interact with their Cyber-Physical System (CPS) environment, including IoT devices, remains challenging. Purpose: The thesis proposes an architecture to integrate smart contracts, Complex Event Processing (CEP), message brokers, and a blockchain platform (namely Hyperledger Fabric) to support end-to-end Cyber-Physical Smart Contracts (CPSCs). This architecture makes it possible to connect IoT devices with smart contracts (generated using Symboleo) through a CEP engine and a message broker. Additionally, this thesis proposes an access control model, treating all contract elements as resources and ensuring regulated access by designated parties. This model extends the Symboleo ontology and language for legal contracts with new modeling concepts inspired by Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), tailored for the legal contract domain, resulting in SymboleoAC (Symboleo Access Control). SymboleoAC also extends the Symboleo language to handle dynamic contract execution scenario. Methodology: This research follows a Design Science Research methodology, which guides the development and evaluation of the research artifacts. This research is conducted in several iterative steps that are divided into two main phases, one that focuses on theoretical aspects and the other on the design, demonstration, and evaluation of the research artifacts. Contributions: The contributions of this thesis are: • An architectural framework for CPSCs that leverages complementary aspects of CPS and smart contracts; • SymboleoAC, an access control ontology for Symboleo; • An extension of the current Symboleo specification language (syntax and semantics) that supports smart contract requirements, including automation and control actions, access control, and CPS components; • An implementation of the SymboleoAC ontology and semantics into a reusable JavaScript library (SymboleoACJS), together with a tool, SymboleoAC2SC, that generates JavaScript smart contract code with security aspects for a designated platform (Hyperledger Fabric); and • A secure and event-driven SymboleoAC Application Programming Interface (API) that orchestrates the runtime ecosystem connecting IoT sensors, the message broker, the CEP engine, and the blockchain platform. Through extensive and the evaluation of multiple variations of two contract case studies, SymboleoAC (architecture, ontology, and language), along with its associated tools, is shown to be an effective environment for CPSCs, simplifying the design of secure smart contracts and their connections to message brokers, CEP engines, and IoT devices.
Muhammad Bin Saif, Sara Migliorini, Fausto Spoto
Abstract The use of blockchain technology and smart contracts is progressively spreading to real-world applications, especially to those that deal with critical services, such as water management systems. In fact, these applications can exploit the immutability, enforceability, and trustworthiness of such technology while promoting a more reliable, tamper-resistant way to collect and store data. At the same time, the development of decentralized applications poses challenges with respect to scalability, efficiency, management, and security. To address these problems, some design patterns, such as the factory pattern, have been proposed in the literature, to deal with modularity and scalability; at the same time, these proposed solutions apply some common concepts of role-based access control (RBAC), by adapting them to the smart contract context. This paper extends prior work by extending the definition of a hierarchical factory pattern, enhanced with multirole authentication and authorization capabilities, and applying it in the context of a water management system. It provides an extensive description of both advantages and disadvantages of this solution, discussing why the ability to instantiate a hierarchical family of contracts is essential in some application domains, and how a finer management of dynamic roles and permissions can be achieved in this kind of design. This paper also performs an extensive analysis of the performance and scalability capabilities of the proposed solution, and discusses some security aspects by considering its ability to overcome certain security attacks.
Ibonon Warma
As the Agentic Economy expands, autonomous AI agents—ranging from algorithmic trading bots on decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms to decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) orchestrators—operate with increasing autonomy. However, the absence of a standardized, cross-protocol identity and behavioral reputation layer exposes the ecosystem to coordinated agentic attacks. This paper presents Sigui, alongside the proposed Ethereum standard ERC-8259, which introduces a composable framework for Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), dynamic reputation scoring, and trustless threat intelligence sharing specifically designed for AI agents operating on EVM-compatible networks. By decoupling identity verification, reputation mutation, and threat pattern hashing, Sigui enables smart contracts to perform zero-latency, on-chain risk assessments of agent transactions. We detail the architecture of the IAgentIdentity, IAgentReputation, and IThreatRegistry interfaces, propose a deterministic cryptographic hashing standard for multi-layered threat patterns, and discuss the economic security and sybil resistance of the protocol. The reference implementation, deployed on the Ethereum Sepolia testnet, demonstrates the feasibility of real-time A2A (Agent-to-Agent) security protocols.
Adwait Rao, Rutuja Kenjalkar, Himanshu Patil, Omkar Walke · 5 authors
This paper presents Polyquity, a Web2.5 platform enabling decentralized Initial Public Offering (IPO) fundraising through a hybrid data architecture. The platform leverages the Avalanche C-Chain for high-speed settlement, while utilizing a custom WebSocket indexer and PostgreSQL database to bridge the gap between blockchain security and institutional-grade user interfaces. By implementing a strict Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model alongside modular architecture for auction mechanisms, fund escrow, and secondary market functions, Polyquity demonstrates how decentralized capital formation can achieve web2-equivalent performance while preserving core web3 security. The system utilizes the blockchain as the ultimate source of truth for state and funds, while the relational database serves as the source of speed for client-side rendering. Polyquity achieves sub-2-second transaction finality with 50% lower costs than Ethereum, supporting 10,000+ concurrent participants. This work establishes practical mechanisms for bridging traditional finance and decentralized ecosystems through a highly scalable, hybrid full-stack design.
Pascal Berrang, Mirco Giacobbe, Jacob Swales, Xiao Yang
We introduce a technology to formally verify that a software system satisfies a temporal specification of functional correctness, without revealing the system itself. Our method combines a deductive approach to model checking to obtain a formal certificate of correctness for the system, with zero-knowledge proofs to convince an external verifier that the system -- kept secret -- complies with its specification of correctness -- made public. We consider proof certificates represented as ranking functions, and introduce both an explicit-state and a symbolic scheme for model checking in zero knowledge. Our explicit-state scheme assumes systems represented as transition graphs. We use polynomial commitments to convince the verifier that the public proof certificates correspond to the secret transition relation. Our symbolic scheme assumes systems specified as linear guarded commands and uses piecewise-linear ranking functions. We apply Farkas' lemma to obtain a witness for the validity of the ranking function with public and secret components, and employ sigma protocols for matrix multiplication and range proofs to convince the verifier of the witness's existence. We built a prototype to demonstrate the practical efficacy of our two schemes on linear temporal logic verification examples. Our technology enables formal verification in domains where both the safety and the confidentiality of the system under analysis are critical.
Manasy Jayasurya
Digital identity management is a cornerstone of effective e-governance, yet centralized identity systems face critical challenges including single points of failure, data breaches, and lack of citizen control over personal information. This paper proposes a blockchain-based Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) framework for e-governance that enables citizens to own, control, and selectively disclose their identity credentials without relying on centralized authorities. Built on Hyperledger Fabric with W3C Decentralized Identifier (DID) standards and Verifiable Credentials, the framework incorporates zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for privacy-preserving authentication and smart contracts for automated credential verification. Performance evaluation on a 4-organization, 16-peer Hyperledger Fabric network demonstrates a throughput of 4,800 transactions per second with an average identity verification latency of 85 ms, suitable for citizen-scale e-governance applications. Security analysis confirms resistance to identity theft, Sybil attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, and credential forgery, achieving resistance scores above 94% across all evaluated attack vectors. The framework provides a practical pathway for governments to modernize identity infrastructure while preserving citizen privacy and data sovereignty.
В.І. Єсін, В.В. Вілігура
In the context of rapid and widespread digitalization of society, active implementation of new innovative technologies, and the growth of cyber threats, the issue of organizing effective cybersecurity for enterprises is becoming particularly important. To protect today's modern digital enterprise, you need a comprehensive strategy for secure access to your corporate resources anytime, anywhere, regardless of where they are located. By following Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) principles, which call for least privilege access and continuous verification, businesses can effectively minimize their attack surface and limit potential losses from compromised accounts. However, existing access control and authentication mechanisms alone are not always sufficient to ensure complete protection of critical data, especially in scenarios where proof of access rights or actions is required without revealing content. In such cases, an effective addition to ZTA can be the use of Zero-Knowledge (ZK) concept, which allows confirming access rights or ownership (knowledge) of certain information without the need to disclose it, which significantly reduces the risks of leaks and unauthorized access. At the same time, representatives of businesses interested in the security of their systems are not yet fully aware of the advantages of this concept. The practical application of already known Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) capabilities in various relevant areas that ensure security is being hampered, among other things, by a lack of awareness and insufficient theoretical training in this area among specialists responsible for security and communicating these capabilities (their potential) to the managers of relevant IT companies. In other words, there is currently a problem related to a lack of awareness about the zero-knowledge concept (its theoretical and practical significance) for making the right decision when building a security system for a corporate information system in modern conditions. This article is exactly aimed at solving this problem. The purpose of this work is to systematize the theoretical foundations and practical application of the zero-knowledge concept using simple and obvious examples in order to understand the potential of ZKP in solving problems of confidentiality/privacy and data verification. To this end, it outlined the main aspects of the zero-knowledge concept, including an analysis of the applicability of interactive and non-interactive approaches, an assessment of existing ZKP systems, and a conceptual representation of zk-SNARK technology based on the popular Groth16 scheme with mathematical justification. This contributes to a better understanding and future use of this dynamically developing and complex concept as one of the key mechanisms of modern cryptography, providing the ability to prove the correctness of calculations without disclosing the computational process or the initial data.
V.I. Yesin, V.V. Vilihura
In the context of rapid and widespread digitalization of society, active implementation of new innovative technologies, and the growth of cyber threats, the issue of organizing effective cybersecurity for enterprises is becoming particularly important. To protect today's modern digital enterprise, you need a comprehensive strategy for secure access to your corporate resources anytime, anywhere, regardless of where they are located. By following Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) principles, which call for least privilege access and continuous verification, businesses can effectively minimize their attack surface and limit potential losses from compromised accounts. However, existing access control and authentication mechanisms alone are not always sufficient to ensure complete protection of critical data, especially in scenarios where proof of access rights or actions is required without revealing content. In such cases, an effective addition to ZTA can be the use of Zero-Knowledge (ZK) concept, which allows confirming access rights or ownership (knowledge) of certain information without the need to disclose it, which significantly reduces the risks of leaks and unauthorized access. At the same time, representatives of businesses interested in the security of their systems are not yet fully aware of the advantages of this concept. The practical application of already known Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) capabilities in various relevant areas that ensure security is being hampered, among other things, by a lack of awareness and insufficient theoretical training in this area among specialists responsible for security and communicating these capabilities (their potential) to the managers of relevant IT companies. In other words, there is currently a problem related to a lack of awareness about the zero-knowledge concept (its theoretical and practical significance) for making the right decision when building a security system for a corporate information system in modern conditions. This article is exactly aimed at solving this problem. The purpose of this work is to systematize the theoretical foundations and practical application of the zero-knowledge concept using simple and obvious examples in order to understand the potential of ZKP in solving problems of confidentiality/privacy and data verification. To this end, it outlined the main aspects of the zero-knowledge concept, including an analysis of the applicability of interactive and non-interactive approaches, an assessment of existing ZKP systems, and a conceptual representation of zk-SNARK technology based on the popular Groth16 scheme with mathematical justification. This contributes to a better understanding and future use of this dynamically developing and complex concept as one of the key mechanisms of modern cryptography, providing the ability to prove the correctness of calculations without disclosing the computational process or the initial data.
Tom Sorger, Eric Cornelissen, Aman Kumar Sharma, Javier Ron · 6 authors
Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) are increasingly mandated by regulators, yet existing sharing mechanisms impose a binary choice between full disclosure and full opacity. This exposes software suppliers to attacks that can be deduced from the SBOM only, such as the presence of a vulnerable dependency. Conversely, software consumers can be fooled by software suppliers who modify or misrepresent published SBOMs. We present zkSBOM, a privacy-preserving SBOM sharing mechanism designed to address these threats. zkSBOM uses zero-knowledge sets to cryptographically commit to the components within an SBOM. Software consumers can query for known vulnerabilities and receive a cryptographic proof confirming whether the artifact described by the SBOM is affected, without revealing any additional SBOM content. We conduct a security analysis of zkSBOM by quantifying expected leakage from inclusion and exclusion proofs. We demonstrate real-world feasibility by applying it to realistic scenarios and evaluating its operation requirements. Our evaluation demonstrates that zkSBOM is a strong, secure, and privacy-preserving mechanism for SBOM sharing, protecting software suppliers and software consumers from one another.
Ihor Solomka, B. B. Liubinskyi
This study investigates the process of validator committee selection in permissionless blockchain networks operating on the Proof-of-Stake algorithm. The task addressed relates to the vulnerability of conventional static selection schemes to identity-forging (Sybil) attacks. A fixed baseline weight facilitates stake splitting among numerous fictitious entities, allowing attackers to gain control over the network. In response to these challenges, a method for the dynamic stabilization of consensus based on an adaptive control law has been devised. This method automatically regulates the weight mixing intensity using the smoothed Gini coefficient. The concept of Proof-of-Persistence has been proposed, which replaces the uniform baseline distribution with a time-weighted reputation of the participants. The analytical and experimental analyses of data from 10 real-world networks were conducted, demonstrating that the proposed mechanism reliably reduces the aggregate weight of a potential attacker. The result is attributed to the fact that when new entities are created, their prior participation experience is not considered, and the loss of reputational weight outweighs the benefits of acquiring new baseline shares. This makes the stake-splitting strategy economically unviable. An important distinct feature is that the system's adaptation is carried out exclusively on the basis of deterministic on-chain data, without the need for external identification. The proposed system functions autonomously: under a normal mode, intervention is minimized, while under the risk of an oligopoly, protection is strengthened. The results could be practically applied to the architecture of permissionless blockchain networks as the method might be integrated both at the network protocol core level and in the form of smart contracts to enhance the security of distributed ledgers without additional manual adjustments.
Antony Rowstron
Auditing the semantic properties of proprietary data creates a fundamental tension: verification requires transparent access, while proprietary rights demand confidentiality. While Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) ensure privacy, they are typically limited to precise algebraic constraints and are ill-suited for verifying qualitative, unstructured properties, such as the logic within a codebase. We propose {\em Agentic Witnessing}, a framework that moves verification from attested execution to {\em attested reasoning}. The system is composed of three agents: a Verifier (who wants to check properties of a dataset), a Prover (who owns the dataset) and an Auditor (that inspects the dataset). The Verifier is allowed to ask a limited number of simple binary true/false questions to the auditor. By isolating an LLM-based Auditor within a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), the system enables the Verifier to query a Prover's private data via simple Boolean queries, without exposing the raw dataset. The Auditor uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to dynamically inspect the target dataset, producing a yes/no verdict accompanied by a cryptographic transcript: a signed hash chain binding the reasoning trace to both the original dataset and the TEE's hardware root of trust. We demonstrate this architecture by automating the artifact evaluation process for 21 peer-reviewed computer science papers with released codebases on GitHub (e.g. Does the codebase implement the system described in the paper?). We verified five high-level properties of these codebases described in the corresponding publications, treating the source code as private. Our results show that TEE-enabled agentic auditing provides a mechanism for privacy-preserving oversight, effectively decoupling qualitative verification from the need for data disclosure.