The exponential emergence of cross-chain data sharing in blockchain-enabled IoT and cloud systems creates vital challenges in the scalability, privacy, and post-quantum security landscapes. To tackle these problems, we propose a hierarchical attribute clustering-attribute-based encryption (HAC-ABE) scheme in this paper, which offers a secure post-quantum cross-blockchain data exchange framework. The method utilizes hierarchical attribute clustering and lattice-based encryption to reduce the computation overhead while supporting fine-grained access control. It utilizes IPFS decentralized storage and smart contracts to achieve a transparent data exchange across chains. Experimental results show 9.7% faster computation time and much lower communication overheads than state-of-the-art ABE-based approaches, verifying its effectiveness and scalability for practical decentralized environments.
Newborn misidentification poses serious patient safety and accountability problems, but errors can be traced through the use of a blockchain to create an audit trail. However, a blockchain storing raw or even hashed biometric templates for individual identities is not acceptable for privacy reasons. This work redefines our prior work (1) to form a privacy-preserving audit protocol that isolates the processes of capturing a biometric and matching it against a database of known identities to an external Service Provider and the processing of the blockchain to a permissioned Ledger that contains only pseudonymous audit commitments related to keyed entries on the Ledger. This work describes an implementation of this protocol in Solidity 0.8.30 and provides metrics for the gas use and latency of the smart contract for 100 iterations of 100 total Enrollment and Verification Workflows each. Twenty Adversarial Functional Tests are also described that attempt to place the system into an invalid state, as well as four additional tests that assess the effect of batched submission to the smart contract of multiple keyed audit commitments. The smart contract processing throughput is also determined for a batch of submissions, finding a maximum local throughput of 60.2 tx/s. A further 50,000 randomized reference-model transitions of the system’s internal reference-model were then made (involving a total of 57,345,087 invariant checks, all of which passed), as well as a measurement of the time taken to generate an HMAC-SHA-256-sized commitment for 10,000 iterations (local median time = 0.002 ms). The results of this work provide a solid foundation for the blockchain component of BIBIS, but it is not intended to provide any insights into the accuracy of neonatal biometric matching, the presentation attack resistance of the system, or even the usability of BIBIS by clinical end-users. The results also do not comment on the finality of QBFT-based commits to a blockchain.
Rodrigo Jara Espinoza, Yohamin Nafit Pimentel Alarcon, Angelo Rodrigo Taco Jiménez, Fabricio Martin Chavez Rodriguez
Quantum computing poses a significant threat to classical asymmetric cryptography, which is essential for ensuring confidentiality, authentication, and key exchange in contemporary digital infrastructures. Although post-quantum cryptography (PQC) provides mechanisms that resist quantum attacks, its implementation in Internet of Things (IoT) systems is challenged by constrained resources, including limitations in computation, memory, energy, latency, and bandwidth, and the heterogeneity of devices. This paper offers a comprehensive narrative review of PQC approaches applicable to IoT, systematically organizing 30 peer-reviewed studies published between 2022 and 2026 across four layers: device, communication, distributed trust, and application. Additionally, the review examines two cross-cutting dimensions, privacy and side-channel resistance. The analysis indicates a significant prevalence of lattice-based schemes, hybrid strategies, and integrations with blockchain technology, zero-knowledge proofs, federated learning, homomorphic encryption, AI, and Zero Trust architectures. Notably, key gaps remain in side-channel evaluation, migration pathways, deployment costs, and real-world validation—issues that are particularly critical given the long lifecycles of IoT devices and the ongoing threat of “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks.
With the advent of digital services, various vulnerabilities in centralized identity management systems such as Single Point of Failure (SPOF), data leakage, and user privacy invasion are evident. In this paper, an architecture framework for designing Decentralized Identity Management System (DIDMS) by leveraging blockchain technologies is proposed for privacy preserving authentication in digital age. The DIDMS framework makes use of Decentralized Identifier (DID) with Verifiable Credentials (VC) and Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) techniques to implement the concept of self-sovereign identity. Four phases of framework including registration, credential issuance, authentication and storage is designed and tested. The performance results obtained from the experimentation indicate that the proposed framework gives an authentication latency of 320 ms, storage overhead reduction of 42%, and verification accuracy of 98.6% with 31% gas optimization over conventional smart contract approaches. The comparative evaluation with existing frameworks indicates improvement in the areas of privacy protection, scalability and user control.
Supervisors need reliable assurance over balances, issuance, and transaction integrity. Institutions need toprotect sensitive financial data. Traditional audit practice often resolves this tension by granting broad accessto ledgers. That approach is effective, but costly in privacy, operational risk, and cross-border data exposure.This note presents a settlement architecture in which compliance statements can be proven cryptographicallywithout disclosing the full ledger. A supervised entity can demonstrate that a balance equals a value, exceeds athreshold, or lies within a band. Verifiers check the proof without receiving account-level books. Spending keysremain on the client side and do not travel to the operator to authorize a transfer.A second confidentiality property is reported that is easy to miss in architectural summaries: in a settlementthat updates both accounts in a single transition, the payer must know the recipient’s balance in order toconstruct the proof. Paying someone therefore reveals what they hold. The architecture addresses this with atwo-phase transfer, at a stated cost in finality latency.The paper is deliberately non-utopian. It specifies which properties become demonstrable and which residualtrust remains—especially in a single-node deployment where the operator may still observe state, sequencetransactions, or censor. The institutional claim is modest: zero-knowledge settlement can reduce routine fullledgerdisclosure while improving the quality of evidence for specific supervisory questions.
Decentralized manufacturing faces a pre-contractual impasse: a Provider cannot price a service accurately without inspecting the design file, yet the Consumer cannot share that file without exposing intellectual property. We introduce the Optimistic Verifiable Claim (OVC), a blockchain protocol that lets a Consumer publish a verifiable claim about a concealed design (such as the material it consumes) and a Provider price and bid on it without seeing the design. The claim is committed when the service is posted and stands unless the selected Provider challenges it; a challenge triggers a deterministic on-chain check that exposes any dishonesty, and the design is disclosed only to settle a dispute, never on the honest path. We implement four checks (authorized key access, delivery-channel integrity, syntactic conformance, and declared material consumption) in Solidity and measure them on a real 6.41 MB G-code file, the 3DBenchy, across Ethereum, Arbitrum, and opBNB. Every service incurs the cost of posting the encrypted design, with or without a dispute. For the 3DBenchy, the no-dispute outcome costs \$7,207 in up to 9 hours on Ethereum, \$288 in 3 min on Arbitrum, and \$2.87 in 2 min on opBNB, and a fully contested dispute costs \$49,660 in up to 57 hours on Ethereum, \$1,988 in 19 min on Arbitrum, and \$19.73 in 13 min on opBNB. Costs and times grow with size: for a 50 MB industrial design, an undisputed service reaches \$56,173 and up to 3 days on Ethereum against \$22.36 and 16 min on opBNB, and a fully contested dispute reaches \$488,440 over up to 18 days on Ethereum against \$195 and 1.6 hours on opBNB. Of the four, the material-consumption check is the costliest, its predicate being the most expensive to evaluate on-chain. OVC makes confidential, claim-based bidding economically feasible on Arbitrum and opBNB, but not on Ethereum at industrial scale.
Vabuk Pahari, B. Chandrasekaran, Johnnatan Messias, Krishna P. Gummadi · 5 authors
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a governance entity that allows its stakeholders to manage blockchain-based protocols through smart contracts. The DAO explicitly specifies how stakeholders make and enforce decisions concerning a protocol's operation in a smart contract, aptly referred to as its governance contract. The design of this governance contract, therefore, has far-reaching implications for the security (trust) and privacy (transparency) of the smart contracts managed by the DAO and its stakeholders. In this work, we (i) explicate the trust and transparency trade-offs of the design choices in implementing a DAO and (ii) highlight how poor choices introduce critical vulnerabilities, using real-world examples as case studies. To this end, we analyze $48$ public, actively used Ethereum-based DAOs that control a vast capital. We classify the design choices into a handful of key dimensions that succinctly capture how a DAO's stakeholders initiate a protocol change, vote on it, and, based on the voting outcome, execute that change. Our analyses crucially uncover a new class of attacks, which we call governance attacks, that directly exploit the fundamental design of a DAO's governance mechanisms, even if we assume bug-free implementations.
Harlequin is a blockchain protocol in which the right to take part in consensus, governance and adjudication comes solely from reputation earned by verifiable acts — never from capital (proof of stake) or expended computation (proof of work). Reputation is a four-dimensional quantity ("the four suits"), computed deterministically from a public evidence record by a damped trust-propagation function, aggregated conservatively (a strong dimension cannot buy authority in a weak one), and subject to time decay so that standing must be continually re-earned. Block authorship and committee/jury membership are assigned by reputation-weighted cryptographic sortition; finality is provided by a Byzantine-safe gadget over signed votes; disputes are judged by sortitioned juries with interest-exclusion, and the only enforced consequence is reputational — the protocol applies no coercive force. We give the system model, the consensus and justice mechanisms, and a security analysis against a state-level adversary whose goal is capture, censorship or de-anonymization rather than direct theft. Two results are emphasized for their honesty. First, steady-state Sybil resistance is strong: a Sybil farm without earned evidence obtains about 0% of consensus power (17/17 adversarial tests). Second, the cold-start window is not unconditionally safe: a competent adversary present at genesis can capture the bootstrap; we show the security of that window is a race between honest onboarding and adversary mass — bounded, not eliminated, by non-operator personhood verification, an automatic ceiling-halt and the onboarding rate, with the residual risk declared. We report an implementation in Rust (dependency-free cores cross-validated against FRAME pallets) and a reproducible validation record spanning unit tests and multi-node hardware runs. v3 — post-launch revision. The network described here is no longer a design: the chain launched on 18 July 2026, with its genesis seed anchored to Bitcoin block 958536, and has been sealing blocks under the mechanisms this paper describes since. This revision corrects the emission schedule (per-era public ratios: 15/16 for HLQ, 3/4 for SOV, decoupled from the reputational decay constant), documents the launch facts and the first on-chain runtime upgrade executed through the paper's governance mechanism, and updates the evaluation with the live chain's validation record. Both English and Spanish editions are included; the English edition is the primary text.
Electronic voting has become an important digital governance mechanism for remote elections, institutional decision-making, shareholder voting, public consultations, and large-scale Internet-based democratic participation. Despite its growing relevance, secure electronic voting remains difficult to implement because a practical system must simultaneously preserve voter anonymity, verify voter eligibility, prevent double voting, ensure ballot integrity, support public auditability, and maintain acceptable transaction throughput. To address these challenges, this study proposes a post-quantum secure and privacy-preserving blockchain-based electronic voting framework that integrates Dilithium digital signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, nullifier-based double voting prevention, encrypted ballot submission, smart contract-based election rule enforcement, and a Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus mechanism. In the proposed architecture, Dilithium signatures are used for post-quantum authentication of voter transactions and validator messages, whereas the zero-knowledge proof layer is used separately to verify voter eligibility, candidate validity, credential ownership, and correct nullifier generation without revealing the voter identity or ballot choice. Dilithium verification is performed externally at the transaction authentication layer, while the zero-knowledge circuit handles privacy-preserving voting logic. Each voter locally generates a private credential and submits only a public commitment during registration, thereby reducing the risk of authority-based impersonation or identity-to-vote linkage. Smart contracts verify the proof, reject reused nullifiers, enforce voting rules, and record auditable election events on the permissioned blockchain ledger. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed prototype achieves an average throughput of 408 transactions per second and an average block finalization time of 2.18 s under stress testing. The results indicate that the framework can provide a practical balance between post-quantum security, privacy preservation, verifiability, and transaction efficiency in permissioned electronic voting environments.
Hayder A. Nahi, Rusul A. Salman, Awring Falah Hassan, Ebtehal Akeel Hamed · 7 authors
Abstract The Internet of Things look out on growing security and privacy defies, principally in light of the up growth of quantum threats. To handle these defies, we suggest a unified security framework that merges post-quantum blockchain technologies and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to attain secure authentication, decentralized identity management, and advanced data protection. The provided system based on a power-weighted consensus mechanism, compressed and overlapping recursive ZKPs, and transaction batching to decrease on-chain load. The outcomes display that the suggested system outperforms conventional systems and state-of-the-art solutions, with response time reduced to 92 ms, transaction throughput increased to 735 tx/s, energy consumption reduced to 0.37 J/op, and authentication accuracy increased to 97.6%, achieving a privacy score of 0.91.These outcomes emphasize that the offered framework not only attains superior performance but as well supplies strong resistance to quantum attacks and high privacy warranties, making it a promising solution for securing future IoT environments.
This study examines the potential of Zero-Knowledge Protocols (ZKPs) as cryptographic mechanisms that enhance privacy and security in the context of advancing quantum technologies. Rather than accepting current legal safe guards and regulatory structures at face value, the study critically evaluates their effectiveness, particularly in healthcare environments where highly sensitive data frequently encounters inadequate protection. The methodology employs a multifaceted approach, integrating qualitative insights, legal case studies, and framework analysis. The findings indicate that zero-knowledge proof techniques can significantly enhance the protection of personal health information. A case study of NantHealth Inc.’s quantum-safe healthcare data protection framework illustrates the practical implementation of post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption, demonstrating how health care organizations may proactively address quantum computing threats while enabling secure data collaboration. The study further demonstrates that incorporating these cryptographic methods into existing legal frameworks not only addresses immediate privacy concerns but also facilitates compliance with evolving data protection standards. The study also suggests that healthcare organizations should reconsider their data security approaches by implementing advanced cryptographic measures while maintaining regulatory compliance.
Christian Cachin, David Lehnherr, Juan Villacis, François-Xavier Wicht
Sender untraceability hides the account spent by a cryptocurrency transfer among a set of candidates, its masking set. What a transfer does to that set separates two designs: classical schemes retain the whole set and append a nullifier marking the spent account, so the ledger grows with every transfer; constant-state schemes instead consume and replace the entire set. We ask how this choice affects synchronization. We formalize the two designs as the linear and constant untraceable asset transfer objects (LUAT and CUAT) and locate them in the consensus hierarchy. In LUAT, transfers from distinct accounts commute. Its consensus number is 2, compared with 1 for standard asset transfer, independently of the masking-set size and of the untraceability notion, and LUAT is starvation-free. Partitioning the accounts into fixed masking sets lets exhausted sets be garbage-collected without increasing that number. In CUAT, a transfer consumes and replaces every account of its masking set, so two transfers whose sets intersect cannot both take effect. We formalize this with the conflict graph on masking sets, whose edges join sets sharing an account. Under weak untraceability, which protects a transaction in isolation, the consensus number is unbounded already for one-round protocols. Under strong untraceability, which protects against an observer of the complete history, untraceability holds on a history exactly when any two accounts sharing a masking set occur in the same number of the masking sets in it. This uniform incidence bounds the conflict graph, and matching constructions attain it, so the consensus number is determined exactly and grows quadratically in the masking-set size. Finally, CUAT is not starvation-free. The two objects therefore pay for the same privacy differently: LUAT in storage, CUAT in synchronization and fairness.
Privacy-preserving machine learning auditing protocols allow auditors to assess models for properties such as accuracy or fairness, without revealing their internals or training data. This makes them especially attractive for auditing models deployed in sensitive domains such as healthcare or finance. For these protocols to be meaningful in real-world audit settings, though, their guarantees must reflect how the model will behave once deployed, rather than merely certifying its behavior during an audit. Existing security definitions often miss this mark: most certify model behavior only on a fixed audit dataset, without ensuring that the same guarantees generalize to other datasets drawn from the same distribution. As we show, this gap allows a model provider to attack many cryptographic model certification (CMC) schemes built on secure zero knowledge proofs (ZKP) by carefully engineering training data, resulting in models that exhibit benign behavior during an audit, but pathological behavior in practice. For example, we empirically demonstrate that an attacker can certify that a model achieves over 99% accuracy on an audit dataset, but less than 30% accuracy on fresh samples from the same distribution. To address this gap, we formalize rigorous cryptographic security notions tailored to CMC frameworks, introduce a generic protocol template, and prove that it satisfies these requirements. Our results thus offer both cautionary evidence about existing approaches and constructive guidance for designing secure, privacy-preserving ML auditing protocols.
Junhong Liu, Qinfei Long, Alex Pengfei Zhao, X Zhong · 7 authors
Multi-region unit commitment with reserve sharing requires coordinated optimization across jurisdictionally distinct system operators, exposing sensitive cost curves, topology, and dispatch decisions to inference attacks. The accelerating progress of quantum computing further compounds this threat. As quantum hardware matures, current classically-encrypted data flow becomes vulnerable to retrospective decryption. To enable post-quantum-secure distributed optimization, we propose a customized Benders decomposition-based approach with the global summation structure to share aggregated cuts and variables. By exploiting this structure, we further develop a multi-layer quantum-resilient secure aggregation protocol comprising additive masking for information-theoretic content privacy, affine variable transformation hiding individual sensitive data flows, and reveal-bound lattice-based zero-knowledge proofs providing resilience against active adversaries. Simulation results show that the proposed approach achieves the mean suboptimality of 0.09%-0.22% with lightweight computational overhead, recovers up to 51% of system cost via inter-regional reserve sharing, and imposes no measurable cost-quality trade-off, whereas the noisy ADMM degrades monotonically under tightening privacy budgets and becomes structurally infeasible on combinatorially dense systems.
The security and privacy of blockchain data have become critical research challeSimilarly, the full-function accounting node verifies the validitynges. While numerous approaches have been proposed to address these concerns, many existing schemes suffer from high computational complexity or excessive verification latency. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a secure and privacy-preserving blockchain data transaction verification system. By integrating the Paillier cryptosystem with a zero-knowledge range proof protocol, the proposed system ensures the confidentiality of transaction amounts and participant identities, simultaneously achieving strong anonymity and conditional traceability for users. Moreover, fully functional accounting nodes support efficient ciphertext-domain balance updates, eliminating the need for decryption during accounting operations. Experimental evaluation confirms the practicality and high performance of the proposed system.
NOXFORD ID is a seven-layer privacy-preserving identity verification architecture designed to address a specific fraud vulnerability in cross-institutional identity validation: the brittleness of exact-match verification against ordinary, legitimate variation in how names and dates are recorded across institutions. The architecture combines hardened Bloom-filter cryptographic linkage (privacy-preserving record linkage), field-separated fuzzy matching, a probabilistic decision engine with an explicit human-review tier, a tamper-evident cross-institutional integrity ledger, a genuine Schnorr zero-knowledge proof of identity knowledge, replay-resistant institution-specific key derivation, and a Root Certificate Authority layer aligned with Nigeria's NIMC Act 2026, which designates the National Identity Management Commission as Root Certification Authority for the country's National Public Key Infrastructure. Each layer is independently implemented and empirically tested against a labeled test corpus, with results reported transparently, including design flaws discovered and corrected during development. The paper documents a measured reduction in false rejection of legitimate citizens from 57% to 14% relative to a representative exact-match baseline, while maintaining zero fraud slip-through in testing, and explicitly states the system's current limitations, including evaluation corpus scale, dependence on enrollment-data integrity, and pending network-level threat-detection integration.
The BLS digital signature scheme, in particular its instantiation with the BLS12-381 curve, has become a cornerstone of modern blockchain protocols such as Ethereum Proof-of-Stake, due to its unique and attractive characteristics (e.g., support for non-interactive signature aggregation). Recently, Cheng et al. (CHES 2025) demonstrated that the enormous Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data (SIMD) computing power of the Intel AVX-512 extensions, when combined with carefully-designed vectorization strategies, can be effectively leveraged to speed up the computation of the optimal ate pairing on BLS12-381, a major component of BLS. This naturally raises the question of whether such SIMD-parallel processing can be exploited more extensively to benefit the entire BLS signature scheme. The present paper answers this question positively by presenting a highly SIMD-optimized BLS implementation using Intel AVX-512, especially the AVX-512IFMA instructions. In order to harness AVX-512 more efficiently for the performance-critical operations of BLS, we explored a wide range of optimization options, including various formulas and vectorization granularities for elliptic curve arithmetic operations, scalar multiplication, and hashto- curve, as well as the fine-tuning and flexible use of different implementations of the finite-field arithmetic. Benchmarking results collected on an Intel Core i3-1005G1 (“Ice Lake”) CPU show that our vectorized BLS software using AVX-512 is at least 1.57 times faster than an x64 assembly implementation of the widely-used blst library
ABSTRACT TRSP — The Temporal Security Architecture: The Consolidated Record. Three documents, one DOI: the Security Record, the Economic Record, and a general-audience companion. Every cryptographic system in production today rests on one assumption: that a mathematical problem is too hard to solve in practical time. Quantum computing places an expiry date on that assumption, and adversaries are already recording encrypted traffic and public ledgers at scale — harvest now, decrypt later. This record consolidates the Temporal Rotation Security Protocol (TRSP) series into its canonical form. TRSP closes the attack surface that post-quantum mathematics leaves open: cryptographic keys are generated from physical hardware entropy at the moment of use, exist for a rotation window measured in milliseconds, and are destroyed by hardware-enforced destructive readout. Between operations, no persistent credential exists anywhere in the system. This record comprises three documents under one DOI: Document 1 — The Security Record (TRSP — The Temporal Security Architecture: Time as the Fundamental Security Parameter). The consolidated technical reference of the series. It states the security doctrine with precision as a division of labour across three attack mechanics: temporal rotation eliminates the stored-credential surface (endpoint extraction by malware, insiders, hardware probing, or coercion); NIST-standardised post-quantum mathematics (ML-KEM, ML-DSA) eliminates the recorded-transcript surface; single-use protocol rules eliminate the public-record surface, since a retroactively derived key finds its one permitted action already complete and refused for reuse. Each threat is assigned to the layer that closes it structurally — the combination this architecture defines as quantum permanence. The architecture is organised in three layers named for the Norse Norns of time: URDHR (the irrecoverable past — hardware commitment and Landauer-anchored destruction, with optional macroscopic optical entropy), VERÐANDI (the witnessed present — geographically distributed quorum validation bounded by light-speed, with a canonical rotation-window definition of 10–100 ms default and adaptive extension to 500 ms for global quorums), and SKULD (the anchored future — LEO satellite quorums contributing unpredictable physical state measurements under relativistic timestamp validation). Further parts document the four-layer temporal-quantum hybrid (LTQS), the formal ephemeral verification pipeline with zero-knowledge enrollment binding and an explicit statement of the minimised persistent root, application domains ordered by strategic value (AI-to-AI authentication and micropayment, cloud access immune to credential breaches, interbank settlement finality across multi-decade ledgers, critical infrastructure command authorisation, interplanetary autonomous verification, and the consumer expression documented in the TRSP Citadel record), a compliance architecture reconciling maximum personal privacy with institutional regulatory obligations through enrollment tiers, and nine engineering considerations with documented solution pathways. Document 2 — The Economic Record (TDC — The Temporal Digital Coin: Value Anchored in Verified Moments). The corrected canonical economic layer of the series (NC-TDC-26 through NC-TDC-32). It opens with an explicit correction: earlier records simultaneously asserted fungibility of all units, no re-pricing across phases, and rising per-phase value ranges — three statements that are jointly impossible, since a fungible asset trades at exactly one price. This record resolves the contradiction in favour of the principles and formally retracts the per-phase value ranges. The canonical doctrine: one coin, one price, stability by coupled expansion — supply is admitted only against verified, settled growth of the anchored economies under the quantity-theory identity M·V = P·Q, with governance-bounded elasticity, so that price-level stability becomes an accounting consequence of the issuance rule rather than a promise, and early holders gain no phase windfall by construction. Further parts document Proof of Physical Presence consensus economics (validation democratised to enrolled devices; the attack currency is human recruitment), the corrected role of temporal uniqueness (events anchor authenticity, never scarcity — scarcity derives from governance, value from anchor-economy demand), supply and issuance rules, the multi-anchor demand architecture (machine, institutional, and sovereign economies as demand sources, never price classes), consortium governance defined primarily by its prohibitions, the phased rollout in corrected form, and economic engineering considerations including velocity management, demand shocks, exchange-rate regime, bootstrap liquidity, and measurement integrity. Document 3 — The Companion Article (The Key That Even a Time Machine Cannot Steal). A general-audience presentation of the complete architecture — protocol, secure personal computer, and coin — written for readers outside the field, including the time-traveler thought experiment, the three guards (sortition, light-speed, multilateration) in plain language, and the estate architecture. It introduces no claims beyond the technical records. Newly registered contributions. In addition to consolidating and re-registering all prior novel contributions of the series (NC-TDC-1 through NC-TDC-41, NC-URDHR-1, NC-TRSP-Hybrid-1), this record places the following on the public record of prior art as of its publication date, each with a full enabling defensive specification (Security Record, Part 10a): NC-TDC-42 — Optical Air-Gap Content Transfer (formally registered herein, first described in the Citadel record): content crosses a security boundary as rendered light captured by a hardware-switched sensor and locally reconstructed via optical character recognition — the meaning crosses, the file never does; enumerated elements include the security inversion (the receiver harvests, the sender has no channel), the hardware-gated exception to device-level optical silence, and throughput asymmetry as a security property; registered embodiments include matrix-barcode, audio-channel (synthesised speech to local speech-to-text), and enterprise domain-transfer variants. NC-TDC-43 — Chained Presence Verification (newly documented): a unified three-link defence against device-farm collusion — sortition (per-transaction quorum draw via verifiable random function, unpredictable in advance, verifiable after), light-speed (adaptation between draw revelation and window close physically impossible), and multilateration (propagation-delay fingerprints against a relativistically validated time base expose any participant absent from its claimed position) — with the explicit answer to the position-based-cryptography impossibility result (Chandran–Goyal–Moriarty–Ostrovsky 2009): the architecture proves the position of an attested hardware module under an unpredictable draw, removing the pre-positioned-collusion premise the impossibility proof requires. NC-TDC-44 — Ephemeral Witness Relations (newly documented): the formal security model of time-bounded credentials — keys as functions of bounded temporal support with the derived metric of temporal attack surface; erasure completeness as a zero-mutual-information condition I(sk_eph; S(t)) = 0 with Landauer's bound identified as the realisation floor of erasure and explicitly not as a barrier to mathematical re-derivation; the composite adversarial bound over orthogonal domains (computational hardness, temporal measure, combinatorics of presence) with the binomial sortition term; the spacetime-local physical oracle O(D, t) with destructive-readout consumption; and ownership as a time-indexed capability predicate over uncopyable events, including the transient-witness class, the notion of proof of transient knowledge, and the no-retroactive-forgery bound. NC-TDC-45 — Disturbance-Elevated Alpha-Quorum Time Reference. Binding authorisation to short time windows places the local clock in the trusted computing base. This contribution redistributes time-validation authority at the moment of attack rather than fixing it in advance: under normal conditions all nodes validate equally; on detection of a time-source anomaly (cross-source divergence, or a multilateration residual beyond threshold), the system elevates a small set of hardened, atomic-clock-bearing nodes to a median-of-five reference — which tolerates two outliers, so shifting it requires corrupting at least three of five. Membership is fixed by short-lived sortition at the moment of elevation, so the set cannot be pre-targeted. Every coordinated time attack thereby degrades to denial, never forgery: it can interrupt authorisation, not manufacture one. Additionally placed on record in the Economic Record: the coupled-expansion issuance doctrine (corrected canonical form of NC-TDC-29), the corrected scope of NC-TDC-27 (temporal anchoring of authenticity, with uniqueness explicitly disclaimed as a source of value), and the formal retraction recorded in NC-TDC-31 — the corrections themselves are part of the prior-art registration. Consolidation and continuity. This record consolidates and supersedes as canonical reference: TRSP v3 (10.5281/zenodo.20324081), TRSP Digital Coin (10.5281/zenodo.20346658; v2: 20332811; v1: 20288860), TRSP: The Authorization Protocol for Everything (10.5281/zenodo.20402892), and TRSP Citadel (10.5281/zenodo.20481331). The four source records remain in force as prior art; where formulations differ, this record is authoritative. The CRATON designation in prior records and the URDHR designation in this and future records refer to architecturally identical concepts; prior-art continuity is complete and uninterrupted. The economic layer and the security layer are maintained as separate documents within this record by design: each addres
Due to the fast development of digital communication technologies and the creation of distributed computing architecture, it is crucial to ensure the security of communication through effective and safe authentication schemes that can protect data privacy within cybersecurity frameworks. The most efficient cryptographic method for such purposes is zero knowledge proof since it provides ultimate security by proving the authenticity without disclosing any sensitive data to the verifying party. It is fascinating to look into the zero-knowledge proof protocol based on graph isomorphism because of its mathematical nature. A detailed discussion on the graph isomorphism based zero-knowledge authentication techniques along with their significance in the current cryptography is presented in this paper. Working principles and concepts behind graph theoretic based authentication techniques and the concept of graph isomorphism and zero-knowledge proofs have been discussed in this paper. Besides, emerging application areas of these protocols in disciplines like cybersecurity, block-chain. Internet of Things security, cloud computing and post-quantum cryptography have also been highlighted in this paper. In addition to that, this paper provides an analysis of major advantages, drawbacks and future research directions for the graph theoretic zero-knowledge authentication schemes
# VeriSBOM: Secure and Verifiable SBOM Sharing Via Zero-Knowledge Proofs **VeriSBOM**, a trustless, selectively disclosed SBOM framework that provides cryptographic verifiability of SBOMs using zero-knowledge proofs. Within VeriSBOM, third parties can validate specific statements about a delivered software, mainly regarding the authenticity of the dependencies and policy compliance, without inspecting the content of an SBOM. Respectively, VeriSBOM allows independent third parties to verify if a software contains authentic dependencies distributed by official package managers and that the same dependencies satisfy rigorous policy constraints such as the absence of vulnerable dependencies or the adherence with specific licenses models. ## Key Features * **Selective Disclosure (Hiding):** Choose which proprietary components to hide from the public SBOM. The system generates a cryptographic proof that replaces the plaintext data, guaranteeing privacy. * **High-Performance Folding:** Powered by **Nova-Scotia**, utilizing recursive SNARKs to handle SBOMs. * **Interactive Dashboard:** A complete 4-step workflow (Package Manager, Auditor, Vendor, Client) built with **Streamlit**. ## Repository structure The repository contains three main folders: 1. **Empirical**: contains **Benchmarking** and **src**, for the analysis and source code, respectively. 2. **User study**: contains the code and results of the user study. 3. **README_Doc**: contains the images used for this documentation. ## VeriSBOM Architecture The system is divided into four main roles: 1. **Package Manager**: Maintains the package repository with the allowed packages. 2. **Auditor:** Represents the regulatory body marking the compliance status by checking the packages of the package manager. 3. **Software Vendor:** Represents the entity that provides software artefacts and wants to hide the related SBOMs for privacy reasons. He is responsible for the generation of the cryptographic proofs as verifiable substitutes of the hidden packages in SBOMs. 4. **Client:** The end-user who receives the cryptographic proofs along with the software artefact for verifying binding, inclusion and compliance status. ## Web Access (Recommended) **For direct access to the artefact, VeriSBOM can be accessed at this public link** https://verisbom-verisbom-software.hf.space ## Setup & Installation Follow the README within the artefact ## Operational Workflow The application follows a **linear workflow** composed of four steps. Each step depends on the output generated in the previous one. > **Performance Note** Due to the cryptographic operations involved, generating proofs may take some time depending on the number and complexity of the active policy constraints. In the current reference environment, proof generation takes approximately **~5 seconds**, while verification takes around **~3 seconds per proof**. ## Step 1 — Package Manager In this step, the **Package Manager initialises the package repository**. ### Instructions 1. Open the **Package Manager** tab. 2. Click **`Load repository`**. > For convenience, the system automatically loads a **default repository containing packages from the NPM ecosystem**. ### Expected Output After successful execution: - A **green confirmation message** is displayed. - The **package list** appears on the left panel. - The **dependencies of each package** can be inspected on the right panel using the search bar. - A **dependency graph** is displayed at the bottom of the interface. ## Step 2 — Auditor In this step, the **Auditor defines policy constraints** that will be applied to the packages in the repository. ### Instructions 1. Enter a **policy name** (e.g., `Vulnerabilities`, `MIT License`). 2. Click **`Add`** to create the policy constraint. 3. Use the **search bar** to locate target packages. 4. **Uncheck packages** to mark them as **non-compliant**. > By default, **all packages are marked as compliant**. 5. Click **`Save and Propagate`** to apply the policy. ### Optional - Repeat the previous steps to create additional policy constraints. - Remove policies that are no longer required. ### Expected Output - A **green confirmation message** appears. - A **dependency graph visualisation** shows how non-compliance propagates across dependencies for the selected policy (or combination of policies). ## Step 3 — Software Vendor In this step, the **Software Vendor generates cryptographic proofs for a given SBOM**. ### Instructions 1. Upload a **local SBOM file**. > For demonstration purposes, the system automatically loads an **example SBOM**. 2. In the **Selective Disclosure** section: - Select which SBOM packages should be used for proof generation. 3. Click **`Generate Proofs`**. 3. Click **`Download`**. - Download the SBOM with hidden components and plaintext components ### Expected Output - A **progress bar** indicates the proof generation process. - **Green confirmation messages** appear once proofs are generated successfully. > **Important:** Successful proof generation only means that the **cryptographic proof has been constructed correctly**. Compliance with policies is verified only in **Step 4**. ## Step 4 — Client In the final step, the **Client verifies the proofs generated by the vendor**. ### Instructions 1. Upload the **SBOM**. 2. Select a **policy** from the dropdown menu. 3. Click **`Verify`**. ### Expected Output - **Verified (green badge)** The SBOM satisfies the selected policy. - **Failed (red badge)** The verification failed, and the interface displays the reason for the failure.
Ilango (FOCS 2025) invented effectively zero-knowledge proofs, a new variant of zero-knowledge. We reformulate it in the language of logic and give simple proofs (under the same assumptions as Ilango (FOCS 2025)) of its existence and of the key property defined in Ilango (FOCS 2025) that it is "indistinguishable from true" (that property is in Ilango (FOCS 2025) a part of the definition of the prover, not its consequence). Using the theory of proof complexity generators we show that the concept can be turned it into a genuinely zero-knowledge proofs, assuming a conjecture from the theory about the existence of a hard generator and allowing the parties to share a common random string.
Traditional secret sharing techniques such as Verifiable Secret sharing (VSS) are vulnerable to quantum attacks by a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC) running Shor's algorithm. We observe that the binding a VSS needs is required only at the moment of dealing, and this binding can be made before any CRQC exists. We propose Proof in a Bottle (PiB), which decouples verifiability from long-term binding: standard Pedersen commitments provide zero-knowledge, publicly checkable consistency during a pre-quantum window, while a salted, index-bound hash of the share set, anchored to an immutable public ledger, preserves the binding established in that window into the post-quantum era. The guarantee is explicitly a commit-now, reveal-later one: it protects today's honest dealings against tomorrow's quantum adversary.
Quantum resource estimates for the elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) now shape cryptographic migration planning, blockchain security analysis, and fault-tolerant architecture design. Recent work has moved in two complementary directions: Babbush et al. give improved secp256k1 resource estimates supported by zero-knowledge attestation while withholding sensitive circuit details, whereas Luo et al. publish an explicit reversible modular-inversion construction based on the extended Euclidean algorithm, reducing the logical-qubit footprint of prime-field ECDLP and identifying gate count, depth, and architecture-aware implementation as natural optimization targets. This note proposes a third disclosure model: verifiable resource certificates for public reversible arithmetic blocks. A certificate records a circuit commitment, gate basis, resource counts, input-output specification, deterministic test generation, correctness transcript, and optional proof artifact. We specialize the framework to modular inversion blocks |x⟩|0⟩ → |x⟩|x−1 mod p⟩, for \(x\in\mathbb F_p^\times\), which are central to affine-coordinate quantum ECDLP implementations. We prove a basic soundness bound for hash-derived randomized testing and outline a prototype verifier. The goal is not a new quantum attack, but reproducible, comparable, and independently auditable quantum-ECDLP arithmetic claims.