Smart contracts, self-executing agreements written in code, are increasingly prevalent in decentralized applications (dApps). However, their immutable nature and complex logic make them vulnerable to security breaches, leading to significant financial losses and reputational damage. Traditional security auditing methods, relying heavily on manual code review and fuzzing, are often insufficient in uncovering subtle vulnerabilities. This paper proposes a novel approach to smart contract security auditing utilizing formal verification. We represent smart contracts as formal specifications and employ formal verification tools to rigorously analyze their behavior and detect potential security flaws. The core claim is that leveraging formal verification techniques significantly enhances the security and reliability of smart contracts. The core mechanism involves translating the contract's logic into a formal language, allowing automated verification against predefined security properties. This approach addresses the limitations of traditional auditing, providing a more comprehensive and reliable assessment of smart contract security. The research contributes to a proactive security strategy for smart contract development, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities and fostering greater trust in decentralized systems.
Blockchain technology has garnered significant attention for its potential to revolutionize various industries. A critical component of blockchain is its consensus mechanism, which ensures the integrity and reliability of the distributed ledger. However, current blockchain consensus protocols are frequently characterized by their complexity, making formal verification challenging. This paper addresses this challenge by presenting a formal model of a blockchain consensus protocol using process calculi. Specifically, we utilize the Temporal Temporal Calculus (TCC) formalism to represent the protocol's state transitions and interactions. This approach allows for a rigorous analysis of the protocol's correctness, security, and efficiency. The model captures key aspects such as node participation, transaction validation, and block creation. The use of process calculi offers a precise and unambiguous description of the protocol, facilitating the identification and mitigation of potential vulnerabilities. This work contributes to a foundational understanding of blockchain consensus and paves the way for improved protocol design and enhanced security assurances.
The increasing prevalence of smart contracts in decentralized applications necessitates robust methods for ensuring their correctness and security. Smart contracts, due to their inherent complexity and potential for subtle errors, pose a significant challenge for traditional verification techniques. This paper proposes a novel approach combining symbolic execution with constraint solving and temporal logic verification for the systematic analysis of smart contracts. The core idea is to systematically explore the execution paths of a smart contract using symbolic execution, identifying potential vulnerabilities and execution scenarios. Subsequently, temporal logic is applied to formally verify that the contract's behavior aligns with its intended specifications over time, capturing temporal constraints such as safety and liveness properties. This integrated framework provides a more comprehensive and reliable method for verifying smart contracts compared to relying solely on symbolic execution or temporal logic alone. The approach offers a structured methodology for detecting and mitigating risks associated with smart contract development.
Blockchain technology has garnered significant attention as a revolutionary distributed ledger system. However, the security and efficiency of blockchain consensus protocols – the mechanisms that ensure agreement among nodes – remain a critical concern. These protocols are often characterized by intricate designs and complex interactions, making traditional testing methods insufficient to guarantee their robustness. This paper proposes a novel approach to formally model and verify blockchain consensus protocols using symbolic execution. Symbolic execution allows us to systematically explore all possible execution paths of a protocol, identifying potential vulnerabilities, inefficiencies, and deviations from the intended behavior. By representing variables with symbolic values rather than concrete values, we can create a comprehensive model that captures the protocol's logic without being constrained by specific data. This approach offers a rigorous and automated method for assessing the security and performance of blockchain consensus protocols, ultimately contributing to the development of more trustworthy and reliable decentralized systems.
Blockchain technology relies fundamentally on consensus mechanisms to ensure data integrity and prevent fraud. However, the inherent complexity of these mechanisms often leads to subtle vulnerabilities that can be exploited. This paper presents a novel approach to blockchain security by developing a formal specification language and accompanying verification tools. We aim to rigorously analyze and verify the security and performance of various blockchain consensus protocols, including Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS). The methodology employs mathematical modeling and logical reasoning to identify potential weaknesses and assess protocol robustness. The developed tools facilitate a systematic examination of protocol behavior under various conditions, ultimately leading to the design of more secure and reliable decentralized systems. This work offers a significant advancement in the field by providing a concrete framework for formal verification, moving beyond anecdotal evidence and subjective assessments. The core claim of this paper is that blockchain consensus mechanisms are complex and prone to vulnerabilities, and the proposed approach provides a mechanism to address this issue.
Authentication in Web 3.0 faces a structural conflict. Systems that offer full anonymity leave no lawful way to identify a malicious actor. Systems built for accountability expose a persistent wallet address to blockchain-graph analysis, or fall back on centralized key recovery. Existing designs solve one side of this conflict at the cost of the other. This paper presents PEUAP-W3, a Privacy-Enhanced and User-centric Authentication Protocol. Its contribution is the integration of five established components into a single deployed and formally analyzed system. A Circom 2 circuit of 1579 Groth16 constraints proves four facts in a single 192-byte on-chain proof: knowledge of an opening of the session credential commitment, an SpO2 value inside an 85–100% band, single-use nonce binding, and HMAC integrity. Shamir (k = 2, n = 3) sharing distributes the identity payload across three independent relays. The coordinator reconstructs an identity only after a threshold vote has been recorded on chain. Credentials are issued as W3C Verifiable Credentials 2.0 in did:key form. Four Solidity contracts verify the proof on Ethereum Sepolia. Verification costs about 241,000 gas and takes roughly 3 ms. ProVerif and Scyther find no attack under the Dolev–Yao model. A concurrency sweep to 500 simultaneous requests completes 1191 requests with zero failures at about 15.4 requests per second. A behavioral gate screens commodity abuse as a supplementary control; it is not treated as a security boundary. Against a nine-property framework, PEUAP-W3 satisfies six properties. Three remain conditional and are not verified in the current deployment: biological-origin assurance and digital replay prevention, both of which need an attested sensor; and GDPR erasure equivalence. Here, formally verified refers to the protocol models and theorems, not to the complete deployed software.
Centralised cloud authentication and authorisation commonly rely on a trusted server for identity, policy enforcement, and audit logging, which can increase the impact of compromise and complicate tamper-evident accountability. This paper presents a decentralised biometric authentication and authorisation framework that integrates fingerprint minutiae verification with Ethereum smart contracts and IPFS-based off-chain storage. Biometric templates are processed off-chain using a NIST NBIS-based pipeline ( MINDTCT minutiae extraction and Bozorth3 matching) and protected via SHA-256 hashing, zlib compression, and authenticated encryption (Fernet), while the blockchain stores only integrity metadata (hashes and IPFS content identifiers) and authorisation state. To mitigate replay attacks without introducing additional session-creation transactions, the framework uses a domain-separated request-binding hash ( tokenHash ) over the caller, nonce, timestamp, chain id, and contract address, validated on-chain together with one-time nonce consumption. A prototype was implemented using Solidity on a local Ethereum-compatible test network (Ganache), with Python/Web3 tooling and an IPFS-compatible content-addressed storage interface. Biometric performance is reported using standard metrics (FAR/FRR/EER and ROC/DET curves) on SOCOFing and FVC2002/FVC2004 benchmarks. In the core blockchain experiment, the proposed single-call attendance workflow required 74,773 gas while adding nonce-based replay protection and auditable authorisation checks on top of CID/hash anchoring (the separate literature benchmark reports end-to-end call-path gas under a shared harness). Compression reduces encrypted-template storage by approximately 76–84% across tested dataset sizes. Security analysis and attack simulation show that replay attempts (nonce/token reuse), unauthorised access, and off-chain payload tampering are rejected under the stated threat model.
Banik and Kumar (Journal of Information Security and Applications 2023) proposed a blockchain-based public key encryption with keyword search for medical data sharing in cloud environments. In this comment paper, we show that the Banik-Kumar scheme leaks keyword information from both ciphertexts and trapdoors.
This paper proposes a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) soft pairing framework for Bluetooth service access control. Unlike conventional Bluetooth systems where pairing implicitly grants persistent service access, the proposed approach decouples native Bluetooth pairing from authorization without modifying the underlying protocol stack. The framework introduces a three-layer architecture consisting of a Bluetooth layer for connectivity, a blockchain layer for trusted execution and on-chain state verification, and an application layer where NFT soft pairing defines the authorization logic. In this design, Non-Fungible Bluetooth Tokens (NFBTs) represent user-side access credentials, while Non-Fungible Device Tokens (NFDTs) represent device identities. Their bidirectional on-chain binding forms a revocable and verifiable NFT soft pairing relationship. During access, users prove ownership of valid NFBTs through challenge-response signatures, and devices verify the corresponding on-chain state before granting service access. A prototype implemented with MetaMask and Ethereum demonstrates secure authentication, dynamic revocation, acceptable latency, and gas-efficient credential issuance based on ERC1155.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to interconnect more than 75 billion devices worldwide, yet device authenticity remains one of the most pressing unsolved security challenges in the IoT space. Typical IoT nodes have limited computing power, memory, and battery capacity, making traditional public-key-based authentication difficult to implement without compromising either security or resource conservation. This paper presents a structured narrative review and quantitative comparison of lightweight authentication protocols for IoT environments published between 2024 and 2026, spanning seven families: Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-based, ECC for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), hash-based, Physical Unclonable Function (PUF)-based, biometric and behavioural, blockchain-assisted, and machine-learning-augmented protocols. The review adds message-level protocol-flow comparisons for representative ECC- and PUF-based schemes, a benchmarking table of published latency, message-size, and energy indicators, and five sector-specific case studies. Reported findings include dynamic-credential ECC schemes reducing communication and computational overhead by more than 37% over prior ECC schemes; PUF-based techniques using machine learning to improve modelling-attack resistance by more than 35% over earlier techniques; blockchain-assisted authentication for fog-enabled IoT; and multi-sector schemes such as SELAP, reducing computation and communication cost to 422 ms and 960 bits respectively, against 548 ms and 2048 bits for the earlier ELWSCAS protocol. Protocols are also examined against ephemeral information leakage, modelling attacks on PUFs, node cloning, and physical tampering. No protocol category is universally optimal; selection depends on a deployment's constraints, threat model, and sector. Research is converging on hybrid designs combining hardware-rooted trust, efficient public-key primitives, decentralised trust, and intelligent anomaly detection.
Open access
2 source records
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Sunday Yunisa, A. Ajah Ifeyinwa, Eturpa Salami Emmanuel
Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices, due to their resource constraints, require specialized security solutions that can operate efficiently without compromising performance and maintaining data confidentiality and integrity while minimizing computational overhead. This review examines various IoMT-based security frameworks designed to secure healthcare records in the cloud, emphasizing their effectiveness, challenges, and best practices. The study was conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method. 100 studies were identified published between 2020to 2025 and 50 papersthat were relevant to the study was carefully selected through a structured screening process. The papers were obtained from major academic databases such as PubMed, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, SpringerLink, Wiley, and Google Scholar. A systematic review protocol was developed before the literature search to establish clear criteria for inclusion and exclusion, ensuring transparency and reproducibility. The review showed that despite the progress made in safeguarding IoMT cloud-based health records, numerous prevailing frameworks predominantly emphasize either encryption or blockchain technology in a singular context, thereby neglecting to exploit the synergistic advantages inherent in the integration of both methodologies. Also, the encryption techniques currently employed for the protection of records within IoMT cloud environments frequently fail to achieve the essential equilibrium between security and operational performance which is characterized by limited resources. The study recommends the formulation of a framework that integrates several encryption schemes and blockchain technology to address the prevailing security problems.
The growing adoption of digital medical health care systems makes it necessary to build efficient, secure, and interoperable medical information exchange services. Nevertheless, existing traditional healthcare systems are centralized, inefficient in communication, vulnerable in terms of the integrity of data, and lack transparency. In this study, a novel blockchain-based secure framework is proposed with the integration of Ethereum smart contracts, CBOR compression, AES-256 GCM encryption, and SHA-256 validation. A multispecialty hospital dataset including patients’ information, laboratory information, prescriptions, and billing details is used in testing. A study obtained a compression rate of 7.22, validation speed of 0.0039 ms, encryption in 0.36 ms, average API latency of 98.47 ms, and throughput capacity of 52.9 TPS with a blockchain-based proposed system. Security analysis proved that this system provides security in terms of encryption, tamper resistance, access control, and immutability. The study also contributes a new model of communication within the health sector, which is both lightweight and secure, and increases blockchain performance and security.
The ubiquity of lightweight resource-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in 5G smart environments necessitates authentication protocols with the conflicting goals of being lightweight, highly secure, and having a decentralised credential management structure. Existing schemes use trusted third-party key distributors or heavyweight cryptographic primitives infeasible to IoT embedded hardware; they also fail to anchor device credentials on a permissioned blockchain ledger for tamper-evident credential revocation. In this work, we introduce BLAP-IoT: a Blockchain-Assisted Lightweight Authentication Protocol over live Hyperledger Fabric 2.5.9 that leverages elliptic-curve Diffie–Hellman over P-256 curve, keyed MACs, and a three-message challenge-response protocol to provide injective mutual authentication with device key confirmation. Device credential commitments are stored on-chain to facilitate decentralised and efficient device revocation without revealing secrets on-chain. A formal security verification of the protocol in ProVerif 2.05 shows session-key secrecy, injective mutual authentication, and perfect forward secrecy in the presence of the Dolev-Yao attacker. The empirical evaluation of BLAP-IoT on measured P-256 primitives reports that the scheme achieves a total computation cost of 0.303 ms on constrained devices — up to 52% less than compared schemes, 1920-bit two-way communication overhead, and 0.218 mJ device energy consumption. The underlying blockchain layer sustains up to 277 transactions per second (TPS) in peak throughput, with end-to-end authentication latency less than 13 ms at 1000 concurrent devices.
W. C. Yang, J. F. Qiao, J. F. Hu, Jie Wang · 5 authors
This study presents a multi-level verification system for secure communication protocols in energy billing infrastructures. The proposed framework integrates device attestation, network integrity verification, privacy-preserving aggregation, billing validation, and immutable auditing to address security vulnerabilities across Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) communication chains. A Hybrid Secure-Efficient Protocol (HSEP) combining elliptic curve cryptography, homomorphic encryption, and zero-knowledge proofs is developed to provide secure authentication, privacy protection, and verifiable data integrity while maintaining low computational overhead. Experimental evaluation using a large-scale AMI testbed demonstrates that the proposed system significantly improves tampering detection capability, achieving an intrusion detection AUC of 0.94 while maintaining an average energy consumption of 1.55 J per transaction and acceptable communication latency for large-scale deployment. The architecture exhibits strong scalability, robustness, and rapid dispute-resolution performance under multiple attack scenarios. The proposed framework is particularly applicable to wireless smart metering networks and antenna-enabled AMI communication infrastructures, where reliable data transmission, secure protocol verification, and resilience against communication-layer attacks are essential for trustworthy energy billing and grid operation. This work provides an effective engineering solution for secure, privacy-preserving, and verifiable communication in modern intelligent energy systems.
Stateful cryptographic schemes—exemplified by the hash-based signatures XMSS (RFC 8391) and LMS (RFC 8554)—require the signer to advance a local state monotonically; any rollback is catastrophic, yet a verifier has no way to check it. IETF guidance on state and backup management for hash-based signatures states explicitly that the verifier must simply trust the signer not to have reused state. We define verifiable monotone chains (VMC), a primitive that makes such state discipline cryptographically verifiable: state evolves along a finite poset (S, ⪯) under inflationary monotone operators, every transition carries a zero-knowledge proof, and a public commitment to the state provides an audit trail. We formalize two security notions: monotone-unforgeability (MU), which captures that an external adversary cannot certify an illegal or rolled-back transition, and auditability (AUD), which captures that signer rollback cannot be hidden from a public root history. Both notions reduce, with explicit advantage bounds, to position binding of the underlying vector commitment and knowledge soundness of the proof system. We instantiate VMC as RSEP-XMSS, in which each XMSS signature carries a proof that the signed leaf advanced along the chain FRESH ≺ USED ≺ SPENT in a Poseidon-based state Merkle tree, and we give a complete algorithmic specification with a concrete circuit design (~6041 R1CS constraints estimated, Groth16 proving time estimated at 5–15 ms, signature overhead of about 1–3 KB). RSEP-XMSS is one-way compatible with standard XMSS: legacy verifiers verify the core signature, while enhanced verifiers reject unprotected signatures, preventing downgrade attacks.
Biometric authentication offers enhanced usability for digital payments, but traditional centralized architectures suffer from single points of failure. While blockchain integration promises decentralized trust, existing solutions often store biometric helper data (e.g., fuzzy commitments) directly on-chain. We demonstrate that such transparency, even in permissioned settings, exposes low-entropy biometric inputs to offline brute-force attacks and identity-linkage risks if the immutable ledger is accessed by malicious nodes. To resolve this transparency–privacy paradox, we propose a threshold-based decentralized authentication framework. Unlike prior works, our protocol keeps all sensitive Biometric-Enhanced Key Derivation (BEKD) tokens entirely off-chain, using the blockchain solely for freshness enforcement. We provide a game-based security analysis of brute-force resistance, unforgeability, and unlinkability. Our experimental results demonstrate that our scheme’s gas cost is acceptable, offering a robust solution for self-sovereign biometric identity.
Cryptographic protocols are evaluated not only by the security properties they achieve, but also by the resources required to execute them. Unlike conventional algorithm analysis, where a single running-time function may be sufficient, protocol analysis usually separates computational complexity, bit complexity, communication complexity, storage complexity, and round complexity. This article develops a systematic methodology for such analysis through three representative case studies: the Schnorr zero-knowledge proof of knowledge, a Diffie–Hellman-based one-out-of-two oblivious-transfer protocol, and Regev-style public-key encryption based on the Learning With Errors problem. For each construction, the protocol is stated formally, correctness is derived, and the dominant computational, communication, and memory costs are calculated step by step. The examples illustrate three qualitatively different bottlenecks: group exponentiation in discrete-logarithm protocols, amortized public-key cost in oblivious transfer, and dense matrix–vector arithmetic in lattice-based cryptography.
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.
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.
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
Sovereign is a Prove/Pull communication protocol designed to address the structural imbalance of modern digital communication, where senders can impose cognitive and computational costs on recipients without corresponding friction. The protocol requires messages to carry a cryptographic proof of intent through one of three mechanisms: adaptive Proof-of-Work, private zero-knowledge proximity credentials, or registry-attested clearance tokens. Verification is performed by a decentralized Sovereign Audit Network (SAN), which attests that messages satisfy recipient-defined acceptance policies before delivery. This document presents the complete architectural specification of Sovereign, including the MessageEnvelope format, federated attestation protocol, dual Sparse Merkle Tree issuer registry with revocation support, Groth16 zero-knowledge proximity credential circuit, identity hierarchy, security assumptions, economic model, limitations, and phased deployment strategy. This release is Version 1.0 of the design specification. It is an unimplemented protocol proposal; all performance figures are engineering targets based on primitive benchmarks and require validation through future reference implementation. The work is published to establish a public technical record, invite peer review, and support future research, collaboration, and implementation efforts.
To make the payment system robust and user friendly, decentralized based Scan and Pay system need to be designed. This paper integrates the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) of India with the Solana-based Blockchain to make the payment system decentralized. Solana offers a high throughput and low-cost based decentralized infrastructure which is combined with the simple and reliable UPI system. So, the proposed system enables cryptocurrency transactions linked to UPI while maintaining user friendliness, scalability, and regulatory compliance. The designed method uses a secure architecture powered by smart contracts and modular design. It offers a viable bridge between centralized financial networks and emerging Web3 ecosystems. Proposed Solana-based UPI is compared with the Non-Solana based UPI which is using Blockchain. Results show that there is improvement of 91% in transaction latency and 95% in transaction cost as compared to the Non-Solana based UPI system.