Driven by the increasing demand for multi-party data computation, Private Set Intersection (PSI) has become a pivotal technique for secure data sharing and privacy preservation. Although several efficient two-party PSI protocols have been developed, multi-party scenarios continue to suffer from limited computational efficiency and inadequate security guarantees. To address this engineering challenge, this study aims to enhance the performance and security of multi-party PSI protocols. We introduce SM-MPSI, a multi-party PSI protocol built upon national cryptographic standards. This protocol integrates SM2 and SM3 cryptographic mechanisms, employs non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs for identity authentication, and leverages domestic secure cryptographic chips to accelerate core algorithms. Experimental comparisons with existing mainstream protocols demonstrate significant improvements in computational efficiency and system scalability, while preserving robust security guarantees. Furthermore, SM-MPSI achieves enhanced communication efficiency and reduced resource consumption in multi-party scenarios. This research offers technical contributions toward advancing China's efforts in independent innovation in privacy-preserving computing and cryptographic technologies, thereby laying a solid foundation for strengthening national cybersecurity capabilities.
Digital transactions currently exceed trillions of dollars annually, yet traditional paper-based agreements remain a bottleneck for automation, enforceability, and dispute resolution. Natural language contracts introduce ambiguity, require manual processing, and lack computational verifiability, all of which hinder efficient digital commerce. Computable legal contracts, expressed in machine-readable formats, offer a potential solution by enabling automated execution and verification. Blockchain-based smart contracts further strengthen enforceability and accelerate dispute resolution; however, current implementations risk exposing sensitive agreement terms on public ledgers, raising serious privacy and competitive intelligence concerns that limit enterprise adoption. We introduce zk-agreements, a protocol designed to transition from paper-based trust to cryptographic trust while preserving confidentiality. Our design combines zero-knowledge proofs to protect private agreement terms, secure two-party computation to enable private compliance evaluation, and smart contracts to guarantee automated enforcement. Together, these components achieve both privacy preservation and computational enforceability, resolving the fundamental tension between transparency and confidentiality in blockchain-based agreements.
This paper addresses the challenge of designing secure and private digital credentialing systems by leveraging advanced mathematical primitives from applied cryptography. The core of our proposed solution is the application of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), a class of cryptographic protocols that allows for the verification of assertions without disclosing the underlying secret data. We introduce a formal, layered architecture that demonstrates how the mathematical properties of ZKPs can be systematically translated into a robust, large-scale information system. The framework's design is validated against the complex requirements of the academic domain, which serves as a rigorous testbed for our architectural approach. The primary contribution is a blueprint for integrating complex cryptographic protocols into practical system design, demonstrating how mathematical guarantees of privacy can be preserved in a distributed and verifiable manner. This work provides a novel contribution at the intersection of applied cryptography, system architecture, and information security.
Recent advances in lattice-based cryptography have seen Chen et al. introduce a linkable ring signature scheme (LLRS) for cloud-assisted electronic medical record systems, claiming dual security properties of linkability and unforgeability (IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur., doi: 10.1109/TIFS.2024.3455772). Our cryptanalysis reveals critical security flaws in their construction: the scheme fails to satisfy either claimed property. Specifically, we demonstrate universal forgeability through adaptive message attacks and identify defective linkability verification that permits signature origin ambiguity. Following vulnerability demonstrations via concrete attack vectors, we trace these weaknesses to flawed parameter initialization and improper nonce handling in their zero-knowledge proof framework. We conclude with concrete mitigation strategies including strengthened commitment schemes and improved randomness management.
Blockchain and Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are two transformative technologies that have gained significant attention in recent years. Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that ensures secure, transparent, and tamper-proof transactions without the need for a central authority, making it indispensable across various industries. PUFs, on the other hand, leverage the inherent randomness in physical devices to generate unique identities for authentication and security, particularly in applications requiring low-cost, scalable solutions. The convergence of blockchain and PUFs promises to address critical security challenges, particularly in device authentication, data integrity, and privacy-preserving mechanisms. This research explores the synergy between blockchain and PUFs, aiming to identify commonalities in methodologies, key findings, limitations and future directions in existing literature. A total of 12 peerreviewed papers, each with over 10 citations, were selected based on their academic rigour and impact, representing the most influential studies published between 2019 and 2024. By employing thematic analysis, this research synthesises the past literature across three main objectives: methods, key findings, and both limitations and future work, identifying 8 distinct themes within these categories. The majority of the papers reviewed indicated a strong focus on authentication and access control within their methodological approaches. These studies frequently utilised enhanced cryptographic techniques and conducted security analyses as part of their frameworks. A common finding among the papers was their emphasis on security and efficiency, with many solutions being specifically applied to the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. However, there was a notable lack of comprehensive discussion regarding the limitations of the approaches. Furthermore, the papers often proposed that future research should address the development of novel consensus mechanisms. This study suggests that prospective research should focus on integrating smart contracts and further advancing scalable, decentralised solutions, extending beyond the IoT domain.
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Smart contracts are commonly used for automated processing on blockchains, and research related to smart contracts is actively conducted. However, smart contracts are constrained by the fact that they cannot hold secret information due to transparency requirements, and thus smart contracts cannot perform calculations using secret information. In particular, they generally cannot generate digital signatures, which are computations using a secret key. This limits the potential of smart contracts. In this study, we propose a new scheme that enables smart contracts to generate signatures even if the smart contract does not hold a secret key. The proposed scheme allows smart contracts to securely delegate signature generation to off-chain servers that hold the signing key and do not support TEE. Even if the off-chain server is compromised by an attacker and the secret key (signing key) is stolen, the smart contract still generates a valid signature. We provide a new secure and effective signature generation approach using smart contracts and incentive mechanisms, even if the signing key is publicly available.
W. M. A. B. Wijesundara, Joong-Sun Lee, Eleni Aloupogianni, Dara Tith · 6 authors
Rapid proliferation of smart home IoT devices has intensified the demand for secure, scalable, and autonomous firmware authentication mechanisms. Traditional centralized solutions face challenges related to privacy concerns, limited scalability, and vulnerability to single point of failure. In this paper, we propose DIDAuth-IoTFW, a novel decentralized identity and firmware authentication framework that uniquely integrates Ethereum Layer-2 Arbitrum, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and W3C-compliant Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs). DIDAuth-IoTFW provides a complete firmware authentication life cycle, from decentralized identity registration to real-time, on-chain verifiable revocation. While enabling autonomous, cryptographic verification directly on resource-constrained IoT devices and ensuring reliable performance even when gateways are compromised or unavailable. Our proof-of-concept implementation on ESP32 and Raspberry Pi achieved complete resistance to replay, forgery, and revocation threats with verification consistently under 1.2 s. Compared to prior work, DIDAuth-IoTFW uniquely combines firmware–VC hash binding, contract binding that prevents cross-registry replay, and device-side enforcement resilient to gateway compromise. Experimental results indicate a robust, privacy-preserving, and scalable alternative to centralized firmware-update pipelines for smart-home IoT.
The rapid adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) in Healthcare has significantly enhanced real-time patient monitoring and decision making. However, security and privacy still remain the major concern due to sensitive medical data of patients especially on low-power IoT devices. Traditional authentication schemes like Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) often struggle with efficiency in resource-constraint environments due to their computational overhead. In order to address these challenges, we propose a Neural-Based Hybrid and Adaptive Framework that combines Schnorr ZKP with Kyber-based key encapsulation, using a neural network to dynamically select Kyber variants (512, 768, 1024) based on device parameters (type, authentication time, transmission time) to balance security and efficiency for low-power IoT devices. Extensive experiments validated robust security against replay and spoofing attacks, achieving authentication success for legitimate clients and zero attack successes. Furthermore, our proposed framework outperforms traditional Kyber1024 and ZKP/ECC based authentication schemes in terms of authentication time and computational overhead making it robust and scalable solution for sensitive and resource-limited environments like HealthCare IoT systems. • Design a novel hybrid authentication framework that integrates ZKP and Kyber PQC (Post Quantum Cryptography) to ensure secure and efficient authentication for IoT healthcare devices. • Utilize Neural Network to intelligently select the most appropriate Kyber variant based on threat level and computational efficiency. • Provide comprehensive experimental analysis comparing the proposed hybrid and adaptive framework with traditional ZKP, ECC and static Kyber implementations.
Traceable Ring Signatures (TRS) were introduced by Fujisaki and Suzuki~[PKC'07], where a trace algorithm can publicly check if two signatures with the same event label were generated by the same signer (linkability). In addition, if the two signatures correspond to different messages, then the signer's identity is revealed (traceability). Following [PKC'07], most subsequent works adopt the same definitions and consider three security properties, anonymity, linkability, and exculpability. [PKC'07] proved that the latter two properties together imply unforgeability, a fundamental requirement for all signature-like primitives. ~~~~In this work, we identify a gap in the aforementioned proof, which arises from the insufficient consideration of linkability and exculpability in [PKC'07]. To address this, we revisit the syntax and security notions of TRS, and close this gap by defining extended linkability and extended exculpability. Building on these, we design a new framework of TRS from PseudoRandom Functions (PRF) and Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Knowledge (ZKPoK) that supports tracing, provided that both two signatures are valid. This constitutes a substantial improvement over existing approaches---all of which require tracing with the size of the ring---and elevates TRS to a level of practicality and efficiency comparable to Linkable Ring Signatures (LRS), which have already achieved widespread deployment in practice. Finally, we instantiate our generic framework from the DDH assumption and leverage the Bulletproofs [S\&P'18] to construct a TRS scheme with log-size signatures. The proposed scheme achieves highly optimized signature sizes in practice and remains compatible with most existing DLog-based systems. On Curve25519, the signature size is bytes, which to our best knowledge is the shortest LRS scheme for a ring .
Leela V, Kanishka K, Kaviyasri S, Guru Dharshan K · 6 authors
Protecting privacy, availability, and security of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is of utmost importance in the modern digital health industry. Traditional centralized storage system has been under increasing security threats like illegal access, data tampering, cyber-attack and single point of failure. To address these problems, we present in this work a new blockchain-based system which combines Token-Based Authentication and Permissioned Pure Proof-of-Stake (PPoS) consensus model. The architecture authenticates the identity of participants using Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and generates cryptographic tokens providing limited access to EHRs that expire over time. These tokens, together with encrypted metadata and access logs are written on a permissioned block chain to provide transparency, traceability and finegrained access control. For data privacy concern, the real health record is off-chained saved with encryption by the ChaCha20-Poly1305 algorithm. The PPoS enforced on Algorand blockchain, provides an efficient, green consensus for the authorized healthcare nodes. It is compliant with HIPAA and GDPR, has excellent audit features and provides a highly available, emergency override access.
Shahad Altamimi, Qasem Abu Al‐Haija, Abdullah AlShuaibi
Incorporating BC technology in Internet of Things (IoT) networks allows secure peer-to-peer communication in Distributed Information Systems (DIS). This research analyzes the protocols implemented on the Blockchain (BC) about data integrity, authentication, and trust issues, which are core challenges of IoT. Thus, the study discussed a secure communication protocol based on BC. These protocols incorporate consensus and smart contracts, which remove central points of failure and improve transparency. Thus, the study setup simulates various IoT devices sending classified messages through a FastAPI backend integrated with Ethereum (Geth) via web3.py. The recent designs and blueprints show where they shine and where overhead or speed still bite. We aim to steer future work toward light, expandable, and privacy-first tools that lock down open IoT systems.
With the rapid advancement of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication systems, ensuring robust security has become a critical challenge. Various studies have proposed several protocols; however, many of them may suffer from potential threats, such as impersonation attacks. This paper presents an efficient and lightweight authentication protocol for V2X communication. Our scheme uses zero-knowledge proof to perform mutual authentication without revealing the real identities in V2X communication. The proposed protocol ensures that all vehicles on the network are authenticated without compromising the integrity. Hence, the proposed scheme protects V2X communication against possible attacks. The preliminary result shows that the proposed scheme is efficient in terms of computational complexity.
There have existed transaction and connection difficulties between Web 2.0 and Web3 for a long time. Seamless Web3 has played a significant role to reduce the complexity of Web3 and the gap between Web2.0 and Web3. We propose a seamless Web3 based decentralized application (DApp) for non-fungible token (NFT) purchase by using credit cards. The proposed seamless Web3 DApp has been tested in an iOS system and shows positive results. The main goal is to connect Web 2.0 users purchase and store NFT within the DApp, without interacting with the complicated blockchain ecosystem such a wallet address, cryptocurrency or a crypto exchange account.
Aiming at the problems of single-point failure, privacy leakage, and high communication delay existing in the process of massive intelligent terminals accessing the new power system with traditional centralized identity authentication methods, this paper proposes an efficient identity authentication method for power terminals based on blockchain and non-interactive zero-knowledge proof. By improving Schnorr protocol, a dynamic random number driven non interactive authentication mechanism is designed to avoid the high delay of private key transmission and multi round communication. At the same time, in combination with the distributed ledger characteristics of the blockchain, the terminal public key and authentication records are decentralized stored, eliminating the dependence on a single CA. In this paper, we propose an aggregate signature method, which aggregates the zero knowledge proofs of multiple devices into a total signature, reducing the computation and communication overhead when authenticating a large number of terminal devices. This paper analyzes the performance of the proposed method using building simulation blockchain on the Hyperledger Fabric platform. Compared with other methods, this method performs well in the actual authentication phase, and reduces the time cost by more than 4.5%. Through batch certification test, compared with single terminal certification, the time cost is reduced by more than 80%. The security analysis results show that this method can resist replay attacks, phishing attacks, etc., and ensure the identity anonymity of terminal devices, the confidentiality of private keys, and the integrity of data transmission.
The paper highlights the critical need to ensure the reliability of smart contracts and also security of smart contracts, which are agreements execute on their own and have terms that are directly encoded in the code. Smart contracts have transformed a number of industries by offering automated and secure transaction solutions. However, this innovation brings its own set of challenges, including security vulnerabilities and execution errors leading to serious economic and functional consequences. This survey aims to comprehensively address these issues by examining recent research on smart contract security and correctness verification. To lower the risks associated with smart contracts, the framework incorporates efficient techniques and technologies.The survey categorizes and analyzes key vulnerabilities, evaluates existing verification techniques, and proposes best practices for secure smart contract development. Additionally, it identifies research gaps and future directions to enhance the security of smart contracts. By guiding researchers and practitioners toward building more secure and reliable smart contract systems, this effort not only fortifies the backbone of blockchain technology but also encourages the scalability and resilience of decentralized systems in the fast-paced digital age of today with its wide range of use cases
The article presents a comprehensive overview of zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) protocols as a fundamental concept of modern cryptography. The historical background of their emergence and the main properties ensuring reliability and confidentiality, i.e., completeness, soundness, and zero-knowledge — are considered. A classification of protocols into interactive and non-interactive ones is provided, with a special focus on modern solutions such as the zk-SNARK and the zk-STARK. The mathematical foundations of ZKPs are described in detail, including discrete logarithm proofs, the use of homomorphic encryption, polynomial commitments, hashing, and elliptic curves. Practical application areas are analyzed, including cryptocurrencies (Zcash, Ethereum), authentication systems, digital identity, and electronic voting. The advantages of using ZKPs are shown, such as enhanced privacy, reduced need for trusted intermediaries, and strengthened security. At the same time, key challenges are outlined, including scalability, implementation complexity, the problem of trusted setup, and potential vulnerability to quantum computing. It is concluded that zero-knowledge proof protocols are a powerful tool for ensuring confidentiality and reliability of digital systems, while further research is aimed at creating more efficient and quantum-resistant solutions.
The article presents a comprehensive overview of zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) protocols as a fundamental concept of modern cryptography. The historical background of their emergence and the main properties ensuring reliability and confidentiality, i.e., completeness, soundness, and zero-knowledge — are considered. A classification of protocols into interactive and non-interactive ones is provided, with a special focus on modern solutions such as the zk-SNARK and the zk-STARK. The mathematical foundations of ZKPs are described in detail, including discrete logarithm proofs, the use of homomorphic encryption, polynomial commitments, hashing, and elliptic curves. Practical application areas are analyzed, including cryptocurrencies (Zcash, Ethereum), authentication systems, digital identity, and electronic voting. The advantages of using ZKPs are shown, such as enhanced privacy, reduced need for trusted intermediaries, and strengthened security. At the same time, key challenges are outlined, including scalability, implementation complexity, the problem of trusted setup, and potential vulnerability to quantum computing. It is concluded that zero-knowledge proof protocols are a powerful tool for ensuring confidentiality and reliability of digital systems, while further research is aimed at creating more efficient and quantum-resistant solutions.
The emergence of 6G networks enhances the speed and compatibility of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), leveraging underutilized bands to improve wireless communication and security, though its adaptability may introduce cyber vulnerabilities; to address this, we propose an energy-efficient consortium-based blockchain-enabled heterogeneous (EBH) 6G network for IoT devices, offering secure VANET control through a lattice-based ring signcryption scheme that ensures timely message relaying while preserving vehicle anonymity and cloud data confidentiality, with blockchain blocks formed via secure peer nodes and service provider data; our protocol’s security was rigorously validated through analysis and Python-based implementation, achieving 42.1 ms computational cost and 1026-bit communication overhead, and proving effectiveness across varying block and transaction loads, while guaranteeing key security properties-anonymity, linkable privacy, unforgeability, and confidentiality-even under quantum threats, using lattice-based cryptography, Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP), and blockchain immutability.
Web3 has attracted considerable attention in fields including DeFi, DApps, and NFTs due to its decentralization, enhanced privacy, and user-centricity. However, interoperability and scalability challenges hinder its widespread adoption. While deploying anonymous credentials across Web3 networks to enable cross-network service access is a potential solution to these challenges, existing credential systems remain limited by centralized management, high energy consumption, and credential abuse, making them unsuitable for Web3 environments. To overcome these limitations, we propose a decentralized anonymous functional credential (DAFC) scheme that is efficient, privacy-preserving, and linkable. Unlike existing schemes, DAFC enables users to generate a single proof embedding attributes$x$for requesting services under different access policies. Each provider can use the functional key$sk_{F}$associated with their respective access policy$F$to extract$F(x)$for attribute verification. This significantly reduces authentication computational overhead. Furthermore, DAFC's linkability effectively mitigates credential abuse risks. As an additional contribution, we propose a novel construction of non-interactive zero-knowledge functional proof (fNIZK) based on one-out-of-many proofs and functional encryption for inner products, which is the building block of DAFC. Security analysis demonstrates that DAFC achieves anonymity, unforgeability, and linkability. Performance evaluation shows that DAFC outperforms prior schemes in both computational and communication overhead when requesting at least 6 services with distinct access policies.
Vincent Duronio, Mohamed Firas Aguir, Hari Sai Kaja, Andrew J. Kalafut · 6 authors
The Internet of Health Things (IoHT) introduces new opportunities for remote patient monitoring but also exposes sensitive medical data to serious security risks. Traditional authentication mechanisms are often too resource-intensive for IoHT devices, which are constrained in terms of storage, computation, and energy. This paper presents a lightweight, decentralized authentication protocol tailored for IoHT environments, integrating blockchain technology, Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), and zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs). Our protocol employs the Proof of Elapsed Work and Luck (PoEWAL) consensus mechanism, enabling secure, energy-efficient participation in a private Hyperledger Fabric blockchain. The scheme ensures strong mutual authentication between healthcare providers and IoHT devices without exposing sensitive data. An informal analysis is done to demonstrate the protocol’s resilience against common attacks. This protocol offers a secure solution for enabling trustworthy healthcare communication in resource-limited IoHT networks.
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Sep 4, 2025·2025 IEEE 13th International Conference on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications (IDAACS)
This paper presents a cryptographic ZeroKnowledge Proof (ZKP) protocol that allows the prover (P) to convince the verifier (V) that they know a secret number X, which is consistent with k residues in a Redundant Residue Number System (RRNS), without revealing the number X itself. The use of RRNS in this protocol provides enhanced efficiency and computational parallelism by splitting operations across independent moduli. This approach combines zero-knowledge properties with high performance, addressing the simultaneous need for security, privacy, and scalability - particularly in authentication and secure transactions.
Designing secure electronic voting systems that truly protect voter privacy, ensure vote accuracy, and allow independent verification continues to pose serious difficulties. Many current cryptographic approaches require excessive computational resources and use encryption keys that are too large for practical implementation. This paper proposes modifications to the Chaum, Pedersen and Cramer, Franklin, Schoenmakers, and Yung voting protocols by integrating elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), which offers stronger security per bit and more compact key representations. The use of ECC allows for reduced parameter sizes while maintaining resistance against known attacks, including those targeting the discrete logarithm problem. We present detailed adaptations of these protocols on elliptic curves and demonstrate how they preserve core security properties such as vote secrecy, universal verifiability, and resistance to double voting under a more efficient cryptographic framework. Our findings contribute to the development of scalable, high-assurance e-voting mechanisms suitable for modern digital infrastructures. The presented modifications significantly enhance the scalability and efficiency of e-voting systems without compromising cryptographic strength.