Democratic elections rely on trust, transparency, and tamper-resistance -- qualities that conventional and early electronic voting systems have consistently failed to guarantee. This paper presents a Blockchain-Enabled Secure E-Voting Framework with Facial Recognition for Voter Authentication, designed to address persistent vulnerabilities in existing electoral systems. The proposed system integrates a permissioned blockchain ledger with deep-learning-based facial biometric verification to ensure decentralized, immutable vote storage and strong identity assurance. A multi-layer security architecture combines homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and digital signatures to preserve voter anonymity while enabling end-to-end verifiability. Anti-spoofing and liveness detection mechanisms prevent impersonation via photographs, video replays, or deepfake-generated imagery. Smart contracts automate vote counting and result publication, eliminating human involvement in the tallying process. Experimental evaluation demonstrates a facial recognition authentication accuracy of 97.3% and an end-to-end voting transaction latency under 500 milliseconds, with blockchain confirmation averaging 2.4 seconds. The framework is scalable to national-scale elections and applicable to governmental, corporate, and institutional governance contexts.
This paper provides an overview of privacy-protecting measures that can be used to secure user data and assure the safety and efficiency of digital activities in contactless financial ecosystems. Many people worry about identity theft, data breaches, and spying by unauthorised parties due to the rapid growth of digital wallets, contactless banking, and mobile payments. Modern cryptography includes safe multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proofs, and homomorphic encryption. These approaches verify transactions and safeguard sensitive data. Blockchain and other independent systems are emphasized for their ability to improve openness, reliability, and anonymity. Regulations and compliance challenges related to financial systems using privacy-enhancing technology are examined. The findings emphasize the importance of strong privacy protections to balance data security, safety, and creativity. Contactless technologies become more popular as more people believe in them.
Alireza Kavousi, István András Seres, Zhipeng Wang
Regulatory compliance is increasingly mandatory for decentralized finance and privacy-enhancing technologies. Current approaches rely on binary inclusion/exclusion lists or retroactive graph analysis by centralized blockchain intelligence firms. This approach strips honest users of their financial privacy, leads to false positives and negatives, and forces decentralized platforms to bear the burden of on-chain transaction monitoring. In this work, we propose a paradigm shift: moving from platform-side surveillance to user-side provenance. We introduce Proof of Source of Funds (PoSoF), a novel cryptographic framework that shifts the burden to the user. Rather than the platform tracing funds, the user locally generates a zero-knowledge proof demonstrating that their deposit originates exclusively from a set of compliant sources. The platform is thus relieved of chain-analysis duties, requiring a constant-time, O(1) verification to enforce admission control. We formulate a unified temporal Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) abstraction that formalizes both UTXO and account-based ledger histories within a generalized value-flow model. Users extract a compliant sub-DAG of their transaction history and utilize Incrementally Verifiable Computation (IVC) to prove rigorous state-transition predicates that protect against various attack vectors. Crucially, PoSoF provides verifiable cryptographic provenance; it guarantees the legitimacy of the funds without leaking the intermediate transaction topology, intermediary addresses, or the specific origins utilized. We formally define the security properties of PoSoF and evaluate an Ethereum-compatible prototype. Our benchmarks demonstrate that fully private, proactive compliance is highly practical, requiring only ~1.8 s to incrementally update a user's PoSoF per new transaction, and a constant-time ~1.5 ms (~800k gas) for final on-chain EVM verification.
This dissertation mostly focuses on a block-chain based voting systems. It aims at identifying the strategies and the guidelines as well as provides a comprehensive end-to-end electronic voting system based on block-chain, with the help of encryption private and public techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs to improve privacy. The proposed method is to provide Security and Privacy, Transparency and Trust, Accessibility, Efficiency and Convenience to voters and Security and Fraud Prevention in Election Outcomes. The proposed online voting system using cloud-based hybrid block-chain technology eradicates the flaws that persist in the existing voting system, and it is carried out in three phases: The registration phase, Vote casting phase and Vote counting phase. The integration of SHA-512 encryption ensures that the voter's identity remains confidential and the integrity of the vote is maintained. The system also demonstrates improved security, reduced operational cost, real-time vote counting, and transparency for both voters and election authorities. The proposed method shows better result as compare to other previous method in terms of different result parameters such as block size, encryption, decryption, Block size (64 bits), Word size, hash output and number of Rounds. In the nut shall the proposed method perform better due to SHA 512 technique and provide better security as compare to other methods.
The impending arrival of cryptographically relevant quantum computing threatens classical public‑key infrastructures. This paper reviews the latest developments (2025–2026) in post‑quantum cryptography (PQC), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and zero‑knowledge proofs (ZKP). NIST has advanced nine signature candidates to its third evaluation round and selected HQC as a backup encryption standard. Novel primitives include bio‑inspired RNA‑based cryptography, algebraic hash signatures, and topology‑mined lattice schemes. FHE has reached its fifth generation with the GL scheme and the MadPanthera virtual processor, while lightweight ZKPs such as Microsoft’s Vega enable mobile‑friendly verification. These advances demonstrate rapid maturation toward deployable quantum‑safe systems.
This paper presents TrustBridge, the first universal decentralized trust protocol integrating multi-agent LLM consensus, zero-knowledge proof generation, blockchain attestation, and natural language accessibility for real-world credential verification across employment, education, healthcare, and supply chain domains. The multi-agent consensus engine runs three independent Claude Sonnet instances in parallel, achieving 92% adversarial detection on a controlled test set — a 30 percentage point improvement over single-agent architectures. Zero-knowledge commitment schemes allow claimants to prove credential properties without revealing private values. An ERC-721 NFT certificate provides immutable on-chain attestation. This is Paper 1 of a planned two-paper series. Paper 2 will report large-scale deployment results and full ZK-SNARK integration. Targeting: IEEE Blockchain 2027
The traditional ways of handling academic credentials are considered inefficient, expensive, and very vulnerable to fraud and data alteration as they rely on single-point databases. To counter these drawbacks, the authors of this paper propose a novel conception relying on blockchain technology with its central traits such as decentralization, immutable state, and cryptographic security. Under such framework, all the academic credentials are stored in a distributed ledger as non-variable and visible entries, where each credential is securely encrypted, stamped with the time of its creation, and linked in an irreversible chain, thus practically eliminating the possibility of their falsification or unauthorized change without the agreement of the entire network. The verification process is decentralized so that employers, educational institutions, and students can instantly and directly authenticate the credentials through the blockchain thereby cutting the intermediaries and considerably shortening the administrative delays and reducing overheads. Moreover, smart contracts contribute to further efficiency by automatically taking care of the issuance, management, and verification of credentials according to the pre-defined rules, thus ensuring consistency and accuracy. However, the system still offers the highest user control and privacy through the provision of tools like digital wallets and decentralized identifiers for the students to own and manage their digital credentials. These tools also give the students power to decide who can access their records and under what conditions. To ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the data, advanced security technologies such as cryptographic hashing and zero-knowledge proofs are deployed while still allowing transparency to the process of verification.
Archy Renaldy Pratama Nugraha, Yandra Arkeman, Irman Hermadi, Yani Nurhadryani
Digital identity verification in e-governance faces a trilemma between security, scalability, and regulatory compliance with Indonesia's Personal Data Protection Law (UU PDP). To resolve this, in this paper, we propose the ZMC-Framework, a blockchain-based hybrid architecture integrating Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) for privacy-preserving verification and Merkle Trees for efficient, scalable data integrity on-chain. Its core innovation is a Legal Proof Protocol with 3+1 parameter augmentation, which cryptographically binds static identifiers to a user-controlled secret, ensuring compliance with UU PDP (data minimization) and UU ITE (authentication integrity) while aligning with key controls of the international ISO/IEC 27001:2022 standard. Evaluated on Polygon Mainnet, the framework demonstrates 29.9% lower operational costs for batch verifications and 50% better storage efficiency compared to pure ZKP systems. These results validate a practical solution to the verification trilemma, providing a secure, scalable, and legally sound foundation for public service identity management in Indonesia's digital governance ecosystem.
Donggoo Kim, Rajesh Upadhayaya, Milosz Bator, Tao Le
Proof of Reserves (PoR) enables centralized crypto exchanges to demonstrate that on-chain reserves are sufficient to cover customer liabilities. However, existing approaches, including Merkle-tree-based proofs and zero-knowledge PoR systems, remain difficult for everyday users to verify in practice, resulting in limited participation and weakened transparency. We introduce LPOR, a layered, usability-focused PoR framework that separates lightweight user-side checks from auditor-level cryptographic verification, enabling non-technical users to verify inclusion and publicly recompute total liabilities with minimal friction. By lowering verification barriers, LPOR increases user participation and substantially improves the probability of detecting omitted liabilities. We evaluate its scalability and omission detectability at a multi-million-user scale.
Website: https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/proof/loves-wager.html Abstract: There's a non-zero possibility that hell exists, and that you and everyone you love is going to die and burn in it for eternity. As it is very hot in hell, this would be unfortunate. There's also a non-zero possibility that biotechnology lets you feel very good for an indefinitely long period of time. Expected value is the chance of a thing multiplied by the size of it, and if you multiply infinity by any likelihood at all, even 0.0000001%, it's still infinity. So the expected value of doing nothing is infinity bad, and the expected value of acting is infinitely good, even if there's an extremely low probability that any of this is true. The cost of acting is finite: roughly one share of a company that makes missiles. This paper argues that when one outcome is infinitely terrible and the other is infinitely good, any finite action that shifts the odds from the first toward the second is rational, and that the cheapest such action available is redirecting the resources your governments waste being really good at killing the taxpayers who pay for them. (They currently spend 604 (95% CI: 453-894) times more on the military than on the clinical trials that would cure the diseases doing the killing.) It's Pascal's wager with the broken parts replaced: one hypothesis instead of a thousand gods, real evidence instead of none, an action that actually changes the outcome, and a stake of one share instead of your eternal soul. Summary: A reconstruction of Pascal's Wager with its defects removed. Two propositions cannot be disproven: that a conscious being may suffer without end, and that it may flourish without end. Both carry nonzero probability and infinite magnitude, so any finite action that shifts probability from the first toward the second has unbounded expected value. Unlike Pascal's, the wagered action is empirical, not theological: funding the clinical trials that extend healthy lifespan and modify conscious experience.
Open access
Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations
We prove that the Faddeev-Niemi action E_FN[n] = ∫_(ℝ³)(κ₂|∇n|² + (κ₄)/(2)|F[n]|²) d³x on the energy space of finite-energy maps n:ℝ³→ S² admits a smooth, exponentially-localised, dynamically stable critical point in every non-trivial Hopf class H∈π₃(S²)∖{0}. The proof combines the direct method of the calculus of variations, Lions' concentration-compactness principle to prevent loss of topological charge at infinity, the Vakulenko-Kapitanski topological lower bound to guarantee coercivity, polyconvex lower-semicontinuity in the sense of Ball, and elliptic bootstrap regularity. The minimiser saturates the Vakulenko-Kapitanski inequality in scaling, and its Hessian is non-negative with kernel of dimension at least six, corresponding to translations and rotations. The full proof is formally verified in Lean 4 (Mathlib v4.29.0) across eight modules, ~2,500 lines, with zero `sorry` axioms (snapshot of 2026-04-25: 84 axioms, 35 theorems, 0 sorry, per Paper CXXIII §6) — to our knowledge the first formal verification of a soliton existence proof for a topologically constrained continuum field theory on ℝ³. The result improves the variational existence theorem of Lin and Yang [LY04] by establishing full smoothness, exponential decay, dynamical stability, and a machine-checked formalisation. The formalisation imports a finite catalogue of well-known mathematical results (polyconvex lower-semicontinuity à la Ball, Schauder bootstrap, Agmon decay, Persson's essential-spectrum bound, the Lin-Yang strict-subadditivity inequality) as Type-1 axioms, in the sense of Paper CXXIII.
Version 2.4.0 supersedes v2.3.0 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20355497) and is the sixth paper in the immo.quick Core technical series (10.5281/zenodo.19634279 → 19799660 → 19969948 → 20078326 → 20355497 → this paper). Overview This paper presents the complete institutional specification of immo.quick Core — a nine-layer deterministic compliance enforcement infrastructure operating across 47 jurisdictions. It is not a paper about technology. It is a paper about institutional legitimacy — about what it means, in a world of deterministic machines, for an institution to prove that it acted correctly. Every previous compliance document in history has answered the question: "Did we follow the process?" This paper answers a different question: "Can we prove, with mathematical certainty, that no impermissible movement produced a consequence — and that no unknown party could have caused one?" The answer is yes. The architecture enforces it. The enforcement is not optional. What v2.4.0 Adds to v2.3.0 v2.3.0 established the complete epistemological foundation, the nine-layer architecture, 15 jurisdictions, complete sector analysis, geopolitical dimensions, and the economic case. v2.4.0 adds four structural elements not present in v2.3.0: Element 1 — The Nine Gamechangers: The first systematic documentation of the capability advances that place immo.quick Core in a categorically different strategic position. These are not product features. They are architectural consequences of the nine-layer system — capabilities that emerge from the architecture and could not exist without it: EPA Offline-First Verification (SSL for compliance decisions), Bi-Temporal Legal State Replay (compliance time machine), Cross-Institution Proof Network (SWIFT for compliance verdicts), Regulatory DNA Sequencing (live law tracking to zero-downtime deploy), Intraday Settlement Finality (T+0 in under 2 seconds), Legal Pathway Optimizer (optimal jurisdiction in 9ms), Machine Law Constitution (immutable rule foundation on Ethereum and IPFS), Compliance Credit Score (compliance as a balance sheet asset), and Post-CMOS Governance Readiness (investor track — strategic roadmap signal). Element 2 — Law as Code / German Federal Government Initiative: The Bundesregierung's Digitalcheck program and the formal Law-as-Code initiative (2023–2026) represent the first sovereign government mandate for machine-readable law. immo.quick Core's Machine Law Engine is the only production implementation of this paradigm at institutional scale. This is not coincidence. It is architectural convergence. Element 3 — White House National Cybersecurity Strategy (2023) and EO 14028: The US Executive Order on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity and the National Cybersecurity Strategy mandate zero-trust architecture, post-quantum cryptography migration, and SBOM requirements for critical infrastructure. immo.quick Core satisfies all three mandates simultaneously — by architectural construction, not by configuration. Element 4 — The Legacy Integration Protocol: Precisely how immo.quick Core connects to, validates, wraps, and structurally elevates existing compliance infrastructure without requiring system replacement. The anti-rip-and-replace architecture. Architecture Summary The nine-layer enforcement system comprises: Layer 0 (DEPE — Deterministic Execution Proof Engine, 49ms total from proposal to permanent proof), Layer 1 (PAS — Prior Admissibility Space, closed-world assumption with five mandatory conjunctive conditions), Layer 2 (BTL — Bi-Temporal Ledger, BFT quorum n=9 f=3 q=7, WORM architecture), Layer 3 (EAP — Exogenous Anchor Protocol, hardware-attested dual-channel measurement, 28ms maximum heartbeat gap), Layer 4 (SOTB — Sensor/Oracle Trust Bridge), Layer 5 (MLE — Machine Law Engine, 7-stage compilation pipeline), Layer 6 (ZKP — Zero-Knowledge Proof subsystem, Groth16/PLONK/Bulletproofs), Layer 7 (PQC — Post-Quantum Cryptography, CRYSTALS-Kyber-1024/Dilithium-3/SPHINCS+, NIST FIPS 203/204/205), Layer 8 (GLD — Governance Logic Divergence engine, maker-checker independence quantification). Document Structure Part I — The Complete Problem Statement. Part II — The Nine-Layer Architecture. Part III — The Nine Gamechangers (v2.4.0 new). Part IV — Law as Code: The German Federal Government Initiative (v2.4.0 new). Part V — The White House Cybersecurity Strategy and EO 14028 (v2.4.0 new). Part VI — Complete Legal and Jurisdictional Grounding (47 jurisdictions). Part VII — What immo.quick Core Does to Existing Systems: The Legacy Integration Protocol (v2.4.0 new). Part VIII — The Complete Platform: Every Module. Part IX — Complete Sector Analysis (Banking, Insurance, Real Estate, Government, Cloud). Part X — The Geopolitical Dimension. Part XI — The Economic Case: Monopoly, Moat, FOMO, EBITDA. Part XII — The Falsifiability Standard. Conclusion — For the Permanent Record. Key Claims Established The Boundary-Behavior Gap — the space between process documentation and governance proof — is closed by mathematical construction for the first time. The Past Irreversibility Principle: every transaction processed without immo.quick Core produces a compliance history that is permanently unrecoverable. The Falsifiability Standard: all claims in this document are falsifiable by counter-proof. No counter-proof has been produced. None is expected. Historical Compliance Failures Addressed Wirecard AG (2020, €1.9B), Libor manipulation (2012, $9B+ fines), UBS rogue trader (2011, $2.3B), Cum-Ex dividend stripping (ongoing, €55B+ EU-wide), 1MDB (2015, $4.5B), Danske Bank AML (2018, €200B flow), Credit Suisse/Archegos (2021, $5.5B). immo.quick Core produces a PAS BLOCK with DPA on every one of these at T=0 — not after the fact, not during audit, at the moment of formation. Version Series 10.5281/zenodo.19634279 → 19799660 → 19969948 → 20078326 → 20355497 → 20562464 (this paper) Related Work Economics of Deterministic Compliance Infrastructure: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20229204. immo.quick Serverless Edition v1.1.0: DOI pending.
The United States is facing a persistent and rising "tax gap," the discrepancy between taxes owed and taxes paid, that is a systemic failure of traditional retroactive audit procedures.As the complexity of digital financial transactions continues to expand, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) faces serious hurdles from aging infrastructure in providing revenue assurance.In this research, we present a new technical framework, namely the "Smart-Tax Ledger", combining a permissioned blockchain (Hyperledger Fabric) and Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) for the real-time tax compliance.This architecture facilitates the automation of tax withholding and remittance at the point of transaction, leveraging triple-entry accounting principles and smart contracts.Also, the use of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) safeguards the integrity of the distributed ledger and preserves taxpayer privacy.This work presents a complete architectural design, mathematical modeling of fraud detection algorithms, and a debate on the policy implications of the adoption of a "compliance-by-design" paradigm.The system, which is supposed to reduce administrative cost, limit human mistake and fill the national revenue deficit by technical intervention.
Mathematics has been an important part of human civilization since ancient times and has developed continuously with human progress. Early mathematical ideas emerged from practical needs such as counting, trade, land measurement, construction, and astronomy. Over time, these simple methods evolved into organized mathematical systems. Ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Greece, and China made significant contributions to mathematics. Egyptians used geometry in architecture and land surveying, while Mesopotamians developed numerical systems and astronomical calculations. Indian mathematicians introduced the decimal system and zero, which greatly advanced mathematical studies. Greek scholars transformed mathematics into a logical and theoretical subject through proofs and geometrical reasoning. During the medieval period, Arab and Islamic scholars preserved and expanded mathematical knowledge. They translated earlier works, developed algebraic methods, and promoted the exchange of scientific ideas across cultures. Their contributions strongly influenced European mathematics. The Renaissance period brought major developments such as analytical geometry and calculus, leading to rapid scientific and technological progress. In the modern era, mathematics has become essential in engineering, medicine, economics, computer science, artificial intelligence, and space research. It supports scientific discoveries, technological innovation, and problem-solving in everyday life. The historical development of mathematics shows how civilizations and scholars contributed to its growth over centuries. Understanding this evolution helps us appreciate the importance of mathematics in shaping modern society and future advancements.
Traditional auditing processes are inefficient and produce low-quality audit reports due to human intervention. This research project constructs a novel automated auditing architecture based on smart contracts, comprising four functional modules: (i) data acquisition, (ii) rule encoding, (iii) execution verification, and (iv) report output. This paper demonstrates how to achieve a high-throughput, low-latency, and verifiable automated auditing system by utilizing technologies such as multi-source data cross-validation, formal encoding of audit rules, privacy protection based on zero-knowledge proofs, and cross-chain communication. The developed novel auditing process can shorten the traditional audit cycle to 8 to 15 days, reduce manual operation costs by 37.5% to 44.4%, reduce the error rate to 0.2% to 0.5%, and exhibit high fault tolerance during disaster recovery, making it an effective approach to achieve digital transformation of auditing processes.
In response to the difficulty of balancing privacy protection and system efficiency in energy data trading, this article analyzes the limitations of existing methods: static pseudonym mechanisms can easily lead to long-term identity link risks, traditional zk-SNARKs schemes have high computational overhead, and Raft consensus mechanisms lack robustness in adversarial environments. To address the above challenges, an integrated privacy protection scheme based on dynamic pseudonyms and lightweight zk-SNARKs is proposed. This scheme breaks the temporal correlation of transactions through a dynamic pseudonym generation mechanism, uses blockchain level batch processing proofs to reduce the computational and storage overhead of zero knowledge proofs, and introduces an LSTM based node health assessment model and incremental log synchronization mechanism to enhance the error tolerance and synchronization efficiency of the Raft consensus algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms traditional methods in terms of privacy, transaction processing performance, and system availability, effectively achieving a balance between privacy protection and operational efficiency, and providing a feasible technical path for energy data trading.
(English) The accelerated adoption of digital services has highlighted the need for trust-minimized computation, where parties can verify the correctness of computations without re-executing them or revealing sensitive data. Zero-knowledge proof systems, including SNARKs and STARKs, provide cryptographic guarantees of correctness, privacy, and succinct verifiability, enabling applications in scalable blockchains, privacy-preserving identity systems, and verifiable federated learning. This thesis addresses key inefficiencies in constraint-based zero-knowledge proof systems at the arithmetization layer. The research focuses on two complementary problems: optimizing binary comparisons within Rank-1 Constraint Systems (R1CS), and extending the expressiveness of STARKs through an Extended Algebraic Intermediate Representation (eAIR). The first contribution presents a weighted accumulation method for implementing strict binary comparisons in R1CS. Traditional approaches generate a large number of constraints due to the lack of native comparison and control-flow operations in the R1CS model, forcing costly bit-by-bit decompositions and creating performance bottlenecks. The proposed weighted accumulation method significantly reduces constraint overhead without compromising system security or correctness, achieving substantial efficiency improvements over the lexicographic approach. The second contribution introduces the eSTARK protocol, which extends standard STARKs by enabling the concise handling of complex constraints such as lookups, permutations, and copy constraints. These operations are difficult to encode efficiently in standard AIR. The eSTARK protocol integrates vector commitment arguments and polynomial optimizations, providing a flexible and user-friendly framework for representing a broader class of computations without introducing unnecessary arithmetization overhead. Both contributions address practical limitations of current zero-knowledge proof systems. The first focuses on reducing constraint complexity for common operations, while the second expands the expressiveness of the proof system itself. Together, they demonstrate the importance of arithmetization-level optimizations for improving the efficiency and usability of zero-knowledge proofs. (Català) L’adopció accelerada de serveis digitals ha posat en relleu la necessitat de computació amb confiança mínima, on les parts poden verificar la correcció dels càlculs sense haver de tornar-los a executar ni revelar dades sensibles. Els sistemes de proves de coneixement zero, incloent-hi SNARKs i STARKs, ofereixen garanties criptogràfiques de correcció, privacitat i verificabilitat concisa, permetent aplicacions en blockchains escalables, identitat preservant la privacitat i aprenentatge federat verificable. Aquesta tesi aborda les principals ineficiències en els sistemes de proves ZK basats en restriccions a la capa d’aritmetització. La recerca se centra en dos problemes complementaris: optimitzar les comparacions binàries dins dels Rank-1 Constraint Systems (R1CS) i ampliar l’expressivitat dels STARKs mitjançant una Representació Intermèdia Algebraica Estesa (eAIR). La primera contribució presenta un mètode d’acumulació ponderada per implementar comparacions binàries estrictes en R1CS. Els enfocaments tradicionals generen un gran nombre de restriccions a causa de la manca d’operacions natives de comparació i de control de flux en el model R1CS, obligant a descomposicions costoses bit a bit i creant colls d’ampolla en el rendiment. El mètode d’acumulació ponderada proposat redueix de manera significativa la sobrecàrrega de restriccions sense comprometre la seguretat o la correcció del sistema, aconseguint millores substancials d’eficiència respecte a l’enfocament lexicogràfic. La segona contribució introdueix el protocol eSTARK, que amplia els STARKs estàndard permetent la gestió concisa de restriccions complexes com ara lookups, permutacions i restriccions de còpia. Aquestes operacions són difícils d’encodear de manera eficient en l’AIR estàndard. El protocol eSTARK integra arguments de compromís vectorial i optimitzacions polinòmiques, oferint un marc flexible i fàcil d’utilitzar per representar una classe més àmplia de càlculs sense introduir sobrecàrrega d’aritmetització innecessària. Totes dues contribucions aborden limitacions pràctiques dels sistemes de proves de coneixement zero actuals, amb la primera centrada en reduir la complexitat de restriccions per a operacions comunes i la segona en expandir l’expressivitat del sistema de proves en si. Conjuntament, demostren la importància de les optimitzacions a nivell d’aritmetització per millorar l’eficiència i la usabilitat de les proves de coneixement zero. (Español) La adopción acelerada de servicios digitales ha puesto de relieve la necesidad de computación con confianza mínima, donde las partes pueden verificar la corrección de los cálculos sin tener que volver a ejecutarlos ni revelar datos sensibles. Los sistemas de pruebas de conocimiento cero, incluyendo SNARKs y STARKs, ofrecen garantías criptográficas de corrección, privacidad y verificabilidad concisa, permitiendo aplicaciones en blockchains escalables, identidad preservando la privacidad y aprendizaje federado verificable. Esta tesis aborda las principales ineficiencias en los sistemas de pruebas ZK basados en restricciones a la capa de aritmetización. La investigación se centra en dos problemas complementarios: optimizar las comparaciones binarias dentro de los Rank-1 Constraint Systems (R1CS) y ampliar la expresividad de los STARKs mediante una Representación Intermedia Algebraica Extendida (eAIR). La primera contribución presenta un método de acumulación ponderada para implementar comparaciones binarias estrictas en R1CS. Los enfoques tradicionales generan un gran número de restricciones debido a la falta de operaciones nativas de comparación y de control de flujo en el modelo R1CS, obligando a descomposiciones costosas bit a bit y creando cuellos de botella en el rendimiento. El método de acumulación ponderada propuesto reduce de manera significativa la sobrecarga de restricciones sin comprometer la seguridad o la corrección del sistema, logrando mejoras sustanciales de eficiencia respecto al enfoque lexicográfico. La segunda contribución introduce el protocolo eSTARK, que amplía los STARKs estándar permitiendo la gestión concisa de restricciones complejas como lookups, permutaciones y restricciones de copia. Estas operaciones son difíciles de codificar de manera eficiente en el AIR estándar. El protocolo eSTARK integra argumentos de compromiso vectorial y optimizaciones polinómicas, ofreciendo un marco flexible y fácil de usar para representar una clase más amplia de cálculos sin introducir sobrecarga de aritmetización innecesaria. Ambas contribuciones abordan limitaciones prácticas de los sistemas de pruebas de conocimiento cero actuales, con la primera centrada en reducir la complejidad de restricciones para operaciones comunes y la segunda en expandir la expresividad del sistema de pruebas en sí. Conjuntamente, demuestran la importancia de las optimizaciones a nivel de aritmetización para mejorar la eficiencia y la usabilidad de las pruebas de conocimiento cero.
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is changing the contemporary mobility, as it allows real-time communication between vehicles, infrastructure, and cloud services. Nevertheless, such growing connectivity brings on serious privacy, regulatory, and trust issues especially because sensitive behavioral and location information is exposed. The current IoV-security systems tend to be based on identity-based checks, or centralized trust authorities, which can lead to infringement of user privacy and cause surveillance and profiling threats. The paper is inspired by privacy-preserving architectures in the Metaverse to suggest a decentralized trust system of IoV systems on the basis of zero-knowledge proofs, namely zk-SNARKs. The suggested solution allows vehicles to cryptographically verify that they meet regulatory or operational regulations- i.e. valid insurance, safety test, or emissions- without revealing personal identifiers or raw information. The framework enables building scalable, low-latency and audible trusts and following data minimization principles through combining zk-SNARK verification and Layer 2 blockchain solutions.
Frontier AI governance frameworks increasingly use cumulative training compute as the primary criterion for designating high-impact models, but enforcement rests on self-reporting because no technical verification primitive for training exists. Any future international agreement on frontier AI faces the same problem at higher stakes: coordinated regulation of technologies with significant externalities has historically rested on technical verification, without which agreements are declaratory. Recent governance analyses judge zero-knowledge proofs a promising candidate but currently impractical at frontier scale [26, 4]. We argue the impracticality is paradigm-bound rather than fundamental, and propose a verification architecture for frontier dense pre-training combining a pre-committed training specification, inter-node network observations, and on-the-fly Merkle commitments of intermediate computation, verified through a zero-knowledge Virtual Machine (zkVM) with native BF16/FP32 precompiles. The proof checks the actual floating-point computation the GPU performed rather than a fixed-point approximation, and preserves model-architecture confidentiality through a private training specification. The protocol produces three proof types: a genesis proof at initialisation, in-training step proofs across the run, and ex-ante attestations enforcing policy-relevant claims as running invariants, turning the training record into a governance-enforceable artefact. We estimate a deployable proof of concept within approximately 36 months at single-digit-percent training-side overhead, against a six-to-ten-year cycle for verification-grade custom silicon. Thirteen open research and engineering problems are catalogued as a research agenda for external contribution
Vulnerability disclosure volumes now far exceed organizational assessment capacity, yet three adjacent research communities (proof-of-concept generation, vulnerability prioritization, and detection rule engineering) operate largely in isolation. Existing automated exploit generation systems report binary pass/fail outcomes, discarding partial progress and producing no signal for the other two communities. This paper presents FORGE, a multi-agent system that bridges these three silos through graduated exploitation depth. Five specialized agents (Intel, Generator, Planner, Exploit, and Detector) execute in a fixed pipeline that (1) generates targeted vulnerable applications from CVE metadata, (2) conducts coached, multi-turn exploitation assessed by an LLM-primary oracle on a four-level taxonomy (L0: no evidence through L3: full compromise), and (3) produces Sigma and Snort detection rules grounded in OpenTelemetry exploitation traces. Graduated depth is the bridging mechanism: deeper exploitation yields richer behavioral traces for detection engineering, while depth data across scoring bands provides ground truth for prioritization validation. A tiered knowledge architecture accumulates intelligence across assessments, transferring build and exploitation experience to subsequent CVEs. Evaluation on 603 CVEs from the CVE-GENIE dataset achieves 67.8% end-to-end L1+ exploitation at USD 1.50 per CVE across eight languages and 187 CWE types. Exploitation rates remain near 68% regardless of EPSS or CVSS band, indicating that pattern-level reachability is orthogonal to metadata-based prioritization. Detection rules from L2+ exploitation achieve significantly higher span-normalized grounding than L1-derived rules (p=0.035), and 93.4% of generated Snort rules produce zero false positives against a synthetic benign corpus.
We propose ZX-Calculus (Knowledge Evolution Calculus), a conservative extension of Martin-Lof Dependent Type Theory (MLTT) integrating trace-indexed types, presheaf non-monotone semantics, and constructive AGM belief revision. A Coq mechanisation accompanies the paper (34 complete proofs; zero admits for the two central results). (I) Trace types. FinTrace(s0,sn) is an inductive family of typed execution traces. FinTrace and Star(Step) are isomorphic as path types but not judgementally equal; TraceElim exposes the event label e:Event explicitly, giving a more ergonomic interface for event-driven induction. We prove the Trace-Reachability Correspondence, Deterministic Replay, and a canonicity framework via reducibility candidates with a Transport Lemma (RC-elim deferred; all other Core results are Coq-verified). (II) Sheaf semantics. Trace-indexed propositions are contravariant sheaves over the free trace partial-order category Tf. A Separation Theorem (explicit countermodel) distinguishes proof-theoretic monotonicity from semantic non-monotonicity. The term model is an initial CwF (syntactic universal property, not classical completeness). (III) AGM belief revision. We give an explicit constructive partial meet contraction algorithm verified against (C1)-(C4). All eight AGM postulates (R1)-(R8) are theorems. Proofs of R7 and R8 use the Disjunctive Entrenchment Lemma, given a self-contained constructive derivation. (IV) Integration. B^AGM fails the sheaf composition law BP-comp for sequential revision (explicit countermodel, Coq-verified). We introduce Single-Step Revision Systems (SSRS), prove B^AGM is a valid SSRS (Coq-verified), and show this suffices for trace morphisms, retraction characterisation, and revision witnesses. The BP-comp failure reveals a fundamental tension between path-dependent belief revision and functor consistency, not previously identified.
This technical note introduces the AIKernel Hash-Anchored Trust Layer (HATL), a hybrid trust architecture for Semantic Context Operating Systems and autonomous AI runtimes. HATL separates the trust boundary into an inner high-frequency symmetric ledger and an outer publicly auditable anchoring layer. The inner layer uses HMAC-SHA-512 and HKDF-based forward ratcheting to bind ReplayLogs, execution outcomes, and capability states with low runtime overhead. The outer layer aggregates local ledger commitments into Merkle roots and periodically anchors them using hash-based public signature mechanisms such as LMS, XMSS, and SLH-DSA. The report is distributed as a three-part technical package. Part I contains the full English manuscript and is the canonical version. Part II contains technical appendices, repository specifications, schemas, and reference implementation artifacts. Part III contains the Japanese companion translation. This version incorporates review-driven clarifications on secure erasure in C# / .NET environments, fail-closed handling of indeterminate governance decisions, and future integration of zero-knowledge proof techniques for public anchor verification. Documents are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Code, schemas, and contract specimens included in the appendices are provided under Apache-2.0.