In the classic model, data integrity assumes a simple sender-receiver channel where threats are limited and verifications are straightforward. However, the modern Internet has reshaped this paradigm. In an era of viral misinformation, encrypted messaging, and decentralized finance, integrity is no longer about just who sent the data, but what it really means and whether it can be trusted. For instance, can we verify the authenticity of a direct message screenshot? Is Signal's end-to-end encryption truly end-to-end when a central server distributes users' keys? Can decentralized protocols, which have attracted four trillions in capital, sustain trust under attacks that wipe out millions?In response, we present a modern perspective on data integrity across diverse systems, arguing for the need of comprehensive innovations from theory to practice along three axes: cryptographic foundation in which we borrow ideas from theoretical research and develop interesting cryptographic tools, protocol design in which we find and achieve novel application goals, and empirical security analysis in which we critically evaluate deployed systems to understand their strengths and exploit their blind spots.To ground these ideas, we discuss three cases: Cauchyproofs as a batch-updatable vector commitment, an analysis of proxying in TLS oracles revealing subtleties in AEAD context unforgeability, and attacks and improvements on the Tor directory protocol. These case studies illustrate both the fragility and opportunity in today's integrity landscape, and how an integrated approach can help guide us forward.
Existing online banking identity authentication protocols typically rely on centralized authorization centers or trusted third parties, which can lead to single points of failure, key escrow risks, and privacy leaks. Addressing multi-party collaboration scenarios under a trustless assumption, this paper proposes an Overseen-by-Multiple-Authorities Identity Authentication (OBIA) scheme tailored for electronic banking environments. This solution integrates attribute-based cryptography with distributed key generation (DKG) mechanisms across multiple authorization centers. Users derive complete personal keys from attribute-based private keys embedded with random factors, enabling implicit binding of identity and attributes. To support dynamic attribute changes and permission revocation, a hierarchical time-driven key update mechanism is designed. Combined with non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs (NIZK) and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), this enables efficient, privacy-preserving authentication. At the data storage layer, an optimized multi-layer Merkle hash tree (MMHT) structure reduces blockchain storage and verification overhead. Security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme effectively resists forgery, replay, man-in-the-middle, and key compromise attacks. Experimental results show that compared to existing multi-authorization authentication schemes, this approach exhibits superior or comparable computational and communication overhead while significantly enhancing the system’s decentralization and auditability.
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Jie Li, Yucheng Zhao, Xiaoyu Yang, Yi Ding · 6 authors
The formal semantics of blockchain smart contracts are the foundation of formal verification. They can be used to establish formal models to verify the security of contracts and help developers understand the specific execution rules of contracts. However, the mathematical logic involved in such modeling poses a high barrier to entry and cannot be directly integrated with other program analysis methods. This article proposes a semantic graph generation approach, KSG, for blockchain smart contracts. First, the semantic rules of the contract language are formally defined, and a semantic interpreter and prover are constructed to automatically transform smart contract code into a scalable semantic graph. This graph incorporates semantic control flow information, semantic data flow information, execution rules, and verification constraints. Next, the generated semantic graph can be utilized for vulnerability detection and symbolic execution and supports iterative optimization based on the analysis results. Finally, the detailed process of semantic graph generation and analysis is demonstrated through the verification of the reentrancy contract and the honeypot contract.
Massimo Bartoletti, Angelo Ferrando, E. Lipparini, Vadim Malvone
Smart contracts deployed on blockchains such as Ethereum routinely manage large amounts of assets, making their security critical. Empirical studies show that real-world attacks often exploit flaws in the business logic of contracts that unfold across multiple transactions, such as liquidity or front-running attacks. Detecting these attacks requires reasoning about expressive temporal properties beyond the capabilities of existing analysis tools. In this paper, we present an automated approach to the formal verification of smart contracts, enabling the specification and verification of complex temporal properties. Our approach provides a fully automated encoding into Lustre -- the specification language supported by the Kind 2 model checker -- of an expressive subset of Solidity contracts and temporal specifications based on first-order Hennessy-Milner Logic. This encoding allows us to leverage Kind 2 to determine whether the contract respects the specification or not. We implement our approach in a toolchain that integrates the translation and verification steps, and we evaluate its effectiveness and performance on a benchmark of smart contracts and temporal properties capturing complex attack scenarios. Our results show that the proposed approach can effectively verify non-trivial temporal properties of smart contracts and detect violations that are beyond the reach of existing analysis tools.
Chirag Sathish, Arshad Khan, Deepesh Haldankar, Nikhita G · 5 authors
The increasing adoption of telemedicine has amplified concerns regarding the security of patient data, particularly in the context of remote authentication and the growing threat of advanced cyber and quantum-enabled attacks. Traditional telehealth security mechanisms rely on static authentication and cryptographic protections, which fail to adapt to changing risk conditions and provide limited resilience against credential compromise and future quantum threats. This paper proposes TAPQ-Health, a Threat-Adaptive Post-Quantum Authentication Pipeline that dynamically adjusts the strength of authentication and cryptographic hardness in real time based on contextual and behavioral risk. The proposed framework integrates four components a lightweight context-bound zero-knowledge proof authentication mechanism, a federated machine learning-based risk assessment model, threat-triggered escalation to lattice-based post-quantum cryptography with adaptive re-encryption, and decentralized, tamper-evident storage using IPFS. A fully implemented prototype was evaluated using 200 real telemedicine sessions and a large-scale analysis of 1.3 million authentication records. Experimental results demonstrate a mean end-to-end latency of 102.84 ms, 100 percent authentication success, and a 61 percent reduction in cryptographic overhead compared to static post-quantum configurations, while achieving 96 percent risk detection accuracy. These results indicate that threat-adaptive post-quantum authentication can significantly enhance telemedicine security without compromising usability or scalability.
We present DSKAG-IT-SIG, a family of information-theoretic transaction signature schemes that achieve unconditional existential unforgeability under adaptive chosen-message attack by computationally unbounded adversaries. The construction derives per-transaction MAC keys through DSKAG, a deterministic symmetric key agreement protocol requiring no key transmission, no handshake, and no public key infrastructure. We prove (Theorem 1) that the forgery advantage of any unbounded adversary making q queries is at most q * 2^{-128} in standard mode, reducing to the statistical uniformity of DSKAG-derived keys and the pairwise independence of HMAC-SHA256 under a uniform key. We prove (Theorem 2) that cross-domain forgery advantage is at most 2^{-128} + negl(lambda), reducing to the statistical key isolation of DSKAG across policy domains. Both bounds are unconditional and independent of any computational hardness assumption. Standard-mode signatures are 30 bytes, a 97.8% reduction versus Falcon-512 (666 bytes) and compatible with ISO 20022 SWIFT message fields without re-engineering. The NexusKey composite policy digest binds asset class, jurisdiction, KYC level, and chain identity into the key derivation path; policy bypass is cryptographically equivalent to key forgery. A four-layer UltraHonk zero-knowledge proof system (143,802 gates, no trusted setup, 16 KB proof) enables permissionless on-chain compliance verification, deployed on Ethereum Sepolia and Arbitrum Sepolia. Version 2.2. 17 pages, 7 tables. Three independent academic institutions validated the construction: no structural attacks found.
Marc Dordal Carreras, Gloria Christina Heesen, Kohei Kawaguchi
Proof-of-stake deters attacks by keeping validator stake exposed to slashing and depreciation losses. Liquid staking lets operators obtain voting power using pooled stake while reducing their own exposure by selling liquid staking tokens (LSTs) and shifting uncovered slashing losses onto token holders. We study the security implications of this control-exposure wedge and the protocol design problem it creates. Competitive LST pricing can partly deter attack by lowering the resale value of claims when risk rises, but it cannot fully restore deterrence because liquid staking participants do not internalize ETH-wide depreciation losses. A fee-charging protocol prefers the no-attack regime because it maximizes total stake, yet collateral requirements alone do not generally make that outcome unique. Robust security may therefore require additional tools, including permissioned participation, screening or reserve capacity.
This paper describes a zero-knowledge proof system that enables verification of password policy compliance within an asymmetric password-authenticated key exchange (aPAKE) protocol specifically OPAQUE (RFC 9807) without revealing the password to the server. The system is built on a composable sub-circuit architecture: independent verification gadgets are combined into a single zero-knowledge proof, each gadget accepting portions of the private witness and producing public instance values, enabling the server to verify multiple password properties in one proof verification. Four gadgets are disclosed: (1) a Policy Engine for character class verification via lookup tables, (2) a History Nullifier for password inequality proof via squared-difference accumulation, (3) an OPAQUE Binder for cryptographic binding to the aPAKE registration element via hash-to-curve and elliptic curve scalar multiplication, and (4) a Breach Detector for offline breached-password detection via Bloom filter non-membership proof using algebraic hashing. The composable architecture permits addition of further gadgets without modifying existing ones, each extending the public instance vector.
Threshold transactions in Bitcoin is an effective solution for vulnerability of wallets to the loss or compromise of secret keys. It also enhances the applicability of Bitcoin to include use-cases that require partitioning the trust among a set of parties. Currently, the threshold transactions on Bitcoin expose the actual signers within the group of participants. This poses a threat of wallet hacks or theft targeting these signers. To address this issue of privacy, we propose a novel protocol to create threshold transaction using a combination of on-chain locking and off-chain proof of knowledge. As Bitcoin currently does not support verification of zero-knowledge schemes, the proposed protocol uses a Trusted Third Party ( TTP ) to verify the proofs off-chain. The trust on the third party is only limited to its service of signing on behalf of the users. The main contribution is the development and applicability of a m-out-of-N proof of partial knowledge that maintains the privacy of the signers both on-chain from the transaction verifiers and off-chain from the TTP and other signers as well. The protocol leverages Taproot’s spending path flexibility to incorporate dual spending capabilities and employs off-chain zero knowledge Σ-protocols to prove knowledge of private keys without disclosing their associated public keys. Experimental analysis demonstrates improved scalability and privacy than the mainstream threshold signature schemes for Bitcoin. A formal analysis demonstrates and establishes the security goals of the proposed mechanism.
Abstract With the increasing reliance on cloud services, establishing secure and reliable authentication for terminal devices to remotely access and control data has become a critical challenge. Existing solutions often suffer from limitations such as concentrated computational load, privacy infringements, and dependence on centralized architectures that introduce single points of failure (SPOF). To address these issues, this paper proposes DTAP, a blockchain-based dual-terminal collaborative anonymous authentication protocol. DTAP introduces a novel architecture that splits the user terminal into a U-Shield and a smartphone: the U-Shield securely hosts the master key offline, providing a robust security anchor, while the smartphone leverages BBS+ signatures and zero-knowledge proofs to achieve privacy-preserving authentication and Fine-Grained Access Control (FGAC). Furthermore, the protocol employs blockchain technology to eliminate SPOF, with smart contracts ensuring tamper-proof logging and transactional transparency. Security analysis confirms that the protocol meets the required security properties. Performance evaluation shows that DTAP maintains competitive computational and communication efficiency despite its enhanced functionality, and its deployment on the Ethereum testnet demonstrates practical feasibility.
Tamara S. Alakbarova, Parvin A. Abbasova, Samira B. Baratzade
In the study, cryptographic authentication approaches for ensuring secure automated access in Cyber-Physical Systems were modeled and examined. The proposed research analyzed the efficiency of three cryptographic models based on Public Key Infrastructure, Zero-Knowledge Proof, and Elliptic Curve Cryptography with the challenge-response mechanism. It was investigated how each model performs under varying latency, computational, and scalability conditions in smart grids, autonomous vehicle systems, and industrial Internet of Things environments. It was identified that the Elliptic Curve Cryptography model provides the best performance in real-time and resource-constrained scenarios. It was studied that the Zero-Knowledge Proof approach ensures higher privacy protection and stronger attack resistance compared to other models. It was defined that the Public Key Infrastructure model remains effective in structured networks but exhibits higher latency. It was established that simulation tools such as Matrix Laboratory and Network Simulator 3 confirm the reliability and reproducibility of results. It was developed a comparative framework that allows researchers to select optimal authentication methods for specific operational contexts. It was justified that hybrid approaches combining multiple cryptographic mechanisms can enhance both efficiency and resilience in Cyber-Physical Systems.
Muhammad Ahmed, Adnan Ahmad, Furkh Zeshan, Sheeraz Akram
Blockchain-based systems increasingly require authentication mechanisms that simultaneously preserve user privacy, support accountability, and enable efficient credential revocation. However, most existing anonymous authentication schemes rely on pairing-based cryptography which introduce high computational overhead and limit deploy ability on widely adopted blockchain platforms such as Ethereum. This paper presents BAAR, a Blockchain-based Anonymous and Revocable authentication framework designed entirely within the discrete logarithm setting over the secp256k1 elliptic curve. BAAR integrates Pedersen vector commitments, Schnorr-based zero-knowledge proofs, and a Merkle-tree-based dynamic accumulator to support anonymous and unlinkable authentication with selective attribute disclosure and public, auditable revocation. Authentication and proof verification are performed off-chain, while the blockchain maintains only a compact revocation state, significantly reducing on-chain computation and gas costs. A formal security analysis demonstrates unforgeability, unlinkability, attribute privacy, and revocation soundness under standard cryptographic assumptions in the random oracle model. A prototype implementation on Ethereum confirms that BAAR achieves low gas consumption, logarithmic-time revocation, and scalable performance with respect to both the number of users and attributes. These results indicate that BAAR provides a practical balance between strong privacy guarantees and deploy ability, making it suitable for real-world blockchain-based identity and access-control systems.
The growing adoption of the Electronic Health Records (EHR) has revolutionized healthcare information management. However, seamless and secure interoperability between different healthcare organizations continues to be a hard challenge. Data silos, centralized trust model, and lack of scalability are common impairments of traditional systems in care delivery which limit ‘patient centric’ way of care delivery. While blockchain technology offers decentralized trust and immutability, current solutions tend to be closed on a single blockchain platform, and thus not able to provide cross network interoperability and accessing data. To address this gap, this research introduces a Cross Chain EHR Sharing Framework that may be leveraged for the secure, bi-directional synchronization of EHR between Hyperledger Fabric (private blockchain) and Ethereum Sepolia Testnet (public blockchain) via decentralized storage by IPFS with AES 256 encryption. To facilitate interoperability the research introduces a smart middleware layer that autonomously monitors the blockchain events, processes encrypted Content Identifier (CID)s, enforces real time cross chain consistency and smart contract-based access control. The experimental evaluation shows that proposed framework achieves low synchronization times (< 195 ms), efficient blockchain operations with low gas and latency costs, small encryption overhead (< 4–5 KB), robust file storage and retrieval through IPFS. It also provides scalability, security and real-world applicability for the cross-chain healthcare interoperability.
EN — This paper introduces proof-object dissociation as an architectural principle for certification systems. In the major families of existing approaches reviewed here — including trusted timestamping, zero-knowledge proofs, token-based certification models, public key infrastructures, commitment schemes, and proof-of-existence mechanisms — the proof remains structurally tied to the object, secret, or entity whose validity is being established. This paper argues that such coupling should be understood as a dominant architectural convention rather than as a logical necessity. EN — Under proof-object dissociation, a certification reference structure may be generated, preserved, and anchored independently of any future certified object. Certification is then achieved through a controlled activation mechanism that associates an already valid reference structure with a specific object, user, or context. At the architectural level, this shift makes possible a set of properties that are difficult or unavailable in coupled models: pre-certification independent of the future object, deferred activation, mutation or transfer of activation rights without regeneration of the reference layer, and validation without disclosure of confidential source elements. EN — The paper positions this proposal relative to existing certification architectures, outlines a general implementation-agnostic framework, and identifies a further operational capability termed the Blind Pre-Certification Layer (BPCL). FR — Cet article introduit la dissociation preuve-objet comme principe architectural pour les systèmes de certification. Dans les principales familles d'approches existantes examinées ici — notamment l'horodatage de confiance, les preuves à divulgation nulle, les modèles de certification fondés sur des jetons, les infrastructures à clé publique, les schémas d'engagement et les mécanismes de preuve d'existence — la preuve demeure structurellement liée à l'objet, au secret ou à l'entité dont la validité est établie. L'article soutient que ce couplage doit être compris comme une convention architecturale dominante plutôt que comme une nécessité logique. FR — Sous dissociation preuve-objet, une structure de référence de certification peut être générée, conservée et ancrée indépendamment de tout objet futur certifié. La certification est ensuite réalisée par un mécanisme d'activation contrôlée qui associe une structure de référence déjà valide à un objet, un utilisateur ou un contexte spécifique. Au niveau architectural, ce déplacement rend possible un ensemble de propriétés difficiles à obtenir ou absentes dans les modèles couplés : pré-certification indépendante de l'objet futur, activation différée, mutation ou transfert des droits d'activation sans régénération de la couche de référence, et validation sans divulgation des éléments confidentiels sources. FR — L'article situe cette proposition par rapport aux architectures existantes de certification, présente un cadre général agnostique quant à l'implémentation, et identifie une capacité opérationnelle supplémentaire nommée Couche de Pré-Certification Aveugle (BPCL).
Wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) enable continuous patient monitoring by transmitting sensitive physiological data over open wireless links. Given the resource-constrained nature and large-scale deployment of such networks, authentication mechanisms must be both lightweight and privacy-preserving. Moreover, due to the frequent turnover of patients and devices in hospital environments, timely member revocation is crucial to prevent discharged or compromised entities from injecting forged reports that could mislead medical diagnosis. Although existing pairing-free certificateless aggregate authentication schemes are efficient, they often suffer from critical security and privacy vulnerabilities. Recently, an efficient certificateless authentication scheme with revocation has been proposed. However, our analysis reveals that the scheme presents the following security vulnerabilities: (i) member witnesses can be recovered from public information, (ii) revocation checks can be bypassed via identity grafting attack, and (iii) user identities can be linked due to the long-term use of static pseudonyms. To address these issues, we propose a security-enhanced certificateless aggregate authentication protocol with revocation for WMSNs. Our design enforces strong identity-membership binding to resist grafting attacks, employs a non-interactive zero-knowledge membership proof to preserve witness secrecy, and adopts dynamic pseudonym rotation to achieve unlinkability. We provide formal security proofs and comprehensive performance comparisons. The results indicate that, at the same security level, our protocol achieves more efficient signature verification while maintaining communication overhead comparable to existing schemes. In addition, the overhead introduced by our revocation mechanism remains constant, making it well suited for large-scale WMSNs deployments with frequent membership changes.
The proliferation of sophisticated AI and bot networks necessitates robust methods for verifying human uniqueness and liveness in digital ecosystems. Existing Proof-of-Humanity (PoH) solutions rely on centralized authorities, invasive static biometrics, or socially-correlatable data, creating vulnerabilities in privacy, security, and accessibility. We introduce the IAM Protocol, a decentralized framework for PoH and Self-Sovereign Identity built on Solana. The core innovation is temporal consistency: the assertion that human identity is best proven not by a static secret, but by the bounded, chaotic drift of biological and behavioral patterns over time. The framework captures multi-modal behavioral data (voice prosody, hand tremor, touch dynamics) during a configurable behavioral challenge, extracts a 134-dimensional feature vector, and produces a 256-bit locality-sensitive hash via SimHash. A Groth16 zero-knowledge proof verifies that consecutive fingerprints fall within a bounded Hamming distance without revealing either value. Attestations are anchored to non-transferable identity tokens (SPL Token-2022) with progressive Trust Scores. We provide formal security definitions, analyze the protocol against replay, synthesis, and Sybil attacks, introduce a graduated trust model distinguishing first-time liveness checks from sustained temporal consistency, and present benchmarks from a working implementation deployed on Solana devnet.
Information security is built on authentication, and foundational passwords and PINs are no longer sufficient to change cyber threats. The given paper uses the model by Bonneau et al. (that is, The Quest to Replace Passwords) to qualitatively compare the traditional knowledge factors with the newly emerged solutions such as biometrics, behavioral analysis, FIDO2/passkeys, multi-factor schemes, and Zero-Knowledge Proofs according to their security, usability, deployability, and privacy. Our analysis summarizes the strengths, weaknesses and threat models of each of the categories and then summarizes the trade offs in a comparison table. We observe that more modern approaches have a tendency to enhance security at the cost of usually introducing usability, cost, and scalability problems. Behavioral biometrics are vulnerable to privacy and spoofing threats; FIDO2/passkeys are simple to operate but they rely on synchronization infrastructure; and Zero-Knowledge Proofs are secure at the cost of computation. Hybrid and multi-factor designs provide the optimal tradeoff between these factors nowadays, and research in the future should enhance the possibilities of new methods of practical large scale identity systems.
Web3 authentication stacks largely inherit ECDSA centric single-signature workflows that limit security and efficiency, while custody of identity data often remains application controlled rather than self-sovereign. We present S-Auth, an authentication layer that combines BIP340 Schnorr signatures with Decentralized Identifiers (DID), Verifiable Credentials (VC), and Content addressing (CID). The proposed solution utilizes Schnorr digital signatures, which have demonstrated improved security and efficiency over traditional schemes. The contributions of this work are as follows. Firstly, we apply the BIP340 standard to Schnorr digital signatures, bolstering security against various attacks including strong unforgeability under chosen message attack (SUF-CMA), non-malleability, linearity, related-key at tacks, hash collision, fault injection, nonce exfiltration, resource exhaustion, and domain separation. Secondly, we leverage the linearity property of Schnorr signatures to enable multi-signature aggregation and batch verification, addressing the inefficiency of existing schemes that rely on single signatures and thereby also enhancing privacy. Third, we combine the blockchain with DID, VC, and IPFS to provide a secure and self-sovereign identity that can be authenticated. Experiments comparing ECDSA, Ed25519, Schnorr, and BIP340 show that S-Auth reduces signature artifacts via aggregation, improves verifier throughput with batching, and decreases anchoring overhead while preserving user-controlled identity. S-Auth provides a self-sovereign, efficient, and secure authentication mechanism suitable for Web3 environments.
Password-based authentication systems remain the most widely used method for user verification despite being highly susceptible to offline dictionary attacks. To mitigate such attacks, server-aided password-based authentication schemes utilize an independent server, which helps to harden the credentials to be stored on the website database. Existing server-aided password-based authentication schemes rely on number-theoretic assumptions that are vulnerable to quantum-enabled adversaries and incorporate complex computations such as bilinear pairings, exponentiation, and Zero-Knowledge Proofs. In this work, we introduce a novel post-quantum secure server-aided password-based authentication scheme based on the Module Learning With Errors (M-LWE) problem. A defining feature of our protocol is its complete operational transparency as it integrates with existing web interfaces without requiring users to modify their login behaviour or perform additional computation. To ensure long-term resilience, our scheme includes a transparent key rotation mechanism that allows service providers to update the entire credential database with a fresh secret key without user intervention. We provide a formal security analysis in the Real-or-Random (RoR) framework. This analysis demonstrates that our protocol's resistance to offline dictionary attacks reduces to the underlying hardness of the M-LWE problem, and the system achieves forward secrecy through a key rotation mechanism. Through an optimized Number Theoretic Transformation (NTT)-based implementation for faster polynomial multiplications, our empirical analysis demonstrates high computational efficiency, with average registration and authentication latencies of 0.88 ms and 0.96 ms, respectively.
Mr. Utsav Pandey, Ms. Sania Parkar, Mr. Anant Sarode, Prof. Amit Chakrawarti
Traditional banking systems rely on passwords, PINs, and centralized biometric storage, exposing users to phishing, SIM-swap attacks, and credential reuse vulnerabilities. This paper presents the ZKP Banking Interface, a pinless, context-aware financial authentication system built on Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) technology. A unified ZK-SNARK circuit (Groth16), implemented in Circom, encodes three simultaneous security factors: identity commitment, trusted network context, and transaction threshold logic using Poseidon hashing. Conditional biometric and puzzle challenges are enforced cryptographically for higher-risk scenarios. Proof generation and verification are fully automated within the browser using snarkJS and WebAssembly artifacts, eliminating manual proof handling. The system supports two verification modes: local (device-only privacy) and on-chain (public auditability via a Solidity smart contract on a Hardhat network). Experimental evaluation across five test scenarios confirms correct contextual policy enforcement, successful proof validation in both modes, and a smooth, practical banking user experience. The proposed system demonstrates that ZKP-based authentication can replace traditional credentials while maintaining strong privacy guarantees.
This paper explores the potential of using modern smartwatches, particularly the Apple Watch, as an additional device for signing transactions and interacting with the blockchain. Modern crypto applications on smart-watches are limited to a read-only paradigm. The reason is a lack of security, specifically the absence of biometric verification for each transaction. When creating a classic Externally Owned Account wallet on the smartwatch side, these vulnerabilities carry a high risk of losing all of the user's funds. To solve this problem, an architecture based on the ERC-4337 standard was proposed. The proposed solution includes creating a wallet based on the kernel architecture, which allows setting access for additional keys to use funds, but within specific limitations. Consequently, one account can have several keys that can access funds. One key is the root key and has no restrictions. The established keys are called delegated and may have different restrictions. The root key can install a new delegated key or delete a previously established delegated key at any time. These delegated keys are used on the smartwatch to enable signing transactions according to the allowed rules. The main novelty of the proposed solution lies in its architecture, which enables smartwatches to be used as autonomous Web3 clients without compromising the root key, while strictly adhering to restrictions on executable operations and prioritizing security.
Secure cross-domain UAV authentication is challenging because identity verification alone is insufficient to guarantee safe operation. In many UAV applications, it is equally critical to verify that a UAV is currently located within an authorized geographic region. Existing approaches often expose precise GPS coordinates, rely on static identifiers that enable tracking, or fail to guarantee the freshness and authenticity of location evidence. These weaknesses allow replay, location spoofing, and trajectory inference attacks, especially in multi-domain environments. To address these limitations, we propose PrivLocAuth, a zero-knowledge-based cross-domain UAV authentication protocol that enforces geofence restrictions without revealing actual locations. In PrivLocAuth, UAVs encode their current coordinates into fresh Pedersen commitments, which are attested by the home Local Domain Server (LDS) using short-lived Schnorr signatures. Based on these attested commitments, UAVs generate Bulletproof range proofs to demonstrate compliance with cross-domain server-defined geofences. This design ensures that UAVs operate within authorized airspace while preserving strong location privacy. PrivLocAuth further incorporates a lightweight elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and Schnorr signature-based credential framework that enables unlinkable authentication across-domains, preventing session correlation and identity tracking. Formal security analysis demonstrates resistance to impersonation, replay, geofence-bypass, and linkage attacks. Experimental evaluation shows low computational latency and minimal communication overhead, confirming the protocol’s suitability for resource-constrained UAV platforms operating in dynamic cross-domain environments.