Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (De-PINS) are secured and governed by blockchains but beyond crypto-economic incentives, they lack measures to establish trust in participating devices and their services. The verification of relevant device credentials during device registration helps to overcome this problem. However, on-chain verification in decentralized applications (dApp) discloses potentially confidential device attributes whereas off-chain verification introduces undesirable trust assumptions. In this paper, we propose a credential-based device registration (CDR) mechanism that verifies device credentials on the blockchain and leverages zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) to protect confidential device attributes from being disclosed. We characterize CDR for DePINs, present a general system model, and technically evaluate CDR using zkSNARKs with Groth16 [1] and Marlin [2]. Our experiments give first insights into performance impacts and reveal a tradeoff between the applied proof systems.
Authors: Jonathan Heiss, Fernando Castillo, Xinxin Fan
Institution: Technische Universität Berlin
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4402593694