Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePINS) 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 and Marlin. Our experiments give first insights into performance impacts and reveal a tradeoff between the applied proof systems.
@article{arxiv.2406.19042,
title = {Towards Credential-based Device Registration in DApps for DePINs with ZKPs},
author = {Jonathan Heiss and Fernando Castillo and Xinxin Fan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.19042},
year = {2024}
}