BlindMarket: Enabling Verifiable, Confidential, and Traceable IP Core Distribution in Zero-Trust Settings

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 24 Mar 2026] BlindMarket: Enabling Verifiable, Confidential, and Traceable IP Core Distribution in Zero-Trust Settings Zhaoxiang Liu, Samuel Judson, Raj Dutta, Mark Santolucito, Xiaolong Guo, Ning Luo We present BlindMarket, an end-to-end zero-trust distribution framework for hardware IP cores. BlindMarket allows two parties, the IP user and the IP vendor, to complete an IP trading process with strong guarantees of verifiability and confidentiality before the transaction, and then traceability after. We propose verification heuristics and adapt the cone of influence-based design pruning to overcome the limited scalability common to cryptographic protocols and the hardness of the underlying hardware verification. We systematically evaluate our framework on a diverse set of real-world hardware benchmarks, and the results demonstrate that BlindMarket effectively completes across a diverse set of real-world hardware IP cores, demonstrating successful verification on 12 out of 13 designs and substantial performance improvements enabled by design pruning and control-flow guided heuristics. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO) Cite as: arXiv:2603.22685 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.22685v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.22685 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Zhaoxiang Liu [view email] [v1] Tue, 24 Mar 2026 01:23:45 UTC (4,964 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.LO References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)