Hermes Seal: Zero-Knowledge Assurance for Autonomous Vehicle Communications

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 27 Mar 2026] Hermes Seal: Zero-Knowledge Assurance for Autonomous Vehicle Communications Munawar Hasan, Apostol Vassilev, Edward Griffor, Thoshitha Gamage The application of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) in autonomous systems is an emerging area of research, motivated by the growing need for regulatory compliance, transparent auditing, and trustworthy operation in decentralized environments. zk-SNARK is a powerful cryptographic tool that allows a party (the prover) to prove to another party (the verifier) that a statement about its own internal state is true, without revealing sensitive or proprietary data about that state. This paper proposes Hermes Seal: a zk-SNARK-based ZKP framework for enabling privacy-preserving, verifiable communication in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) networks. The framework allows autonomous systems to generate cryptographic proofs of perception and decision-related computations without revealing proprietary models, sensor data, or internal system states, thereby supporting interoperability across heterogeneous autonomous systems. We present two real-world case studies implemented and empirically evaluated within our framework, demonstrating a step toward verifiable autonomous system information exchanges. The first demonstrates real-time proof generation and verification, achieving 8 ms proof generation and 1 ms verification on a GPU, while the second evaluates the performance of an autonomous vehicle perception stack, enabling proof of computation without exposing proprietary or confidential data. Furthermore, the framework can be integrated into AV perception stacks to facilitate verifiable interoperability and privacy-preserving cooperative perception. The demonstration code for this project is open source, available on Github. Comments: 28 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2603.26343 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.26343v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.26343 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Apostol Vassilev [view email] [v1] Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:07:55 UTC (730 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs 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?)