Hermes Seal: Zero-Knowledge Assurance for Autonomous Vehicle Communications

TL;DR

Hermes Seal introduces a zk-SNARK-based framework enabling privacy-preserving, verifiable communication for autonomous vehicles, supporting regulatory compliance and trustworthy operation without revealing sensitive data.

Contribution

The paper presents Hermes Seal, a novel zk-SNARK framework for verifiable, privacy-preserving vehicle communication, with real-world case studies demonstrating real-time proof capabilities.

Findings

Achieves 8 ms proof generation and 1 ms verification on GPU.

Enables proof of perception computations without exposing proprietary data.

Supports interoperability across heterogeneous autonomous systems.

Abstract

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.