Efficient Verifiable Credential Aggregation With Blockchain Anchoring and zk-SNARKs

Istiaque Ahmed , Kentaroh Toyoda , Tadashi Nakano , Thi Hong Tran ·

YOU? · · 2025 · Open Access · · DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2025.3627625

Traditional digital identity systems struggle with centralization, vulnerability to manipulation, and a lack of transparency. In distributed identity, different cryptographic methods are used for issuing credentials, which create challenges during presentation. It suffers from a fundamental interoperability barrier with heterogeneous digital-signature schemes, forcing each verifier either to implement every scheme or to trust a central translation gateway. We propose a signature-agnostic verification framework that eliminates this barrier. The core idea is to commit a salted root hash of credential claims to a distributed ledger and ensure the authenticity using a smart contract. A zero-knowledge proof (zk-SNARKs) is used to prove a selected claim set without revealing actual information. The verification reduces to a single hash-consistency check, and the verifier never touches issuer-specific signatures. A pleasant side effect is that the same verifiable presentation (VP) can be reused across verifiers and sessions, since trust derives from the on-chain anchor rather than transient signatures. This research will advance the identification ecosystem, enabling applications such as eKYC across finance, healthcare, and other sectors. We implement our method on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) using Groth16, benchmark gas cost, proof size, and latency, and show its feasibility and computational efficiency. The privacy and security analysis confirms that the proposed solution is resistant to various attacks.