Paper 2026/1003

A Blockchain-Based Pre-Verification Access Control Scheme with Vector Commitments and Bulletproofs

, School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University, Shenzhen 518055, China

Hui Li, School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University, Shenzhen 518055, China

Wenhui Hu, China Mobile Internet Co., Ltd., Guangzhou 510000, China

Baocheng Yan, China Telecom Digital Intelligence Technology Co., Ltd., Room 1308, 13th Floor, East Tower, No. 33 Fuxing Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100036, China

Kedan Li, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61801, USA

Naixing Wu, China Unicom Shenzhen Branch, Shenzhen 518046, China

Abstract

Blockchain-enabled data sharing provides public verifiability and auditability for access control in Internet of Things environments. However, before formal authorization is granted, efficiently verifying whether a data requester satisfies a hidden access policy remains challenging. Existing schemes may expose user attributes, access policies, or matching relationships during on-chain verification, while pairing-based operations, decryption tests, or general zero-knowledge circuits often introduce high verification overhead or strong trust assumptions. To address these issues, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving pre-verification access control scheme based on attribute vector commitments and Bulletproofs. The proposed scheme encodes user attributes and access policies into vector forms and uses vector commitments to hide authenticated user attributes. Access eligibility verification is then transformed into a hidden inner-product relation, allowing a data requester to prove policy satisfaction without revealing its real attributes or the policy contents. The pre-verification process is pairing-free and does not require trusted setup, making it suitable for smart-contract-based public verification. In addition, proxy re-encryption is integrated to support controlled data access after successful pre-verification. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves pre-verification completeness, knowledge soundness, zero-knowledge, attribute privacy, policy privacy, and collusion resistance. Performance analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme reduces on-chain verification overhead, communication cost, and deployment complexity compared with existing access control schemes, making it practical for privacy-preserving data sharing in blockchain-assisted Internet of Things environments.

Note: This paper proposes a privacy-preserving pre-verification access control scheme for blockchain-assisted IoT data sharing. The scheme combines vector commitments, Bulletproof inner-product arguments, and proxy re-encryption to support attribute hiding, policy privacy, pairing-free on-chain pre-verification, and controlled data access after authorization.

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/1003,
      author = {Yuanshao Liang and Hui Li and Wenhui Hu and Baocheng Yan and Kedan Li and Naixing Wu},
      title = {A Blockchain-Based Pre-Verification Access Control Scheme with Vector Commitments and Bulletproofs},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/1003},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1003}
}