Zero-Knowledge Proof for Trusted Construction Management: A Preliminary Study of Adaptive Blockchain BIM Identity Authentication

Abstract

Blockchain technology emphasizes trust and collaboration through distributed networks and is deemed to contribute to building information modeling (BIM) based construction collaboration and management. However, the open nature of blockchain introduces severe cybersecurity attacks that undermine the trustworthiness of construction management. One salient point is identity authentication for security BIM data access in the blockchain environment. The traditional public-private key or password authenticate methods are vulnerable to malicious theft. Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) is an emerging, password-free method for authenticating identities. It allows one party to prove the truth or falsity of a statement to another party without revealing any meaningful information to the counterpart. Therefore, this study proposes a preliminary user authentication protocol based on the non-interactive ZKP protocol, specifically the zk-SNARK protocol, for adaptive authentication of blockchain BIM. The adaptive authentication recognizes a random subset of on-chain historical BIM operation records to prove the identity according to the protocol. Without revealing any meaningful knowledge to the authentication system, this adaptive data access control prevents password attacks using the BIM records on-chain. Finally, the proposed protocol is deployed on the test blockchain and implemented in a preliminary case study to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, the theoretical contribution is proposing a novel zk-SARKs-based identity authentication protocol that utilizes the on-chain BIM operation records. Secondly, the practical contribution relies on presenting a ZoKrates-based workflow of generating proofs, creating smart contracts, and deploying on the blockchain for verification