ZK-eSIM: A Privacy-Centric Zero-Knowledge Approach for eSIM Provisioning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07654v1
• Date: Mon, 07 Sep 2026 15:42:20 GMT
• Title: ZK-eSIM: A Privacy-Centric Zero-Knowledge Approach for eSIM Provisioning
• Abstract summary: GSMA Remote SIM Provisioning exposes long-lived identifiers during profile ordering and download.<n>This undermines subscriber anonymity and enables cross-session tracking.<n>We present ZK-eSIM, a privacy-preserving redesign that achieves subscriber anonymity and provisioning-session unlinkability.
• Score: 12.037878652068537
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: GSMA Remote SIM Provisioning (RSP) enables over-the-air delivery of eSIM profiles, but it exposes long-lived identifiers during profile ordering and download. In particular, stable device identifiers (e.g., EID), profile identifiers, and long-lived certificate material enable mobile operators and profile-delivery infrastructure to link provisioning events to the same eUICC and, when combined with account records, to the same subscriber. This undermines subscriber anonymity and enables cross-session tracking. We present ZK-eSIM, a privacy-preserving redesign that achieves subscriber anonymity and provisioning-session unlinkability while retaining accountable traceability by exception. ZK-eSIM (i) replaces direct disclosure of device identifiers with a zero-knowledge proof of device validity and eligibility; (ii) enforces session unlinkability through short-lived, one-time pseudonymous credentials and per-session identifiers to prevent cross-session tracking; and (iii) provides privacy-preserving accountable traceability through a jointly authorised escrow mechanism, so that no single entity can unilaterally deanonymise a user. We formalise a multi-entity, honest-but-curious threat model and prove subscriber anonymity and the unlinkability of provisioning sessions under standard cryptographic assumptions. We implement a Java Card applet on a test eUICC to evaluate performance on commodity hardware with a modified LPA and SM-DP+ server. Our experiments quantify end-to-end cryptographic overhead relative to conventional RSP, confirming that ZK-eSIM adds only practical overhead, closing a critical privacy gap while preserving deployability within existing GSMA roles and interfaces.

Related papers

• China RealDID: Verifiable Credentials Anchored in Legal Identity [2.450043336465111]
  Verifiable credentials (VCs) and decentralized identifiers (DIDs) enable selective disclosure but lack legal anchoring.<n>We present China RealDID, a three-layer architecture evaluated against five adversary classes and six security goals.<n>We describe the VC lifecycle, triple-signature chain, open template registry, and the architecture's metadata-level privacy limits.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-08-08T01:20:28Z)
• Di5Guise: 5G Privacy with vSIM [0.769971486557519]
  Di5Guise is a privacy-enhancing architecture that breaks this correlation at its root by decoupling the device identity from the subscriber identity.<n>We show that Di5Guise reduces user re-identification from 93% to 49% when combined with obfuscation.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-06-15T16:44:40Z)
• Grant, Verify, Revoke: A User-Centric Pattern for Blockchain Compliance [9.133320151595084]
  Decentralized web applications face an inherent conflict between public verifiability and personal privacy.<n>We introduce a Selective Disclosure Framework designed to restore user sovereignty by decoupling eligibility verification from identity revelation.<n>Our evaluation shows that client-side proof generation takes under 200ms, enabling a seamless interactive experience on commodity hardware.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-03-16T17:06:44Z)
• SIDeR: Semantic Identity Decoupling for Unrestricted Face Privacy [53.75084833636302]
  We propose SIDeR, a Semantic decoupling-driven framework for unrestricted face privacy protection.<n> SIDeR decomposes a facial image into a machine-recognizable identity feature vector and a visually perceptible semantic appearance component.<n>For authorized access, SIDeR can be restored to its original form when the correct password is provided.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-04T19:30:48Z)
• Achieving Flexible and Secure Authentication with Strong Privacy in Decentralized Networks [13.209703999398805]
  IRAC is a flexible credential model that unifies credentials from heterogeneous issuers.<n>We design a secure decentralized revocation mechanism where holders prove non-revocation by demonstrating their credential's revocation within a gap in the issuer's sorted list.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-12-23T10:49:05Z)
• Binding Agent ID: Unleashing the Power of AI Agents with accountability and credibility [46.323590135279126]
  BAID (Binding Agent ID) is a comprehensive identity infrastructure establishing verifiable user-code binding.<n>We implement and evaluate a complete prototype system, demonstrating the practical feasibility of blockchain-based identity management and zkVM-based authentication protocol.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-12-19T13:01:54Z)
• Beyond Inference Intervention: Identity-Decoupled Diffusion for Face Anonymization [55.29071072675132]
  Face anonymization aims to conceal identity information while preserving non-identity attributes.<n>We propose textbfIDsuperscript2Face, a training-centric anonymization framework.<n>We show that IDtextsuperscript2Face outperforms existing methods in visual quality, identity suppression, and utility preservation.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-10-28T09:28:12Z)
• Publicly Verifiable Private Information Retrieval Protocols Based on Function Secret Sharing [45.68069331331365]
  Private Information Retrieval (PIR) is a cryptographic primitive that enables users to retrieve data from a database without revealing which item is being accessed.<n>We propose two effective constructions of publicly verifiable PIR (PVPIR) in the multi-server setting, which achieve query privacy, correctness, and verifiability simultaneously.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-09-17T04:28:47Z)
• Distributed Identity for Zero Trust and Segmented Access Control: A Novel Approach to Securing Network Infrastructure [4.169915659794567]
  This study assesses security improvements achieved when distributed identity is employed with ZTA principle.<n>The study suggests adopting distributed identities can enhance overall security postures by an order of magnitude.<n>The research recommends refining technical standards, expanding the use of distributed identity in practice, and its applications for the contemporary digital security landscape.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-01-14T00:02:02Z)
• Disentangle Before Anonymize: A Two-stage Framework for Attribute-preserved and Occlusion-robust De-identification [55.741525129613535]
  "Disentangle Before Anonymize" is a novel two-stage Framework(DBAF)<n>This framework includes a Contrastive Identity Disentanglement (CID) module and a Key-authorized Reversible Identity Anonymization (KRIA) module.<n>Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art de-identification approaches.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-11-15T08:59:02Z)
• FedSOV: Federated Model Secure Ownership Verification with Unforgeable Signature [60.99054146321459]
  Federated learning allows multiple parties to collaborate in learning a global model without revealing private data. We propose a cryptographic signature-based federated learning model ownership verification scheme named FedSOV.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-05-10T12:10:02Z)
• Towards Precise Intra-camera Supervised Person Re-identification [54.86892428155225]
  Intra-camera supervision (ICS) for person re-identification (Re-ID) assumes that identity labels are independently annotated within each camera view. Lack of inter-camera labels makes the ICS Re-ID problem much more challenging than the fully supervised counterpart. Our approach performs even comparable to state-of-the-art fully supervised methods in two of the datasets.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-02-12T11:56:30Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.