🤖 AI Summary
Existing agent communication frameworks struggle to simultaneously ensure auditability and privacy, hindering deployment in regulated scenarios such as compliant billing and regulatory accountability. This paper introduces ZK-Audit, a zero-knowledge auditing framework for the Agent Internet, enabling verifiable bidirectional privacy-preserving audits between agents—i.e., verifying compliance with predefined rules and message formats without revealing message content or semantics. Key contributions include: (1) zk-MCP, a zero-knowledge protocol natively compatible with the Model Context Protocol (MCP), guaranteeing authenticity, privacy, and sub-second verification latency; (2) a lightweight zero-knowledge proof system built on Circom; and (3) an asynchronous audit protocol with full implementation. Formal security analysis proves the framework achieves data authenticity and communication privacy; audit latency is negligible. ZK-Audit provides the first practical solution for regulatory compliance, precise usage-based billing, and trustworthy multi-agent collaboration.
📝 Abstract
Existing agent communication frameworks face critical limitations in providing verifiable audit trails without compromising the privacy and confidentiality of agent interactions. The protection of agent communication privacy while ensuring auditability emerges as a fundamental challenge for applications requiring accurate billing, compliance verification, and accountability in regulated environments.
We introduce a framework for auditing agent communications that keeps messages private while still checking they follow expected rules. It pairs zero-knowledge proofs with the existing Model Context Protocol (MCP) so messages can be verified without revealing their contents. The approach runs in lightweight networks, stays compatible with standard MCP exchanges, and adds asynchronous audit verification to confirm format and general message types without exposing specifics.
The framework enables mutual audits between agents: one side can check communication content and quality while the other verifies usage metrics, all without revealing sensitive information. We formalize security goals and show that zk-MCP provides data authenticity and communication privacy, achieving efficient verification with negligible latency overhead. We fully implement the framework, including Circom-based zero-knowledge proof generation and an audit protocol integrated with MCP's bidirectional channel, and, to our knowledge, this is the first privacy-preserving audit system for agent communications that offers verifiable mutual auditing without exposing message content or compromising agent privacy.