  Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePINS) are secured and
governed by blockchains but beyond crypto-economic incentives, they lack
measures to establish trust in participating devices and their services. The
verification of relevant device credentials during device registration helps to
overcome this problem. However, on-chain verification in decentralized
applications (dApp) discloses potentially confidential device attributes
whereas off-chain verification introduces undesirable trust assumptions. In
this paper, we propose a credential-based device registration (CDR) mechanism
that verifies device credentials on the blockchain and leverages zero-knowledge
proofs (ZKP) to protect confidential device attributes from being disclosed. We
characterize CDR for DePINs, present a general system model, and technically
evaluate CDR using zkSNARKs with Groth16 and Marlin. Our experiments give first
insights into performance impacts and reveal a tradeoff between the applied
proof systems.
