Zero Knowledge Proofs

Why IT Matters

•The first benefit of zero-knowledge based applications is scalability or consuming less resources to verify operations recorded on a blockchain. It’s fairly obvious that if benefits everyone.

•Private computation has countless respectable applications, but let us highlight the potential benefits for digital finance:

•Data protection: Client identifiable information (CID), financial balances, and metadata would remain private.

•Compliance: Privacy is not (necessarily) a device to evade regulatory compliance. Instead, it can be an enabler, by enforcing need-to-know and segregation of duties at a technical level.

• Applications: Where most regulated institutions currently limit their use of blockchains to relatively basic tokens, they could now perform more complex operations on-chain at a reasonable cost.

What Is ZKPs

•One party (Prover) can prove that a specific statement is true to the other party (Verifier) without disclosing any additional information.

•A zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is a mathematical technique to verify the truth of information without revealing the information itself

• What makes zero knowledge proofs so special is the ability to share proofs without sharing data. While data is kept privately and remains under the control of its owner, proofs can be publicly shared and verified.

What are Use Cases

•Finance: ING uses ZKPs that allow customers to prove that their secret number lies in a known range. For example, a mortgage applicant can prove that their income is in the admissible range without revealing their exact salary.

•Online voting: ZKPs can allow voters to vote anonymously and to verify that their vote was included in the final tally.

•Authentication: ZKPs can be used to authenticate users without exchanging secret information such as passwords.

• Machine Learning: ZKPs can allow the owner of a machine learning algorithm to convince others about the results of the model without revealing any information about the ML model itself.

Where can you use ZKPs

Messaging

•In messaging end-to-end encryption is necessary. So that, no one can read your private messages without the…