flâneur

A journey into zero-knowledge proofs

cryptologie.net · 5,172 words · saved by 1 readers

Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity and the author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a crypto architect at O(1) Labs (working on the Mina cryptocurrency), before that I was the security lead for Diem (formerly Libra) at Novi (Facebook), and a security consultant for the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. This is my blog about cryptography and security and other related topics that I find interesting. My journey into zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) began in university, with me slouching in an amphitheater chair attending a cryptography course. "Zero-knowledge proofs", said the professor, "allow a prover to convince a verifier that they know something without revealing the something". Intriguing, I thought. At the end of the course I had learned that you could prove simple statements, like the knowledge of the discrete logarithm of a field element (e.g. that you know x 𝑥 in y = g x mod p 𝑦 = 𝑔 𝑥 mod 𝑝 for some g 𝑔 and prime p 𝑝 ) or of an isomorphism b

My journey into zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) began in university, with me slouching in an amphitheater chair attending a cryptography course. “Zero-knowledge proofs”, said the professor, “allow a prover to convince a verifier that they know something without revealing the something”. Intriguing, I thought. At the end of the course I had learned that you could prove simple statements, like the knowledge of the discrete logarithm of a field element (e.g. that you know in for some and prime ) or of an isomorphism between two graphs. Things like that. The protocols we learned about were often…

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