Bringing Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Knowledge to Practice

Abstract

This is the joint work of several people of whom only Joe-Kai is here today. The whole work is still open research and, as the title indicates, aims to facilitate the secure and efficient usage of non-standard crypto primitives, especially for software engineers.

Let’s start with the very informal definition of zero-knowledge proofs. They are a two-party protocol between a prover and a verifier where the prover claims to know some secret value, for example, login credentials or something, and he has to convince the verifier that he actually does, and this means that the prover has the possibility to cheat, of course, but on the other hand, the verifier would not be able to gain any information about the secret; this is the zero-knowledge property.