In digital security, the less stray information floating around the better. The fewer companies storing your financial records, the less likely they'll be exposed in a breach. But though there are lots of ways to cut down on data sharing and retention, there are some things services just need to know, right? Thanks to the cryptographic method known as “zero-knowledge proofs” that’s not always the case.
Zero-knowledge techniques are mathematical methods used to verify things without sharing or revealing underlying data. Think of a payment app checking whether you have enough money in your bank account to complete a transaction without finding out anything else about your balance. Or an app confirming a password's validity without needing to directly process it. In this way, zero-knowledge proofs can help broker all sorts of sensitive agreements, transactions, and interactions in a more private and secure way.
Zero-knowledge protocols are probabilistic assessments, which means they don't prove something with the complete certainty that simply revealing it would. Instead, they provide small pieces of unlinkable information that can accumulate to show that the validity of an assertion is overwhelmingly probable.
Researchers at MIT first started developing the concept of a zero-knowledge proof in the 1980s. A classic example of the utility of zero-knowledge proofs describes two millionaires, Alice and Bob, who want to know which of them has more money without revealing how much wealth they each have. The techniques have come into prominence over the past decade in a more concrete way thanks in part to their usefulness in blockchain applications like cryptocurrencies. For example, zero-knowledge proofs can be used to validate cryptocurrency transactions managed on a blockchain and combat fraud without revealing data about which wallet ..
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