The world of Cryptography is fascinating and enchanting. When the novel “The DaVinci code” was released it got me hooked and left me with awe. An image reference for fun from aliexpress
Every time a code was about to be broken in the novel I would start guessing how it would be, well that’s the power of Cryptography added to the story telling magic of Dan Brown.
But then, Cryptography had always remained mostly theoretical and once you strip away all that story telling magic it is boring to the extent it will put a normal non-math reader to sleep (Psst: I did sleep the first couple of times I went deep into ZKP). This changed with the advent of cryptocurrency, here you have something which is a practical application of cryptography. Suddenly there was wide spread interest in cryptography and some old concepts were dusted back to life. One of those old cryptographic concepts which is now in the lips of many blockchain users & enthusiasts, if not all, is Zero Knowledge Proofs.
I’m a relative newbie(noob) to the blockchain world. When I heard about zero knowledge proofs and what it prove’s I was like, ah, seriously?. When I found out when the concept of Zero knowledge was originally published/proposed it was even more of a bigger surprise for me.
In 1985,Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff published a paper
It is in this paper the term “zero knowledge” was introduced. To quote from the paper exactly, “Zero-Knowledge Proof’s are defined as those proofs that convey no additional knowledge other than the correctness of the proposition in question”. To explain this simply with an example, You and your friend are playing “find the object” in a picture book. You have to prove to your friend that you indeed found the object that was requested but without revealing where the object is because your friend hasn’t found that yet. You take a big piece of paper bigger than the book, draw a small hole in it and place the object in the page behind the hole. Your friend knows that the object is there as he can see it but he does not know where it is in the book as the book can be placed near the top, bottom or to the side behind the paper. A reference from a ZK presentation by Elena Nadolinski (will talk about her material in the next article in this series),
I hope you get the context now. There is a prover and there is a verifier. The prover shows the verifier that he has the information that is requested by the verifier without providing the verifier any other additional information other than what is necessary.
Now that we are initiated it is time for us to understand what ZK proof is all about and how it is used in Blockchain. We will also look at the types of ZK proofs that are there and what is widely used. I will also provide link’s to some of the best sources which can help you build your ZK knowledge and maybe build some applications using ZK. Stay tuned…
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