Why we should widely adopt ZKP?

ZKP could unleash a revolution when it comes to online Privacy.

We can limit how much a company has information about us while keeping enough information to offer us a service without revealing the whole content of the data.

That is exactly what Zero-Knowledge Proofs is about, they allow me to prove to another party that I have a certain piece of knowledge without revealing what that knowledge is.

Example:

Zero-knowledge proof protocol allows one party, usually called PROVER, to convince another party, called VERIFIER, that PROVER knows some facts (a secret, a proof of a theorem,…) without revealing to the VERIFIER ANY information about his knowledge (secret, proof,…).

Let’s illustrate an example to simplify the ZKP. The prover, in this case, is Alice and the Verifier is Bob.

Alice possesses two identical smartphones (brand X and Brand Y) and there is no way to distinguish between them. However, Alice knows the serial number of each one of them.

Alice the prover would like to prove to Bob (the verifier) that she has the phone X in her right hand without revealing the serial number (which is the secret).

Bob, in this case, is totally blindfolded and Alice will decide if she will change the smartphone position or not.

Once the blindfold is off and if Bob managed to distinguish if the prover switched between the smartphones then it means that Bob is able to distinguish between them without knowing their serial numbers.

However, this could be a lucky shot. In this case, Bob is supposed to re-do the experiment multiple times, If they still get it correct successively, then it shows that Bob (the verifier) actually knows how to distinguish the two without exposing the method he used.

This leads us that Zero-knowledge protocols are probabilistic assessments

Why we should adopt ZKP in our digital identification and transactions?

Unfortunately, the public is slowly becoming aware of ZKP use-cases which means that it is not well adopted by most of the institutions to replace the legacy authentication methods (such as password). In addition to that, ZKP is well expensive in terms of complexity and resources.

On the other hand, ZKP will contribute to identifying objects or people without revealing their private ID which will minimize the risk of identity theft or information interception.

Therefore it will ensure Data privacy across digital infrastructure, which must be widely used since the world will be adopting more and more digital applications that need to be compliant to data integrity and anonymity such as e-voting, Identification papers, or digital payment.

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