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Understanding Zero Knowledge Proof
I'm a licensed Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience in Android and Full Stack development. I like focusing on code quality, readability and reusability. I made several projects with various IoT technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy, MQTT, Web Sockets, Arduino, Raspberry Pi etc. Currently I'm a senior at DuckMa S.r.l.
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In the Color Blind Table Tennis Club they have green and orange table tennis balls, but they think they all look the same.
A man walks in the club and says:
– «You know those actually have different colors?»
All the Club members are like:
– «Pft...Yeaah right!»
And so the game is on.
So a first approach could be asking Mr. Knowitall to write G on green balls and O on orange balls.
The diligent members of the CBTTC would then shuffle them in a sack and proceed like this:
The more balls they pick from the sack and the more colors he gets right, the more they convince themselves he can actually tell them apart.
In this first example, we can already see some key concept behind Zero Knowledge Proof:
With the above method the man would possibly have to mark every single ball in the CBTTC in order to convince the members he can really tell them apart by their color.
So after the guy leaves, them CBTCC members will remain with their marked balls and will be able to tell them apart by the marks on them. This means the man actually passed down (part of) his knowledge to them.
They still can't tell new balls apart, but those old marked ones? Piece of cake!
So let's try this other method instead!
The more the man keeps guessing, the more the club member that is testing him convinces himself that he can actually tell the balls apart.
This time thought, when the man leaves, the club members will be left with two apparently identical balls and won't have acquired any knowledge from the process.
So with this last method, we had an actual example of a fully fledged Zero Knowledge Proof, with all its key aspects:
Let this sink in for a moment... basically Zero Knowledge Proof is:
A way someone else has to convince himself (but not others) that you actually possess a knowledge you claim to possess, without you giving out any of that knowledge to him (or anyone else).
So know that we have an high-level grasp of what Zero Knowledge Proof is, we can ask ourselves what may be the possible applications of this!
I'll cover practical uses of Zero Knowledge Proof and other ZKP extensions in a future article, so stay tuned!
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