The paper https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1296
Unknowable Math Can Help Hide Secrets
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Re: Unknowable Math Can Help Hide Secrets
#12How is this not security through obscurity?
Security through obscurity is about not revealing how the system works. Relying on computational complexity is precisely the opposite, you can understand the entire system but the unknown is well known, e.g. the length of the key and which symbols can be used to compose that key, but recovering it is prohibitively expensive. It's practically impossible even in theory it is possible.
FWIW we don't know for sure that one-way functions truly exists, or that P is different from NP. We just didn't find efficient solutions "so far". So the assumption for both what we used so far and this new work... is that our understanding of mathematics is shared and correct.
Re: Unknowable Math Can Help Hide Secrets
#13> to create a powerful new tool in cryptography.
I thought that was THE ENTIRE PREMISE of cryptography
Re: Unknowable Math Can Help Hide Secrets
#14> to create a powerful new tool in cryptography. What is that new powerful tool in cryptography, then? > He wanted to build zero-knowledge proofs that weren’t interactive. Thirty years earlier, Goldreich and Oren had established that such proofs are impossible. I'm not sure what "interactive" means here, but I thought ZK-SNARKs were already non-interactive. It seems the article has nothing to do with anything practic…
Cryptographer here, but this is not my area and I've only skimmed the paper. As far as I can tell, it's a purely theoretical result but a really cool one. Wall of text that might be wrong, as a rough summary of the result as I understand it: There are different definitions of "zk", of "proof". Eg do "proofs" of false statements not exist, or are they just hard to find? If they exist but are hard to find, then it's of…
Ah... Purely theoretical result.
Thank you!
I was searching for the github repo with a cool example encrypt/decrypt.
Silly me.
Re: Unknowable Math Can Help Hide Secrets
#15The paper https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1296
I can't even tell if this is tangent or central to the main idea, but I'm so intrigued by this one part:
> at the relatively mild cost that such applications now have security that is "game-based" instead of "simulation-based."
Quite interesting and mysterious. What is a game but a kind of simulation with two or more potentially competing "physics engines" involved? What is a simulation but a game, where exactly one player happens to be called "The Environment"? If these aren't two ways of looking at the same thing, what's this about a relatively mild cost?
Re: Unknowable Math Can Help Hide Secrets
#16The paper https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1296
I can't even tell if this is tangent or central to the main idea, but I'm so intrigued by this one part: > at the relatively mild cost that such applications now have security that is "game-based" instead of "simulation-based." Quite interesting and mysterious. What is a game but a kind of simulation with two or more potentially competing "physics engines" involved? What is a simulation but a game, where exactly one…
The author didn’t use those words “just because”. Game-based security and simulation-based security are two different styles of security definitions used in cryptography, and we differentiate between them for good reason: game-based definitions are typically weaker (in that they capture less adversary behaviour) than simulation-based definitions.
Also, they have nothing to do with “video games” or physical simulations therein.
Re: Unknowable Math Can Help Hide Secrets
#17> to create a powerful new tool in cryptography. What is that new powerful tool in cryptography, then? > He wanted to build zero-knowledge proofs that weren’t interactive. Thirty years earlier, Goldreich and Oren had established that such proofs are impossible. I'm not sure what "interactive" means here, but I thought ZK-SNARKs were already non-interactive. It seems the article has nothing to do with anything practic…
The result is indeed theoretical, but is a big advancement in theory.
zkSNARKs (and other “non-interactive” proof systems) are actually secretly interactive because they all require a setup phase, which effectively counts as the first verifier message. The provers response is then the second message, making the entire process interactive.
This work eliminates that setup phase entirely, leaving only the provers message. The resulting protocol is hence truly non interactive
Re: Unknowable Math Can Help Hide Secrets
#18> to create a powerful new tool in cryptography. What is that new powerful tool in cryptography, then? > He wanted to build zero-knowledge proofs that weren’t interactive. Thirty years earlier, Goldreich and Oren had established that such proofs are impossible. I'm not sure what "interactive" means here, but I thought ZK-SNARKs were already non-interactive. It seems the article has nothing to do with anything practic…
Cryptographer here, but this is not my area and I've only skimmed the paper. As far as I can tell, it's a purely theoretical result but a really cool one. Wall of text that might be wrong, as a rough summary of the result as I understand it: There are different definitions of "zk", of "proof". Eg do "proofs" of false statements not exist, or are they just hard to find? If they exist but are hard to find, then it's of…
Goldreich-Oren still applies to NIZKs and SNARKs; the setup phase is the first verifier message. Even in SNARKs with transparent setup (eg, STARKs), the randomness used in the setup phase counts as the firstverifier message.
Re: Unknowable Math Can Help Hide Secrets
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't even tell if this is tangent or central to the main idea, but I'm so intrigued by this one part: > at the relatively mild cost that such applications now have security that is "game-based" instead of "simulation-based." Quite interesting and mysterious. What is a game but a kind of simulation with two or more potentially competing "physics engines" involved? What is a simulation but a game, where exactly one…
The author didn’t use those words “just because”. Game-based security and simulation-based security are two different styles of security definitions used in cryptography, and we differentiate between them for good reason: game-based definitions are typically weaker (in that they capture less adversary behaviour) than simulation-based definitions. Also, they have nothing to do with “video games” or physical simulation…
Thanks for the hint. Reading more about this, it seems the crypto/zero-knowledge/interactive-proof terminology is formal but overloaded here.. games that have nothing to do with game-theory, simulation that has no connection with bisimulation
Re: Unknowable Math Can Help Hide Secrets
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cryptographer here, but this is not my area and I've only skimmed the paper. As far as I can tell, it's a purely theoretical result but a really cool one. Wall of text that might be wrong, as a rough summary of the result as I understand it: There are different definitions of "zk", of "proof". Eg do "proofs" of false statements not exist, or are they just hard to find? If they exist but are hard to find, then it's of…
Goldreich-Oren still applies to NIZKs and SNARKs; the setup phase is the first verifier message. Even in SNARKs with transparent setup (eg, STARKs), the randomness used in the setup phase counts as the firstverifier message.
Ah, thanks for the correction. Do I have the soundness bit right? I guess it might apply even if the proof system is only computationally sound, since the simulator has to be efficient, right?