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Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology

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Re: Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology

#61

Post by heavyset_go »

regularfry wrote: post #50
jjmarr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessary, Uganda has been levying social media taxes on end-users since 2018 by automatically adding it to your cell phone bill if you access a social media website. About 2.7¢ per day of usage.[1] Virtually everyone gets their internet from an ISP that is regulated in the country that the user lives in. There are no technical barriers to implementing a permitting system in the United States. Linking connections…

Do you happen to know what the answer of this scheme to "I have a wireguard connection to another country, you can't see my traffic" is? I know that enough of the population would never bother so it wouldn't significantly harm it as a revenue scheme, but if your goal is avoiding identification rather than taxation then the stakes could be high enough to make the effort worthwhile.

> Do you happen to know what the answer of this scheme to "I have a wireguard connection to another country, you can't see my traffic" is?

WG traffic is easily identifiable and able to be blocked, it's what happens in countries that ban VPNs.

Re: Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology

#62

Post by Spivak »

api wrote: post #8
krunck wrote: post #4

Age assurance will be the gateway to government issued(via corporate proxy) internet usage permits.

True, but I'm also not convinced that a ten year old being able to be face to face with hard-core BDSM and incest fetish porn within 40 seconds of opening a web browser is healthy. I don't like this but don't have another solution other than the porn industry self-policing which isn't promising.

What web browser are you using?! I think this says more about you than about the internet if this is what you're seeing.

Re: Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology

#64

Post by MatteoFrigo »

coldpie wrote: post #57
MatteoFrigo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Using the MDOC requires a signature from a hardware security key in the phone, and a lot of the complexity is how to avoid leaking the private key, which would identify you.

Well, that's not great. My phone is closed-source and its software is provided by an ad company. I do not trust it to always behave in my interests.

An alternative would be some secure chip in a credit-card size plastic document, but nobody seems to like that idea. We (Google) don't make these choices.

Re: Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology

#65

Post by gmueckl »

regularfry wrote: post #50
jjmarr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessary, Uganda has been levying social media taxes on end-users since 2018 by automatically adding it to your cell phone bill if you access a social media website. About 2.7¢ per day of usage.[1] Virtually everyone gets their internet from an ISP that is regulated in the country that the user lives in. There are no technical barriers to implementing a permitting system in the United States. Linking connections…

Do you happen to know what the answer of this scheme to "I have a wireguard connection to another country, you can't see my traffic" is? I know that enough of the population would never bother so it wouldn't significantly harm it as a revenue scheme, but if your goal is avoiding identification rather than taxation then the stakes could be high enough to make the effort worthwhile.

The political answer to circumventing laws is usually some form of punishment. This is often much easier than weird technical solutions.

Re: Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology

#66

Post by coldpie »

MatteoFrigo wrote: post #60
coldpie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. This introduces a third party to the protocol, right? Specifically the developer of the wallet. So we now have three parties: the user, the wallet developer, and the relying party. Does this zk protocol protect the user's privacy from the wallet developer as well as the relying party? In other words, does the protocol give the wallet access to information about the relying party? For example, could this wallet t…

Yes, a malicious wallet could leak your information. This is why some governments will insist on using only blessed wallets. However, wallet+zk is strictly better than sending the plaintext MDOC to the relying party. There are no solutions in this space, only tradeoffs, and elected representatives have picked one tradeoff.

That's too bad :( I wish the protocol had been designed with that in mind. Requiring users to trust proprietary software from Google & Apple to be in complete control over their digital identities is a pretty crummy direction to go in.

Re: Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology

#67

Post by MatteoFrigo »

Confiks wrote: post #43

It's a very interesting solution that allows for multi-show unlinkability to be married to hardware binding using existing ECDSA hardware keys. It's not limited to age verification; it can be applied to arbitrary attributes. It's also an unfathomably complex solution [1] which only a few people in the world will grok, and far more complex than existing solutions such as Idemix or BBS+, which lack such a hardware bind…

On the contrary, any undergraduate can understand our solution. In contrast, I don't know anybody who can explain the bilinear pairing in BBS.

Re: Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology

#68

Post by JW_00000 »

abhv wrote: post #39
bobbiechen wrote: post #29

Anyone have a good explanation on the intuition of non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs? For example, I thought the "paint-mixing" analogy for Diffie-Hellman key exchange ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie–Hellman_key_exchange#Ge... ) really helped me handwave the math into "mixing easy, unmixing hard". https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/11/27/zero-kno... was a good intro for interactive ZK proofs but…

My colleague Amit made a simple video explanation about zkp with Wired. https://youtu.be/fOGdb1CTu5c?si=EyBQS92WyeduIpH- That doesn't explain the way this scheme works, but it's a nice start.

This is what I was going to post. It helped me a lot by first giving a very intuitive understanding of the concept of ZKPs using the Where's Waldo/puffin-among-the-penguins example, but then also going deeper with the graph-coloring example.

Re: Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology

#69

Post by djoldman »

api wrote: post #8
krunck wrote: post #4

Age assurance will be the gateway to government issued(via corporate proxy) internet usage permits.

True, but I'm also not convinced that a ten year old being able to be face to face with hard-core BDSM and incest fetish porn within 40 seconds of opening a web browser is healthy. I don't like this but don't have another solution other than the porn industry self-policing which isn't promising.

For kids with a guardian, the answer is enabling and empowering the guardian to control what the child can access.

Somehow we've inappropriately shifted responsibility away from parents/guardians in some areas like internet access.

In other areas, like letting your kid go outside by themselves, we've criminalized reasonable caregiver actions.

It's a wild world.

Re: Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology

#70

Post by coldpie »

MatteoFrigo wrote: post #64
coldpie wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's not great. My phone is closed-source and its software is provided by an ad company. I do not trust it to always behave in my interests.

An alternative would be some secure chip in a credit-card size plastic document, but nobody seems to like that idea. We (Google) don't make these choices.

Another approach could be for a component in the protocol that I do trust (eg an open source web browser) to serve as an intermediary, providing only the information required to each of the components that I don't trust (wallet, website). The wallet does not need to know who is requesting the proof, right?
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