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How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

quantamagazine.org

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Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#81

Post by barsonme »

can16358p wrote: post #78

I'm confused about the maze example in the article: I can "prove" that I know the path to exit as I traverse the maze in limited time, okay. But interactive proofs have many iterations to sufficiently convince the verifier, however if I found the exit by luck in first try, I've already found it and I can simply follow the same path in the next iterations. How does the interactivity exactly work with the maze example?

The “magic door in a cave” game might’ve been a better example of interactivity.

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#83

Post by aargh_aargh »

pexabit wrote: post #21
muppetman wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the web need half the chaff it has these days? That's why I love YComb, it's a simple text site. Marketing ruined the Internet.

Checkout Healthline today. Then do WaybackMachine of Healtine in like 2009. It is shocking

Looks just fine: https://anon.healthline.com/17-effective-ways-to-lower-your-...

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#84

Post by qsort »

shakow wrote: post #45
CodeSgt wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name a country where an actually observably valid election takes place? And by this I mean an election where, somehow, an individual would be able to see their individual ballot make it from wherever they cast it, to the counter, and could see how their specific ballot impacted/didn't impact the broader vote, and where (again, somehow) there was proof that no artificial or false votes were cast in the name of…

Maybe I missed something in your question, but what we have in France seems pretty close. Our ballots go into a transparent urn, you need to be registered in a voting office and show an ID paper to vote, and people counting the votes are typically a mix of local state employees and volunteers citizens (and given that most people don't want to spend their Sunday evening counting ballots, it's quite easy to get a place…

Same exact process in Italy, except we also use ballot tagging to fight organized crime. For all the problems we have, trusting the results of an election isn't one...

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#85

Post by dmichulke »

porcuquine wrote: post #53

I recently published a fairly detailed blog post about how to formulate expressive provable programs in Lurk ( https://github.com/lurk-lang/lurk-rs ). Although this post goes into no details about the underlying proving mechanism, it does build to some pretty powerful ideas. If you haven't thought about the implications of being able to prove correctness of a computation without revealing some or all details of what…

As a functional programmer it's easy for me to understand the code, so I actually made it until the end where a neat example is given.

In general though I think the example problem might be worth mentioning in the beginning:

"by the end of this article you will understand how to ..."

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#86

Post by barsonme »

kayson wrote: post #57

How can you use zero knowledge proofs to show that your nuclear weapons are inactive? Also... couldn't you just reactivate them after?

FWIW the linked paper on nuclear warheads is fairly accessible. You don’t need to understand nuclear physics to grok the algorithm.

ZK proofs only demonstrate knowledge of some fact. So, you could prove that you know the way through the maze, but then immediately forget it afterward.

Maybe the nuclear inspectors inspect the warheads frequently enough that rearming them would be detected? Or perhaps there is just some level of trust and you have to rely on the country to play by the rules.

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#87

Post by barsonme »

pmx wrote: post #74
kayson wrote: post #57

How can you use zero knowledge proofs to show that your nuclear weapons are inactive? Also... couldn't you just reactivate them after?

Isn't this the point of the article? You wouldn't prove if they're active or not, only that YOU know if they're active or not?

ZK proofs let you (the prover) prove a fact to somebody else (the verifier).

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#88

Post by intelVISA »

nlitened wrote: post #64
bockchain wrote: post #38

> How to prove you know a secret without giving it away This is the best use case for blockchain. Put the secret on the blockchain and show others that transaction. Since it's on blockchain, no one can deny your claim about knowing the secret. This is why blockchain was invented. Before blockchain, I was miserable. There was no way for me to prove to my girlfriends that I knew a secret, without telling the secret. No…

> Before blockchain, I was miserable. There was no way for me to prove to my girlfriends that I knew a secret, without telling the secret. Now with blockchain, ... I thought the joke would continue that now with blockchain, I don't have a girlfriend anymore.

Now you're thinking with web3(tm)

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#89

Post by rex_lupi »

seewhydee wrote: post #40

Scientists used to use anagrams to register scientific discoveries without revealing them. Hooke registered his law of elastic extension using the letters "ceiiinosssttuv”, which he later revealed to unscramble into "ut tensio, sic vis" ("as the tension, so the force"). People did try to brute-force the anagrams. On two occasions, Kepler unscrambled analgrams from Galileo into the statements that (i) Mars has two moo…

Nice story, however the second message he deciphered was not about Jupiter's spots, but something else. https://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath151/kmath151.htm

Re: How to prove you know a secret without giving it away

#90

Post by porcuquine »

dmichulke wrote: post #85
porcuquine wrote: post #53

I recently published a fairly detailed blog post about how to formulate expressive provable programs in Lurk ( https://github.com/lurk-lang/lurk-rs ). Although this post goes into no details about the underlying proving mechanism, it does build to some pretty powerful ideas. If you haven't thought about the implications of being able to prove correctness of a computation without revealing some or all details of what…

As a functional programmer it's easy for me to understand the code, so I actually made it until the end where a neat example is given. In general though I think the example problem might be worth mentioning in the beginning: "by the end of this article you will understand how to ..."

Thanks, that's a good point — and I had originally intended exactly that. Any suggestion for how the … should be completed?
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