In the third of this series (How to be Trustless? and The Trust in Trustless?). This article looks back at how trust has evolved along with encryption.
Once upon a time, there were not so many folks on the earth and the people lived happily and shared their resources equally and fairly. There was healthy and mutual trust and well being amongst all. No single person felt the need to secure or safe guard anything from anyone.
Symmetrical Encryption
Learning how to keep things “safe”. The introduction of security of trust with keys to lock and unlock things to keep them “safe”.
Over time, possibly through greed or envy or basic self serving survival instincts, people became more individualistic in thoughts and lifestyles. And some felt that they needed to safe guard their things from others. Because… well... they stopped trusting them. Hence they began to either hide or lock away items they wanted to keep “safe” and “protected”.
Symmetrical encryption, like a padlock or a map to buried treasures, compromised of a lock mechanism that could only be unlocked (or locked) using a specially made key or likewise a map disclosing where buried treasure might be found. The mechanism or location would be sufficiently unguessable so that, it would be deemed “safe”.
Managing trust with Symmetrical Encryption involved the safe keeping and management of the keys (or maps) and which were carefully passed on to “trustworthy” individuals, as anyone with key would have access to the stored items or secrets, hence needed to be trusted.
Innovation and invention lead to more sophisticated locks, maps and symmetrical encryption techniques over time. The access largely would be handed over personally where possible, with some good old fashioned looking someone in the eye carefully to intuitively decide if that person was to be trusted or not.
Asymmetrical Encryption
Asymmetric keys introduced the ability for two parties who don’t know each other to negotiate and arrange trust between themselves, e.g, how do two people who have never met before coordinate and arrange and agree on a password together. Without anybody else intercepting the password?
Asymmetrical Encryption tried to solve this aspect of trust by making it a little bit more specific and personal. How can Bob send Alice a message and know that only Alice will be able to read it? And how might Alice know if the messages she was receiving were in fact genuine and sent by Bob?
The answer lies in having a pair of keys, one private key that would never be “trusted” (given) to anybody else and one public key, which would be like a public address or insignia that would uniquely identify a person. The two keys would be connected, a message locked using Bob’s public key, could only be unlocked with Bob’s private key.
Conversely, the keys would also have a unique property that meant if Alice signed an outgoing message with her private key, then Bob would be able to validate that the signature was Alice’s, using her publicly available key.
Almost analogous to stamping envelopes with wax and a royal crest back in the old days or placing messages into little wooden puzzle boxes that had to be opened with a special combination to access its contents, which would only be known by the intended recipient. Asymmetrical Encryption aimed to create Trust between two parties that didn't necessarily know each other, and therefore could establish a safe channel of communication between each other.
It became possible to trust people were who they (or at least their public keys) said they were. Asymmetric Encryption often paired wonderfully as a means of managing the exchange of Symmetrical keys, like a cursory step to validate communication.
Shamir Sharding Trust
Splitting up Trust amongst a group of people so that only their collective trust could access something.
The management of collective Trust also evolved into new scenarios, people realised trust could be distributed amongst a group of specific individuals, e.g. a key to a safe or a map to the location of some hidden treasure could be split up into many pieces and distributed to a group of people, who would then only be able to access the treasure when they assembled together with their corresponding pieces.
Homomorphic Encryption
Becoming Trustless! Trusting the process of reconciliation of encrypted or safely stored items without compromising the trust established through Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Encryption techniques.
Up until now, we have been examining the manner in which to keep things safe and finding means to trust others with access.
Let us suppose everyone has been hoarding away err... bananas… and nobody wanted to disclose how many bananas they had hidden away. But the group needed to decide how many banana trees to plant for next year so needed to have a current total count.
At first, to solve this, people tried to set up special authorities or persons that would be neutral and could be trusted to blindly check each person’s secret lair. But it turned out, pretty quickly, that these intermediaries evolved into the least trustworthy entities of them all and too often tgey were caught selling or profiting from attained secrets.
Homomorphic Encryption techniques were invented to reconcile information across the silos of secrets without jeopardising or compromising... well trust; Without the need to a) know any of the secret locations or b) have any knowledge of the key or even the owners of the keys, but c) blindly perform operations and return results without knowledge of the data.
This process could be described as something like a magic black hole. The access to each persons safe would all be put inside (confidentially), and an operation (counting bananas) would be performed. The output would be the aggregated total of everyone that took part, and a series of unguessable clues that proved to everyone that the total had been ascertained from checking each hiding spot correctly.
Thus eliminating the need to take leaps of faith that no one would do anything selfish or self serving, it became possible to orchestrate transactions with no trust at all. Because none was needed and the honesty of such calculations could be proven and audited: Trustless was born.
Summary
The advent of technology to manage and preserve trust has evolved considerable. Trust has moved from being something to manage for Storage, to trust during exchange or transit and finally to processing.
Trust going forward is ever more concerned with managing all three aspects (In Storage, In Transit and In Process). The pillars of Trustless that emerged from Homomorphic Encryption.
Thanks & Mentions
Thank you to Florian Guitton for his contributions in helping me articulate this article.
