When Peggy Met Victor: It’s Goodbye to an Old World of Hashed Passwords and Hello to Zero Knowledge Proofs

People in the future will look back on the way we created our digital world and smile.

“They cared more about sustaining flawed systems than they did about proper privacy”

For them they might say …

“Ha, ha … they took a password and put it through a one-way function and which just scrambled it … and then the found that it could be easily cracked … so they added some salt, but they … wait for it … put the salt beside scrambled value … and then they found that this could be cracked … so they slowed the whole process down … and then they …”,

And

“Ah, they actually gave away all their information freely to however wanted it, and their passwords were sent over the network, and where administrators could see them. And a crack of a key would reveal the rest of their encryption keys. What a crazy, mixed-up world they had. No wonder they had some many data breaches”.

And they will ask “Why didn’t cyber security professionals do anything about it?”.

I appreciate that if we were to use proper random values for our passwords, we would be relatively safe, as the entropy would be high, but we don’t, as we are humans. Some will…