Proving Your Age, Without Giving Away Your Age

If we were to start our computing and data architectures again, we certainly wouldn’t build them as we have. Overall, we have a legacy data architecture, and where we often fail to protect sensitive and private information. The usage of encryption, for example, is often seen as a barrier to accessing the data rather than a positive aspect of protecting sensitive data. But, a company that does not store private information — but proofs of knowledge — will be much less likely to have a data breach than one that stores the raw data on users.

An example of this is with age range checking, where a user needs to provide proof of their date of birth every time they need to prove that their age is in a given range. But why can’t I create a trusted proof that someone is within a certain age range and then get that signed by a trusted entity? This could then be stored as a proof in a digital wallet and prove it whenever required. Then, there would be no need for someone to give away their actual date of birth to anyone checking for a given age range.

For this, we need a cryptographic range proof, and one of the best around is the Bulletproof method [here][1]: