Mar 16
What is Zero-knowledge proofs
A zero-knowledge proof is a protocol that enables one party, called the prover, to convince another, the verifier, that a statement is true without revealing any information beyond the veracity of the statement. For example, a prover can create proofs for statements like the following:
- “I know the private key that corresponds to this public key” : in this case, the proof would not reveal any information about the private key.
- “I know a private key that corresponds to a public key from this list” : as before, the proof would not reveal information about the private key but in this case, the associated public key would also remain private.
- “I know the preimage of this hash value” : in this case, the proof would show that the prover knows the preimage but it would not reveal any information about the value of that preimage.
- “This is the hash of a blockchain block that does not produce negative balances” : in this case, the proof would not reveal any information about the amount, origin or destination of the transactions included in the block.
Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs NIZK are a particular type of zero-knowledge proofs in which the prover can generate the proof without interaction with the verifier. NIZK protocols are very suitable for Ethereum blockchain applications, because they allow a smart contract to act as a verifier. This way, anyone can generate a proof and send it as part of a transaction to the smart contract, which can perform some action depending on whether the proof is valid or not.
Let’s start from absolute scratch. Consider the following polynomials:-
Here, a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h are constants. Say we are provided with a pair (x,y) and we want to verify whether (x,y) satisfies these equations. To verify, we can just substitute the provided value (x,y) in the equations and check that LHS = RHS for both equations.
Now, imagine that we have millions of equations and millions of variables to verify. How would we do that? We could just get some good hardware on the cloud and verify.
However, now imagine we want a smart contract to verify these millions of equations & variables. Since the resources on a blockchain are limited, you might want to avoid performing these million checks on-chain. This is where zero-knowledge proofs come in.
ZK allows us to generate a “proof” that proves that a set of variables satisfy a set of equations. The awesome thing about this proof is that it is small and fixed in size (64 bytes), independent of the number of equations and variables it is proving. Anyone could take this proof and “verify” it. The computational resources to verify this proof are cheap and constant (~300K gas on Ethereum)
So, instead of performing millions of computations in a smart contract, one could just create a zk-proof for them, and provide it to the smart contract. The smart contract shall implement a proof verification algorithm, and if the proof checks, the smart contract can use the variables for further computation. It’s like computational compression.
Another amazing property of ZK is that you can provide the variables in encrypted form. This means I can prove that a certain set of variables satisfy the given equations, without revealing the value of the variables.
Finally, I want to mention that it is possible to represent all computations in the form of polynomials. Hence, ZK can be used to prove general computations.
Join Coinmonks Telegram Channel and Youtube Channel learn about crypto trading and investing
