Privacy Protection Revolution: Zero-knowledge Proof

Abstract

Online privacy protection is highly associated with verification since it is a part of communication between users and servers. Because privacy has a probability of leaking out during the transmissions. With a new method without knowing and verifying the privacy, the verification method will have a revolution. The traditional verification pattern can be rewritten. This paper introduces the history of verification or secret protection and specifically discusses the theory of zero-knowledge proof. After pointing out that the disadvantage of zero-knowledge is time-consuming, this paper expends the theory with zk-SNARK which stands for “zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge”. The part of zk-SNARK gives 2 implementations by linear algebra and polynomial. This paper lists 3 applications of zk-SNARK, which are z-cash, filecoin and loopring 3.0 in detail. In the end, this paper presents the advantage of zero-knowledge proof with the comparison of other currencies and discusses the risk of using zero-knowledge proof as contracts.