ZKPass – A Zero-Knowledge Proof Based Authentication System for Secure Identity Verification

Abstract

Secure digital identity management is every emerging concern. Traditional authentication which includes use of passwords, central databases, and third party recovery present great security and also usability issues. Zero- Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) and blockchain have put forth as very good for Decentralized identity systems. But also many present solutions have large compute requirements, don’t scale well, and have poor user recovery. This review puts forth that in present ZKP based identity systems we see the lack of password less login, human readable identities, and self sovereign recovery. We look at recent systems which we note have a heavy use of complex crypto credentials, central verification which is a point of failure, and extensive infrastructure which in turn do not see wide scale adoption. To present solutions to these issues we have put forth a UID based identity which uses ZKPs for authentication which does not require storage of passwords or private keys. We introduce a novel recovery which uses a human readable phrase from private key, salt, and UID which in turn is a user controlled method. What we did is we put the UID on the blockchain which in turn improves privacy and scale. Our analysis which we present improves on issues of usability, scale and security which in turn we present a very simple and practical solution for today’s identity management issues. Also this study we present which we put forth to be the base for what we think will be future works in the development of useable ZKP based identity systems.