Research on Privacy Protection Adaptation and Cross-Domain Application of Zero-Knowledge Proof Technology

Abstract

In the digital economy era, the contradiction between data sharing and privacy protection is increasingly prominent. Traditional privacy protection technologies such as anonymization, differential privacy, and homomorphic encryption are difficult to meet the diverse privacy demands in multiple fields due to their flaws such as vulnerability to cracking, sacrificing data accuracy, and high computational complexity. Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP), with its core advantage of "data available but not visible", has become the key technical support to solve this contradiction. However, the current protocol types are complex and the demands in various fields vary significantly, leading to confusion in protocol selection and imbalance in resource allocation in practice. This paper systematically reviews the theoretical basis, technical system and mainstream protocol characteristics of zero-knowledge proof, integrates the advantages of demand-driven decision tree and protocol three-dimensional classification model, constructs a protocol selection framework of "demand-driven - feature matching - dynamic optimization", and clarifies the multi-stage decision-making process; Four typical fields, namely education, machine learning, finance, and healthcare, were selected to verify the effectiveness and universality of the framework, providing standardized tools for the large-scale application of zero-knowledge proof technology in various fields and direction guidance for the development of privacy protection technology in the post-quantum era.