As data becomes more and more important, people pay more attention to data privacy and security. The lack of data privacy protection on the Internet has led to serious leakage of user data information, which has brought many troubles to life, and many people have begun to no longer be content with the status quo, and began to explore and pursue changes.
Most of the data in the Internet is not protected by any encryption measures when it is transmitted. It can be said that the data is "running naked" in the Internet. But this situation is very difficult to change for the Internet, because once the data is encrypted, the interaction between the data will become very difficult. At the same time, if the data is encrypted and protected, it will cost a lot of data encryption and Verification costs. This situation results in data not being encrypted unless necessary.
What is Zero Knowledge Proof
For this drawback of the Internet, as early as the 1980s, someone proposed the concept of "zero-knowledge proof" to solve it.
The so-called zero-knowledge proof means that the prover can make the verifier believe that the information is true and credible without providing any useful information to the verifier.
Take a simple example. A proves to B that he has a key that can only be accessed through the key, but he does not want to show B the key. So how can A prove it? Now, we assume that there is an item in the room that B knows, and this item is unique, then A only needs to show this item to B, then B can know that A has the key.
This example is very simple, but we can also understand what a zero-knowledge proof is.
The properties that zero-knowledge proof needs to satisfy
Zero-knowledge proofs on the Internet are not as simple as the previous examples, which is why the concept of zero-knowledge proofs has been proposed for so long, but there are very few real practical applications. Zero-knowledge proof needs to meet three basic properties in order to be realized:
1. Correctness. The prover cannot deceive the verifier and needs to keep the information provided correct and authentic. That is, when the prover provides information to the verifier, he must first ensure that the proof method he proposes can prove that the information is correct, otherwise it is difficult to convince the verifier.
2. Completeness. In zero-knowledge proofs, the verifier also cannot fool the prover. After the prover provides the correct proof method, it is also necessary to ensure that the verifier's verification results are consistent during verification.
3. Zero knowledge. The most important thing in zero-knowledge proof is to ensure that the verifier cannot know and obtain additional information. This is actually the most difficult point of zero-knowledge proof.
It wasn't until the emergence of blockchain technology that data encryption and verification became more convenient and low-cost, and zero-knowledge proof was widely used, and people began to pay attention to this "old" concept.
Applications of Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Before the blockchain technology is mature, zero-knowledge proofs are usually used for identity verification, digital signatures, authentication protocols, etc. These processes are very complicated and troublesome.
Blockchain technology itself needs to encrypt data. Therefore, zero-knowledge proof and blockchain are a match made in heaven. It provides powerful help for both privacy issues and security issues in the blockchain. Account login verification can also be performed without knowing the user password. At the same time, it has practical significance in the DeFi, GameFi, and Metaverse ecosystems derived from the blockchain.