An Interesting Zero Knowledge Use Case?
Preface: I’m a student (in my 30’s, went back to school for an MS in CS), so I view this mostly as a learning exercise.
I’ve been curious about crypto for a while, and recently started learning about ZK Proofs, Plonk, SNARKs, zkvms, etc.
I wonder if an immediate application could be something along the lines of Bot proof/proof of personhood, which seems to be a difficult problem and appears to be getting more difficult with AI (though correct me if I’m wrong). When I think about it, truly proving someone is a bot seems difficult without meeting them in real life and sitting side by side with them while they interact online. And yet, what if each of us could monitor our entire Internet activity i.e. locally store the packets we send and receive, and then provide a ZK-Proof of this history to anyone who asks during a login process. This would exist at the protocol level perhaps, or maybe built in to the browser. But the whole idea is that certain packets would be impossible for a bot to generate. Perhaps it is logging in to your bank, or paying your electricity bill, or logging into your health portal and using health data. Anything that connects to the real world. You would never want to show internet strangers/services your bank statement or EMR information, but a ZK-Proof accomplishes exactly what we are looking for in this case - proof without revealing the underlying data.
An alternative idea could be that the browsing history of a person might look very different than the history of a bot, thus creating a sort of digital fingerprint, though this seems like it could be faked with enough time and effort.
I’m curious what folks think, especially those with experience/expertise in the ZK/crypto space. Thanks!
I think you need to elaborate on how you actually see the zero knowledge proof of this sort of information working.
I would say that you can rule out browsing history as I'm pretty certain that most large advertising companies have a better idea of my browsing history that I do.
That’s a good point, though not every service on the internet has access to that browsing history. I wonder if those large advertising companies are better than most at bot prediction?
Would this be something like OpenPassport?
https://www.openpassport.app/
Or perhaps this decentralized identity verification demo:
https://risczero.com/blog/decentralized-identity-verificatio...
Ah, this is very cool. Thanks! I’ve been reading a lot about risczero and their zkvm
That's where I work! I'd be happy to discuss, if you're curious (or to put you in touch with someone who can talk about the product side of things, more realistically). mars at risczero dot com will reach me.
Sick! I will definitely be reaching out, thank you!
another EF project is https://semaphore.pse.dev/, which basically allows users to prove membership of a group without revealing additional details about themselves. it's useful but also simple enough to understand the whole code-base in a reasonable time.
Super interesting, thanks for sharing!
Check out TLSNotary, recently supported by the Ethereum Foundation https://tlsnotary.org/
This is cool, thanks!