Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Shafi Goldwasser (b. 1958), Silvio Micali (b. 1954), Charles Rackoff (b. 1948)
How do you prove that you know a secret without revealing the secret? Three
computer scientists, Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff,
figured a way in 1985, establishing a new a branch of cryptography rich with
applications that are only now beginning to be realized.
Zero-knowledge proofs are a mathematical technique for demonstrating facts
about a proof without revealing the proof itself, provided that the
demonstration involves interaction between two parties: the prover who wants
to provide that some mathematical statement is true, and a verifier who checks
the proof. The verifier asks the prover a question, and the prover sends back a
string of bits, called a witness, that could be generated only if the statement is
true.
For example, consider assigning colors to the states or countries on a map. In
1976, mathematicians proved that any two-dimensional map can be colored
using just four colors such that no countries that touch are colored with the
same color. But doing the same with just three colors is much harder and can’t
be done with all maps. Until the invention of zero-knowledge proofs, the only
way for a person to show if a specific map could be colored with three colors
was to do just that: produce the map colored with three colors.
Using zero-knowledge proofs, the witness demonstrates a specific map colored
with just three colors has no instance of two touching countries that are the
same color, and it does this without revealing the coloring of any country.
Building a practical system from zero-knowledge proofs requires the
application of both cryptography and engineering—hard work, but some
practical systems have emerged, including password-authentication systems
that don’t actually send the password, anonymous credential systems that
allow a person to establish (for example) that the credential holder is over 18
without revealing his or her age or name, and digital money schemes that let
people spend digital coins anonymously but still detect if an anonymous coin is
spent twice (called double spending).
For their work in cryptography, Goldwasser and Micali won the A.M. Turing
Award in 2012. SEE ALSO Secure Multi-Party Computation (1982), Digital
Money (1990)
Zero-knowledge proofs let a prover demonstrate possession of a fact without
revealing that fact. For example, you can prove that there exists a way to color
a map with just three colors, without revealing the completed map.