Zero-knowledge: Trust and Privacy on an Industrial Scale

One of the main obstacles to the deployment of blockchains is the fact that the data managed on a blockchain is publicly accessible. This is unthinkable in the health or banking sectors, for example. Zero-knowledge technologies can resolve precisely this contradiction. These technologies can be implemented either by deploying a blockchain specifically designed to integrate zero-knowledge, or by deploying zero-knowledge software components on an existing blockchain that is technologically capable of integrating them.

This concept of zero-knowledge is so amazing and promising that it earned its inventors, Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali, the Turing Award in 2012.

To present this counter-intuitive technology and put it into perspective with uses and services, the “Blockchain and B2B Platforms” chair hosted at École Polytechnique and supported by Capgemini, NomadicLabs and Caisse des Dépôts, chose to interview two doctoral students, Sarah Bordage and Youssef El Housni, who are doing their research at the École Polytechnique’s computer science laboratory as part of the chair, and Anthony Simonet-Boulogne and Gilles Fedak, from the startup iExec, who see zero-knowledge as technology to be integrated into their offer.