Zero-knowledge proofs and elliptic-curve cryptography
Pruebas de conocimiento cero y criptografía de curvas elípticas
- Date
- 1985 · confidence high
- Place
- MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Goldwasser, Micali, Rackoff); University of Washington and IBM (Koblitz, Miller), United States
- Credited to
- Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali and Charles Rackoff (zero-knowledge); Neal Koblitz and Victor Miller (elliptic curves)
- People
- 👤 Charles Rackoff1948–👤 Neal Koblitz1948–👤 Shafrira Goldwasser1958–👤 Silvio Micali1954–👤 Victor Miller1940–2026
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
Protocols for proving that a secret is known without revealing it, and public-key cryptography with much shorter keys based on elliptic curves. They underpin Bitcoin, Signal and digital identities.
What it led to
- Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures and privacy-preserving blockchains (zk-rollups)
- Efficient encryption for phones and cards
- Passwordless authentication and digital identity
Built on
Made possible
- Proof of Fermat Last Theorem1994 (anuncio 1993)
- Curve255192005
- Signal Protocol2013
- Bitcoin (ECDSA signatures)
- zk-SNARKs
- Signal protocol