Zero knowledge proofs could 'fix the Internet' and make us all trust each other again, former Merck CIO says
Toposware
- Zero Knowledge Proofs are a new tech emerging from the crypto world.
- ZKPs have the potential to address the trickiest security problems on today's internet.
- Disinformation, deep fakes, fraud, privacy are areas a ZKP startup called Toposware is working to solve.
"I think we're at the cusp of changing the world," investor Clark Golestani said of a technology called Zero Knowledge Proofs. "This is a way to literally transform all of enterprise and government. I haven't been more passionate about anything."
Golestani spent 24 years as a chief information officer at pharma giant Merck, before becoming a venture investor five years ago. He's an investor and board member of a startup named Toposware that hopes to embed ZKP security into its customers' everyday internet usage. In fact, Golestani excitedly tells me — as does Toposware CEO Theo Gauthier — another investor in Toposware is Taher Elgamal, who was chief scientist at Netscape Communications back in the 1990's and also invented one of the internet's first security protocols, Secure Sockets Layer.
They aren't the only people excited about ZKPs. It's a tech that Andreessen Horowitz crypto investor Michael Blau recently compared to a magician's trick. "One such area of science-fiction-like progress is that of zero-knowledge proofs (or ZKPs), a cryptographic tool that addresses two critical challenges in web3: scalability and privacy," Blau wrote in a September blog post about the tech. "Think of ZKPs like a great magic trick."
What are Zero Knowledge Proofs?
ZKPs have been around as a crypto mathematical theory since 1985 but it's only been the last three or four years when the theory has been turned into technology pursued by startups, mostly with respect to crypto blockchain networks, or so-called web3. Toposware, however, also has plans to offer a service that will allow companies to use this tech with the regular old 'internet, too.
ZKPs allow one party to verify that information is accurate, while not revealing the information itself. Instead they verify some other related fact about the information.
Unless you are mathematically inclined, most people who understand ZKPs typically describe them in terms of an analogy (though here's a link to one of the many academic papers that delve into the details).
Toposware uses the analogy of two balls placed side by side. Without ever naming the colors of the balls, one can verify that they are different colors by verifying with 100% accuracy each time the positions of the balls have been switched. This proves that the otherwise identical balls are different colors, even though the colors themselves are not revealed.
Or, as Blau describes, someone can prove they know the secret of a magic trick by successfully performing the magic trick, without sharing how it was done.
How this will change the internet
Gauthier and Golestani describe potential wide-ranging impacts of ZPKs such as fighting disinformation. It becomes impossible for misinformation to pose as facts, or for deep fakes to be mistaken for the real thing because ZPKs will out them as fake. Researchers at Stanford, for instance, are working on this.
ZPKs can also be used to detect fraud in financial applications; create audit trails; in privacy use cases; and to verify that a specific AI model is being used without sharing the model itself, ZPK experts say.
Toposware is working on turning the tech into an internet protocol that works so fast in the background that it doesn't slow things down.
Toposware is developing a cloud service, a so-called "settlement layer" where companies can add its ZKP service to their networks. And if quantum computers ever become reliable enough, ZKPs should be an ideal use case for them, although today's ZKP protocols are done on today's conventional computers, Gauthier says.
Toposware is among a couple of dozen startups working in the area. PortalGate, for instance, is using ZKP for crypto asset trading; Ingonyama is making chips for ZKPs uses.
Toposware, which raised $5 million in November, might be among the startups furthest along in turning this from a splashy web3 tech popular among crypto enthusiasts into a practical tech available to enterprises.
The startup has about 20 employees and partnerships with academic institutions globally. The protocol itself "was actually designed in conjunction with the CEA, the French Atomic Energy Commission. And we have partnerships with institutions all across Europe and some in the United States as well," Gauthier says.