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The issue is not you vs. other companies; it's you vs 25+ years of cryptographic literature. > no company has yet been shameless enough to deceptively use the
by Ar-Curunir 10y ago
The issue is not you vs. other companies; it's you vs 25+ years of cryptographic literature.
> no company has yet been shameless enough to deceptively use the term Zero Knowledge.
Except you guys? Why use the phrase "zero knowledge" when you fully know that it has a predefined meaning? Call it no information, no leakage, zero leakage, whatever, but why the one term that is already used to refer to a different concept?
I get that it's a sexy name, but that's why cryptographers use it to refer to a much cooler concept than mere encryption.
- rarrrrrr 10y agoThanks for the feedback. For what it's worth, we did try a bunch of alternative wordings, and Zero Knowledge was the phrase that non technologists found most accessible. We prioritized making the explanation clear to non-experts vs. to the community of cryptographers.
- Esau 10y agoI believe your explanation but it still strikes me as the wrong thing to do.
- jameskegel 10y agoThis doesn't feel like the correct solution.
- StavrosK 10y agoI'd like to propose "Zero Access", as in zero access to the plaintext.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoThat's actually not bad. I was fine with SpiderOak going for a term that is simple, catchy, and easy to market. Zero Access is the kind of alternative that might work. That specific one might have a problem: send perception of user having zero access to their own data when most clouds constantly reinforce "access from anywhere any time." You're thinking along the right lines. I think variations of the words safe and vault have worked for other companies, too, given people understand what they do. "Your data is in a locked vault that we hold for you while you keep the keys or combination." That sort of thing.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y agoThey could go with "Know nothing". (Or "Jon Snow", for short, if they can get away with it without being sued - "Jon S. crypto, we dont know nuthing" ;-)
- danbruc 10y agoA lot of words are overloaded, across domains as well as within domains, that is not ideal but also no unsurmountable problem, you can always clarify your usage by providing definitions. There is certainly not much of a point to explain things in precise and correct terminology if this prevents the intended audience from understanding you. On the other hand, people aware of the technical details will have no big difficulties to understand something despite simplifications or inaccurate terminology. I am actually not even sure whether zero-knowledge is not technically correct here. Terms like zero-knowledge proof or zero-knowledge protocol have very specific meanings and certainly do not apply here, but is zero-knowledge on its own really used for something more specific or other than not leaking knowledge? I also immediately thought of zero-knowledge proofs and protocols but nothing like that is mentioned anywhere, at least as far as I can tell, so it was kind if my mistake to read something into it that was not actually there. EDIT: Zero-knowledge seems to indeed have a very specific technical meaning on its own [1], at least in the context of zero-knowledge proofs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof#Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof#Definitio...
- tptacek 10y agoThis particular term is not overloaded. People familiar with encryption know it to mean something specific.
- syshum 10y agoThis happens all the time with marketing, surely this is not the first time you have seen a company co opt a term for marketing purposes. This seems like a case of perfect being the enemy of good.