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Privacy enhancing technologies are neat, but they're not exactly new. I've been following them since the 90s. There was a book called _Translucent Databases_ an
by xhkkffbf 4y ago
Privacy enhancing technologies are neat, but they're not exactly new. I've been following them since the 90s. There was a book called _Translucent Databases_ and dozens of good papers back then. Since then, there are entire conferences.
It's good that the Guardian is covering this, but it's not exactly new.
- mattdesl 4y agoFast, general purpose, succinct, and non-interactive proofs are pretty new, see SNARK (2013), STARK (2018) and Halo2 (2020). Even more interesting is zkVM like RISC Zero. Practical and open source applications of FHE feels even more nascent than ZK.
- woojoo666 4y agoIt's not new but it is undergoing a bit of a revolution because of growing interest in privacy and decentralization. Monero didn't exist in the 90s
- nl 4y agoTranslucent Databases[1] is not the same thing at all. The approach they are using requires the person doing the querying to have the same encryption key that the data is encrypted with (eg, they recommend hashing data then querying with the hashed data[2]). This is a great technique that improves security. But is isn't the same as zero-knowledge techniques which are comparatively new. The maths for them first developed in the mid-to-late 1980s, but zkSNARK (which made it useful in computer science) wasn't developed until 2012[3] [1] https://www.wayner.org/node/15 https://www.wayner.org/node/15 [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301174908_Translucent_Databases https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301174908_Transluce... [3] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2090236.2090263 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2090236.2090263