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When the code has to use ZKP's, there is an intrinsic overhead measured in orders of magnitude of CPU time. By avoiding the use of third parties, that overhead
by dumbo-octopus 2y ago
When the code has to use ZKP's, there is an intrinsic overhead measured in orders of magnitude of CPU time. By avoiding the use of third parties, that overhead is eliminated.
So the question is, does this hypothetical entity with very precious data incur the extra orders of magnitude of compute time in oder to not maintain a rack in house, or do they just... maintain a rack. Keeping in mind, of course, that they already must maintain a rack in order for ZKP's to make any sense at all. So... do they add a server to their existing rack to handle the workload, or refactor their entire computation to use ZKP's, and incur several extra orders of magnitude of compute time, and outsource the work to a cloud service?
- avianlyric 2y agoYou’re making the assumption that the entity with the data, and the entity that wants to process that data are the same entity. An obvious use case for ZKP’s, which is under active research, is allowing medical data from institutions like the NHS to be processed by research organisations and pharmaceutical companies. Allowing pharmaceutical and research organisations to extract useful medical data from large populations, without requiring the handover of personal medical data. In that situation the owner of the data has a clear incentive to use ZKP’s (they’re required to protect medical data), and so does the data processor (they can extract new inferences from previously inaccessible, but extremely large, datasets). There’s obviously a clear profit motive as well, and given the cost of medical research, the use ZKP’s doesn’t seem unreasonable.
- dumbo-octopus 2y agoWhat is an example of a real use case for such where the data owner would rather do orders of magnitude more compute to generate the results in the fancy new ZKP format, compared to hosting a simple API that processes the exact same queries and returns the exact same amount of information as the adversary would get in the ZKP strategy, but using classical means?
- avianlyric 2y agoYour again making the assumption that the data owner know what queries people want to execute, and is also happy to pay for all the compute involved in running those queries. There is no “simple API” that’s gonna let you remotely run machine learning training on someone else’s hardware, or let you perform any other kind of large dataset analysis. Converting data into a ZKP format is a one time cost, that can be shared by many different data processors.
- dumbo-octopus 2y agoClearly, the owner is in a great position to charge for access. This is bread & butter software-as-a-service. Can you give an example/paper/blog of how you envision this one time data conversion and infinite privacy preserving queryability to work?
- avianlyric 2y agoAgain you’re making the assumption the data owner wants to get into that game. I seriously doubt the NHS in the UK have any interest in becoming a SaaS provider.