Towards Standardizing Zero Knowledge

Explore a comprehensive overview of the ZKProof standardization effort in this 44-minute presentation by Ran Canetti at ACS'19. Delve into the main goals, challenges, progress, and future directions of standardizing zero-knowledge proofs. Examine efforts to create a common language among different constituents, partition the problem space, and ensure expressible and realizable efficiency and security guarantees. Investigate the challenge of obtaining composable security while maintaining realistic efficiency for succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge, and learn how such security can inform emerging standards. Cover topics including standardizing cryptography, the ZKProofs Steering Committee, interim work, current standard proposals, issues with classic definitions, the UC approach, vanilla ZK functionality in real and ideal worlds, NIZK functionality, and restricted settings in SNARK land.

Intro
Goals for standardization
Standardizing cryptography
ZKProofs Steering Committee
Interim work
Current standard proposals
Issues with the classic definition
The UC approach: Specification via an Ideal Service, with composition
Vanilla ZK functionality - Real World
Vanilla ZK functionality - Ideal World
NIZK functionality - Ideal World
Enter SNARK land
But can be done in restricted settings