Abstract

NB —this week’s talks will take place in the Club Room due to maintenance work in the Wolfson Hall.

Authentication to remote servers is now an extremely frequent problem, but many commonly used techniques are far from ideal: the server knows your secret in its entirety and the protocols used leak this information to eavesdroppers. This talk will be an introduction into Zero Knowledge Protocols, an alternative approach where servers do not know your secret and eavesdroppers learn nothing. We will see the formal properties that these protocols must possess and then consolidate the understanding with two real world examples. At the end we will briefly see how these ideas can be extended to computing functions over the inputs of a set of participants while preserving the secrecy of each input.