Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Business Processes
Date
2020
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
Every day the amount of private and sensitive information shared in the Internet
increases. This means that there is also a growing need for solutions to protect this
information. There are various effective technologies used to protect or hide private
and sensitive information, but even better approach would be to reduce the need for
sharing this information through the Internet at all. In many cases, zero-knowledge
proofs could be used, replacing the shared sensitive information with proofs based
on this information. As zero-knowledge proofs have a lot of potential, but they
are not widely used in practical applications yet, this thesis presents a tool that
supports two goals – firstly, making systems more secure and privacy-preserving,
and secondly, bringing zero-knowledge proofs more into practical applications. This
paper describes a tool that allows to prove, based on a description of a system (a
process) expressed as a business process model in BPMN notation, that the system
(a process) has under certain conditions some stated properties, for example, that
there is a flaw in it. For example, one may prove that a purchase process satisfying
certain conditions allows one to receive the product without actually paying for it,
without disclosing how this is achieved. For constructing and verifying the proofs,
the tool uses the zkSNARK protocol provided by libsnark.
Description
Keywords
BPM, BPMN, zero-knowledge proof, zkSNARK, libsnark