this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
13 points (88.2% liked)

Programming

17651 readers
318 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

It uses MPC and ZK to prove some data from a server (that uses TLS) is authentic given some request.

One of the simple demos is proving you received a DM from someone on twitter, without sharing your session token or login credentials with the other party.

Another idea is proving you know some exploit (think sql injection) without revealing how you did it.

Or proving you purchased some item off a website so you can review it on a neutral platform (amazon reviews but without amazon being able to manipulate the votes)

top 9 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[โ€“] AtHeartEngineer 6 points 1 year ago

FYI its in rust, and its very much in alpha, but if you like diving in and are comfortable with rust, come play ๐Ÿ˜

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

This is amazing. Cryptography is truly the sorcery of our age.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Having to have a trustworthy notary interactively as part of the protocol during the TLS request seems like it shuts out a lot of applications.

I wonder if it could be done with zk-STARKs, with the session transcript and ephemeral keys as secret inputs, and a CA certificate as a public input, to produce a proof of the property without the need for the notary. That would then mean the only roles are TLS server, prover, and verifier, with no interactive dependency between the prover and verifier (i.e. the prover could generate the proof first, that can non-interactively verified at any time later by any number of verifiers).

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Considering data is secured from the notary, it might be that large companies (Google, Microsoft, Apple, other foundations) might run free notaries.
Like how LetsEncrypt does free TLS certs for websites, or how Google (and many others) provide free STUN servers for webrtc. I imagine it's fairly low traffic, and fairly light encryption (being TLS, it's pretty optimised and hardware accelerated).

If it picks up as a "widely useful thing" like STUN signalling did, there might be things like browsers being able to configure a Notary server (so you can self host if you want, or use one provided by your email provider or your ISP or whatever)

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait, is this sort of like an SSH tunnel?

[โ€“] AtHeartEngineer 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Its a bit more complicated than that. There is a fair bit of cryptography that happens where you basically cooperate with another party to communicate with the server in a way where you cant cheat.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I'm not being reductive, just trying to understand the mechanics. The notary is making requests on behalf of the other, right?

[โ€“] AtHeartEngineer 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I will quote the devs directly: "This Verifier is not "a man in the middle". Instead, the Verifier participates in a secure multi-party computation (MPC) to jointly operate the TLS connection without seeing the data in plain text."

https://docs.tlsnotary.org/#%E2%91%A0-multi-party-tls-request

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I don't think SSH tunnel can snoop either, but maybe I misunderstand them.