Boundless Possibilities
Making Online Transactions Safe and Private
Eran Tromer has built a career on pinpointing the security holes in information systems that we all use and inventing ways to mitigate them. One of the computer science professor’s main areas of focus—modern cryptography—led to perhaps his highest-profile technique: zero-knowledge proofs.
Zero-knowledge proofs, conceived in the 1980s, enable two parties to conduct a transaction—for example, the sharing of confidential information—that includes extra layers of verification. Both parties use mathematical formulae to demonstrate that their shared information is trustworthy without having to reveal facts they don’t want to share.
In 2015, Tromer became a founding scientist for Zcash, a cryptocurrency that uses zero-knowledge proofs to protect the privacy of its users. Zcash answers a drawback of the blockchain technology underpinning digital currencies like Bitcoin: a lack of privacy. “You don’t want your business competitors to see your transactions, or your national adversaries to spy on your citizens,” Tromer says. Hundreds of companies involved in digital currencies have adopted Zcash and its underlying cryptography.
You might ask: If the parties to a transaction are invisible, doesn’t that open the door to bad actors? “We’ve grappled a lot with this challenge and how to combine privacy with what society needs to prevent crime and terrorism,” says Tromer. “The robust guarantees of zero-knowledge proofs are actually not just the problem, they’re also the solution.”
Here again, Tromer’s research led to a new company, Sealance, which he cofounded in 2020. Using zero-knowledge proofs, Sealance offers a “trust platform” for cryptocurrency users that adds more verification gates for a transaction. Users can verify that a transaction is financially correct and legitimate—and validate that none of the parties involved is subject to sanctions or is tracked back to illicit activity.