Zero Knowledge Proof

Zero Knowledge Proof- Protocol of Interactive Inputs

A zero knowledge proof, in cryptography is a system in which one prover or a party has the capability of proving to another party, that a given statement is true without the need of imparting any information besides the fact that the statement is true.

In other words, very informally, it means that a zero knowledge proof protocol enables a party known as a prover in convincing the verifier or the other party, with conviction that the statement is true, without revealing any information about his knowledge.

In the case of zero knowledge proofs of knowledge, the requirement of the protocol is interactive input from the verifier in the form of challenge or challenges like the responses from the prover which could convince the verifier only if the statement tends to be true, where the prover does not seem to have claimed knowledge which is clear in the case since the verifier could then record the execution of the protocol and also replay it to another party.

Zero Knowledge Concepts Proposed in 1980

If this tends to get accepted by the other party as proof, then the replaying party is aware of the secret information, it could mean that the protocol has leaked knowledge and it is not zero knowledge or it could be spurious which means it leads to a party accepting another party’s proof of knowledge and who does not have the actual possession of it.

The conception of `zero knowledge’ was proposed in 1980s by MIT researchers Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali and Charles Rackoff who worked on problems that were connected to interactive proof system, a theoretical system wherein first party known as prover exchanged messages with second party known as verifier in order to convince the verifier on some mathematical statement as the truth,The specific concern raised was about the leakage of information.

 In the simple sense, zero knowledge proofs are evidence which yield nothing other than the validity of the assertion which is, a verifier has proof that gains conviction with regards tothe validity of the assertion and this is expressed by stating that anything which is feasibly computable from the point of zero knowledge proof could also be feasibly computable from the assertion point of view.

Basic Definitions/ Properties 

Some of the basic definition on variants comprise of universal and black-box simulations, consideration of auxiliary inputs, the level of similarity needed of the stimulation and restricting attention to honest verifiers. It is also a known fact, that zero knowledge proofs prevail for any NP-sets, if one way functions tend to exist resulting in a powerful tool in the design of cryptographic protocols since it compelsparties to behave as per a predetermined protocol which is, the protocol requires the parties to have zero knowledge proofs on the accuracy of their secret based activity without the need of any revelations. Three properties need to be fulfilled in the case of zero knowledge proof which is –

Completeness – When the statement is true, the honest verifier, the one who follows protocol in a proper manner, will be convinced of the fact by the honest prover.

Soundness – When the statement tends to be false, no cheating prover should convince the honest verifier stating that it is true, with the exception of some small probability.

Lastly, Zero knowledge – When the statement seems to be true, no cheating verifier gets to learn anything besides the fact and is formalized by showing that a cheating verifier has some simulate which provides only the statement to be proved could produce a transcript which is similar to an interaction between the honest prover and the cheating verifier

“Shopping cart” Patent Beaten by Newegg Comes Back To Court, Loses Again

Now patent troll will not get any more money from Victoria's Secret, Avon or others. During last congress, one of the patent reforms comes in spotlight and this patent was the patent of “online shopping cart”. In Congressional hearings the issue comes in spotlight, but till that time the shopping cart patent was dead as its owner, Soverain Software was beaten by Newegg, which is one of the retailers. Newegg won an appellate ruling while validating its patents and by throwing out more than $2.5 million jury verdict against it.

This ruling wiped out the biggest win of Soverain, which was the verdict against Victoria's Secret and Avon in 2011 and for that companies have ordered to pay almost more than $18 million with a "running royalty" of about 1 per cent to infringing the same patents over again.

Most of the apparel companies have been able to coast on the same legal platform with the win of Newegg, whereas; on the other side instead of admitting a defeat, Soverain have hired more law firms to file the appeal by Avon and Victoria's Secret. Before some days, a panel of judges in U.S. Court overturned the win of Soverain and re-affirmed the final decision that now "shopping cart" patent and its other patent for e-commerce, were invalid.

In general, whenever a patent-holder loses, then because of longstanding legal rules they wouldn't proceed with outstanding appeals to prevent the other parties from re-litigating the same case in different courts. However Soverain argued on the issue and stated that these rules shouldn’t apply as; Soverain hadn’t a full and fair opportunity to litigate the issue in courts.

It is true that East Texas jury has found that it is in the favor of Soverain's, but they didn’t address the issue that whether patents were obvious or not? But Soverain itself stopped the East Texas jury from considering the issue. The company, who was holding the patent, filed a complaint by arguing that its patents were non-obvious and it’s a matter of law, so the decision of district court will be final. But Newegg raise the issue again and apparently it was great surprise of win for Soverain.


Soverain stated that it would have raised certain different or additional arguments for appeal if it had known that these particular courts might reverse the district court on invalidity rather than only granting a new trial. Soverain argued that its shopping cart patent was special because it used to identify the product, whereas; the concept of product identifiers weren’t present in CompuServe Mall’s prior art technology, which knocked out Soverain's patent.

But the referred court noted that Soverain didn’t talk about the fact of product identifiers in Newegg case and this can be the reason for Soverain loss. However, Avon declined any official comment whereas; Victoria's Secret didn't respond immediately. A spokesperson from Soverain told Ars, that we respectively disagree with the court’s decision and do not feel that it was justice.

5 Simple Tips to Avoid Getting Scammed In 2015

Criminals and computer hackers in all over the world are active; they are working round the clock to steal your personal information as well as money. There is nothing which you can do, but with few simple precautions you can reduce the risk because life in digital age doesn’t come with undo button and your small mistake can crook your Social Security number.

• Use credit cards for online shopping: 

A credit card provides you better fraud protection than debit card and net banking as credit cards follow the different federal rules. If you are using credit cards, so you can dispute an unauthorized charge and later credit card company have to take charge off your bill after doing the investigation, which is not possible if you are using debit card. You can also dispute the charges of a credit card if the merchandise doesn’t arrive or if you have got the defective material. Whereas; some people afraid to use a credit card for online shopping, but this is for what credit card are meant to be. If there is any kind of problem, so it’s a job of credit card companies to deal with it.


• Protect your personal information:

Hacker have variety of tools and techniques to get your account numbers and passwords such as; bogus emails designed to look like authentic e-mails from banks, key-loggers, phishing and more. There are always reasons why they need your personal information, but you shouldn’t forget that your Social Security number is the key to your tension free life because a hacker can use it to steal money or your personal identity. Social Security numbers are essential for financial and medical records, so it is recommended to guard it.


• Never download unknown attachment or click on suspicious links:

It’s easy to click on a certain link which is in text mail or on social media post, but it is recommended to never open such links which are calming as shipping invoice or some other document calming certain lucky draw. Fraudsters are ready to count on your curiosity and your instant response can end-up with an installation of malicious software onto computers and smartphones.


• Take your time:

Never make your purchase in rush as it can lead you towards fraud. Never fall in love with “buy-now-or-else because sometimes hackers use this trick to compromise your financial details. So before taking any final check-out makes sure you are doing shopping or purchase from authentic platform.



•  Don’t be fooled by e-mails of free prize or free merchandise or money back guarantees: 

Never pay for playing in contest, which claims billion of dollars in prize. If the contest is authentic, so you don’t have to buy anything or pay any amount of money to get your prize. Free is good, but nothing comes in free especially when you are living in this meaning full world. The initial product may be free, but the other attached products can end your purchase with heavy bills and this is the technique through which most of the e-commerce companies are making a real profit. 

 

 

 

Microsoft Says Its New Computer Vision System Can Outperform Humans

Recently, the researchers of Microsoft claims in published paper that their team has developed the world’s first computer machine, which is capable to outperform humans on certain popular benchmark. According to estimation of experts, humans can identify or classify images at ImageNet dataset and in this process the error rate will be 5.1 per cent, whereas; in recent published paper team of researchers indicated that due to deep-learning based system, successfully they have achieved an error rate of 4.94 per cent, which is little less than human error rate.

Microsoft’s paper was published in less than a month after Baidu’s paper. It is well known thing that Baidu is most famous search engine in China as Google is ban in China. Baidu published its paper indicating its record-setting system that claimed an error rate of 5.98 per cent with the help of homemade supercomputing architecture. The performance was based on the competition on ImageNet, which belongs from the team of Google researchers, who have also built a deep learning system with an error rate of 6.66 in 2014.

The paper of Microsoft states, “As per our knowledge, we are the first who have published instance of surpassing humans with the help of visual recognition challenge, whereas; on the native side, our algorithms are still making mistakes in certain cases which are not so difficult for humans, especially then when it requires a high-level knowledge or context understanding”.

Whereas; our all algorithms have given a superior result with this specific dataset, which does not indicate that machine’s vision can outperforms the human vision on object recognition in general. At the end of research, we believe that our results are showcasing the tremendous potential of system algorithms to match the performance level with human for certain visual recognition tasks.

According to Jian Sun, who is researcher in Microsoft, the difference is plainer English in a blog post of Microsoft; “Humans can easily make the difference between a sheep and a cow or between other things whereas; computers are not perfect in these simple tasks. However, when it comes to differentiate between breeds of sheep’s than here outperform humans and it proves that computer can be trained to look at the certain details such as; size, shape, texture, and context of the image to identify the difference that can’t be observed by humans.

As human or researcher if you have curiosity to learn how deep learning works, why in these days it’s a hot area, how it can be used in commercial applications, then you should attend the Structure Data conference of Microsoft at New York between March 18 and 19. Speakers will be machine learning and deep learning experts from Microsoft, Facebook, Hampton Creek, Yahoo, Spotify, NASA and Stanford as well as also from startups such as; Enlitic, MetaMind, Blue River Technology and TeraDeep. Later in Structure Intelligence conference, which will be organized between Sept. 22 and 23 in San Francisco, we will dive even deeper into artificial intelligence, says spokesperson from Microsoft

Microsoft Will Support Biometric Password-Killers on Windows 10

Support Window 10 with FIDO

It was recently revealed by Microsoft at the Stanford Cybersecurity Summit, that the company wouldbe supporting Window 10 with the next version of the Fast Identification Online – FIDO spec enabling devices to work with plenty of third party biometric readers and also provide easy framework for any hardware developers wanting to build extra security in a laptop or a phone.

This could mean that companies designing useful things such as fingerprint readers as well as iris scanners could now rest assured with the thought that their technology will now work with an upgraded version of the most popular desktop operating system and users would probably be in a position to log in to Outlook with fingerprint or an eyes-can with this new development.

With regards to the prevailing fingerprint readers, FIDO has been designed to replace passwords completely by a faster and much more localized authentication system and unlike the traditional biometric security methods, FIDO could completely replace passwords and is designed in such a way that no biometric data gets leaked online with everything inclusive of the authentication done locally offline.

Designed to Protect Biometric Information

Biometric authentication is utilised in computer science for the purpose of identification as well as access control and is also used as identity of individuals in groups which are under surveillance. FIDO which has been designed as an open standard has been supported by some of the largest companies in banking and tech which include Microsoft, PayPal, Google and Bank of America where the system is created for the purpose of protecting biometric information through a zero knowledge proof, authenticating fingerprints or eye scans locally with any exposure to the web at large.

Dustin Ingall of Microsoft has commented in a blog post accompanying the announcement that moving beyond the password was `one of the top priorities for them at Microsoft’.He has also commented that `the current Technical Preview build enables a number of enterprise scenarios and it showcases their integration with Windows 10 sign in, Azure Active Directory and access to major SaaS services such as Office 365 Exchange Online, Salesforce, Citrix, Box, Concur, to mention a few’.

Window 10 – Big Release for Microsoft

Window 10 would also be including Active Directory integration for on-premise scenarios and Microsoft Account integration for consumer Microsoft services like Outlook.com, OneDrive and much more. Specification of version 1.0 had been released in January with companies such as Yubico making hardware with the use of FIDO in order to log into Google account.

Window 10 support is tied to the 2.0 release where Microsoft has been making its contribution in design inputs. Windows 10 being a big release for Microsoft, great efforts is being done with the OS that has already received positive feedback and is presently in the technical preview stage of development.

Even at the technical preview stage, Microsoft lays claims that Windows Insiders running one of the latest build of the Windows 10 technical preview could test the embedded FIDO 2.0 specification. With the OS comprising of several new features, Microsoft is making headway in more addition with its announcement of Window 10 supporting the next version of FIDO spec.