The Encrypted Spaces project is a research and open source project working on end-to-end encryption for shared persistent data like documents, chat forums etc. (https://encryptedspaces.org)
As part of this work, we’re exploring an operation transparency notion to provide each group of users with a shared, fork-resistant operation log for their shared data. In our system this log is used with zero knowledge proofs to provide users with succinct, privacy-preserving proofs that the server has applied the operation log correctly.
We’re eager to discuss this notion and its requirements with the transparency engineering community. For this talk we will briefly summarize our proposed system, frame the operation transparency problem, and then raise some topics for further discussion:
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How operation transparency adds requirements compared to existing transparency notions (e.g. Key Transparency), in particular considering the relationship between transparency logs and ZK proofs over the operation log.
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Whether operation transparency can be built “on top” of a standard witnessing architecture like the transparency.dev witnesses.
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Whether we can extend the use of ZK proofs to provide a substitute for 3rd-party auditing in transparency systems; what trade-offs are involved there, and whether this is increasingly feasible with modern ZKP systems.
- Stepping back further: Can Operation Transparency, Key Transparency, Certificate Transparency, etc. be viewed as different points in a unified design space? How much reuse of code, protocols, ZK techniques, infrastructure etc can be achieved?
Speaker
Cryptography engineer and independent researcher. Co-creator of the Signal Protocol, and author of the Noise Protocol Framework.
