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Projects Privacy-Enhancing Cryptography

Privacy-Enhancing Cryptography PEC

Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP)

Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) is an important Privacy-Enhancing Cryptography (PEC) technique.  It enables proving the truthfulness of a mathematical statement, without revealing information that may have been useful in finding said truthfulness and is not apparent in the statement.

Besides myriad privacy-preserving applications, ZKPs are also useful in establishing correct behavior in other cryptography protocols, such as in Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC).  The NIST PEC project is accompanying ZKP developments and initiatives toward future useful standards.

For technical reasons, it is often useful to characterize a "ZKP of Knowledge", where the proof that a statement is true is done by proxy of proving knowledge of secret information (a witness) that is consistent with a public instance that supports the statement.  For example, this can be used to prove knowledge of a private key corresponding to a public key. In the case of an RSA public-key pair, we can have Statement = "The number N is a valid RSA signing key", Instance = N, Witness = "Secret primes P and Q, satisfying P*Q = N and other properties required by FIPS 186-5".  The NIST Threshold Call gives various examples of ZKPoKs of interest related to NIST standardized primitives (see Table 16 in Appendix B.2). 

The Category S6 of the NIST First Call for Multi-Party Threshold Schemes (NISTIR 8214C) calls for submission of zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge (ZKPoK). The Threshold Call encourages the community of experts to participate in the process, by submitting ZKPoK schemes, and/or subsequently supporting their public analysis.

The "Previews" submitted in 2026 to the NIST Threshold Call consider ZKP:

This container is meant to be updated with examples of applications of ZKP.

Some ZKP-related talks hosted by NIST, by external speakers:

NIST has collaborated with the ZKProof initiative between 2019 and 2024, as a way of supporting the development of open reference material on zero-knowledge proofs. This page lists outputs of that past interaction:

Past ZKProof-related talks by PEC members:

(Some talks were jointly presented with other ZKProof Editors)

ZKProof Reference Material (Selected links):

Contacts

Reach the PEC team at:
[email protected]

Luís T. A. N. Brandão

René Peralta - NIST

Angela Robinson - NIST

Topics

Security and Privacy: cryptography, privacy

Created January 03, 2017, Updated October 26, 2026