Privacy-enhancing cryptography at NIST

Abstract

We will talk about crypto standards at NIST and how it may relate to the ZKProof initiative. We will overview some of the history of crypto standards development at NIST. This informs our thinking regarding crypto areas that currently fall in uncharted territory with respect to standardization. An area of current interest at NIST is privacy-enhancing cryptography (PEC). Within this scope, we believe that it would be useful to develop reference material (documentation and implementations). Zero-knowledge techniques are an important component of this, along with techniques from Secure Multiparty Computation. Considering some PEC use cases as a basis, we will ask whether the current ZKProof proposal (as spelled out in the various public documents) is a good match for the anticipated needs.