A Survey on the Zero-Knowledge Interactive Proof Systems

Zero-Knowledge Protocols are interactive proofs by which one party (the prover) can have a challenge-and-response type conversation with another party (the verifier) to convince him that an assertion, for example holding some secret information, is true without leaking any other knowledge than the assertion itself. In this paper, we give a survey of this kind of protocols, which had been introduced for the first time in 1985 by Goldwasser, Micali, and Rackoff. Since then, for their advantage over classical proofs, they have become a powerful tool for cryptographic designs and computational complexity studies. In addition to preserving secrecy, Interactive Proofs cover a wider range of problems to prove than classical proofs.