Study of Transparency Dictionaries with zkSNARKs and their applications

This documentation is designed to evolve alongside my thesis on IT Security and Cryptography at Philipps University Marburg. My work will draw from research presented in papers on CONIKS, Certificate Transparency, Transparency Logs, Merkle², and Transparency Dictionaries. The latter, for instance, explores how an untrusted service (Verdict) handling label value maps can effectively prove its integrity and honesty. In this context, integrity and honesty refer to the pre-application policies by which the service purports to act. The generated proof should be publicly accessible and easily verifiable by any user, enabling anyone to effortlessly confirm the service's proper conduct.
The service employs, among other things, zkSNARKs, which not only allow for efficient verification of honest behavior but also maintain the secrecy of potentially sensitive internal data due to the zero-knowledge property. The combination of these ideas, along with their application to other systems, will be the focus of my future work.

In my bachelor's thesis, I delve into the authors' core concepts and discuss the data structures and cryptographic principles employed. Furthermore, I showcase these ideas through a sample implementation, developed using Rust for the backend and React for web visualization.

Getting started

We will introduce some basic concepts of cryptography that are essential for understanding the content. For more information and deeper explanations, we will provide links to relevant literature and texts. If you encounter errors or have suggestions for improvement, please feel free to contact us.