Zero Knowledge Systems

Last updated
Zero Knowledge Systems
IndustryPrivacy Technology
Founded1998
Headquarters Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Key people
Austin Hill (CEO) and Hamnett Hill (COO)
Products Freedom network
freedom pseudonymous mail system
Number of employees
300
Website zero-knowledge.com

Zero-Knowledge Systems (also known as ZKS) was a Canadian privacy technology software and services company, best known for the Freedom Network, its privacy network. It was founded by brothers Austin Hill & Hamnett Hill and their father Hamnett Hill Sr. (aka Hammie Hill) in 1997. Its headquarters were in Montreal, Quebec. Early investors and board members were Mike Santer and Alex Hern co-founder Inktomi. The company rebranded under the new name Radialpoint though was no longer a developer of privacy-enhancing technologies. [1] Most recently, it was acquired by AppDirect and rebranded as AppHelp.

Zero-Knowledge Systems was one of the first large-scale commercial attempts to combine cypherpunk principles with a for-profit technology. During its heyday, ZKS captured the media's imagination and successfully drew attention to the privacy risks of unsuspecting internet users.

Being based in Canada allowed it to circumvent the US ban on strong cryptography, considered "munitions" at the time. ZKS was featured in Wired magazine as early as 1999. [2]

The ZKS Freedom Network was a pioneer of anonymous networking technology, predating the Tor network. Some of the enterprise privacy research was also inherited by the IBM Tivoli digital rights management suite. [3]

Several of the company's employees were from an academic privacy-enhanced technology background: Stefan Brands (senior cryptographer) and cypherpunk background Ian Goldberg (chief scientist) and Adam Back (architect & cryptographer). Other employees included Mike Shaver (chief software officer), Adam Shostack, Anton Stiglic, Christian Paquin, Jonathan Wilkins and Ulf Moller. [4] Stephanie Perrin served as Chief Privacy Officer for the firm before she became Director of Research and Policy at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and helped to draft PIPEDA, the Canadian privacy law. [5]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bruce Schneier</span> American computer scientist (born 1963)

Bruce Schneier is an American cryptographer, computer security professional, privacy specialist, and writer. Schneier is an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society as of November, 2013. He is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, and The Tor Project; and an advisory board member of Electronic Privacy Information Center and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the author of several books on general security topics, computer security and cryptography and is a squid enthusiast.

A cypherpunk is any individual advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. Originally communicating through the Cypherpunks electronic mailing list, informal groups aimed to achieve privacy and security through proactive use of cryptography. Cypherpunks have been engaged in an active movement since at least the late 1980s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Len Sassaman</span> American technologist and cryptographer (1980–2011)

Leonard Harris Sassaman was an American technologist, information privacy advocate, and the maintainer of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer code and operator of the randseed remailer. Much of his career gravitated towards cryptography and protocol development.

Articles related to cryptography include:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Chaum</span> American computer scientist and cryptographer (born 1955)

David Lee Chaum is an American computer scientist, cryptographer, and inventor. He is known as a pioneer in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies, and widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash. His 1982 dissertation "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups" is the first known proposal for a blockchain protocol. Complete with the code to implement the protocol, Chaum's dissertation proposed all but one element of the blockchain later detailed in the Bitcoin whitepaper. He has been referred to as "the father of online anonymity", and "the godfather of cryptocurrency".

An anonymous P2P communication system is a peer-to-peer distributed application in which the nodes, which are used to share resources, or participants are anonymous or pseudonymous. Anonymity of participants is usually achieved by special routing overlay networks that hide the physical location of each node from other participants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Goldberg</span> Cryptographer (born 1973)

Ian Avrum Goldberg is a cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is best known for breaking Netscape's implementation of SSL, and for his role as chief scientist of Radialpoint, a Canadian software company. Goldberg is currently a professor at the Faculty of Mathematics of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science within the University of Waterloo, and the Canada Research Chair in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. He was formerly Tor Project board of directors chairman, and is one of the designers of off the record messaging.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matt Blaze</span> American researcher

Matt Blaze is an American researcher who focuses on the areas of secure systems, cryptography, and trust management. He is currently the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University, and is on the board of directors of the Tor Project.

"Information wants to be free" is an expression that means either that all people should be able to access information freely, or that information naturally strives to become as freely available among people as possible. It is often used by technology activists to criticize laws that limit transparency and general access to information. People who criticize intellectual property law say the system of such government-granted monopolies conflicts with the development of a public domain of information. The expression is often credited to Stewart Brand, who was recorded saying it at a Hackers Conference in 1984.

Stefan Brands is the designer of the core cryptographic protocols of Microsoft's U-Prove technology. Following his academic research on these protocols during the nineties, they were implemented and marketed under the U-Prove name by Credentica until Microsoft acquired the technology.

The clipped tag is a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag designed to enhance consumer privacy. RFID is an identification technology in which information stored in semiconductor chips contained in RFID tags is communicated by means of radio waves to RFID readers. The most simple passive RFID tags do not have batteries or transmitters. They get their energy from the field of the reader. They transfer their information to the reader by modulating the signal that is reflected back to the reader by the tag. Because tags depend on the reader for power their range is limited, typically up to 10 meters (33 ft) for UHF RFID tags.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adam Back</span> British cryptographer and cypherpunk (born 1970)

Adam Back is a British cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is the CEO of Blockstream, which he co-founded in 2014. He invented Hashcash, which is used in the Bitcoin mining process.

Privacy-enhancing technologies (PET) are technologies that embody fundamental data protection principles by minimizing personal data use, maximizing data security, and empowering individuals. PETs allow online users to protect the privacy of their personally identifiable information (PII), which is often provided to and handled by services or applications. PETs use techniques to minimize an information system's possession of personal data without losing functionality. Generally speaking, PETs can be categorized as either hard or soft privacy technologies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moxie Marlinspike</span> American entrepreneur

Moxie Marlinspike is an American entrepreneur, cryptographer, and computer security researcher. Marlinspike is the creator of Signal, co-founder of the Signal Technology Foundation, and served as the first CEO of Signal Messenger LLC. He is also a co-author of the Signal Protocol encryption used by Signal, WhatsApp, Google Messages, Facebook Messenger, and Skype.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hal Finney (computer scientist)</span> Cryptograph and cypherpunk

Harold Thomas Finney II was an American software developer. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. He later worked for PGP Corporation. He was an early Bitcoin contributor, and received the first Bitcoin transaction from the currency's creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

ZKS may refer to

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moti Yung</span> Israeli computer scientist

Mordechai M. "Moti" Yung is a cryptographer and computer scientist known for his work on cryptovirology and kleptography.

Monero is a cryptocurrency which uses a blockchain with privacy-enhancing technologies to obfuscate transactions to achieve anonymity and fungibility. Observers cannot decipher addresses trading Monero, transaction amounts, address balances, or transaction histories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zcash</span> Cryptocurrency aimed at privacy

Zcash is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency which is based on Bitcoin's codebase. It shares many similarities, such as a fixed total supply of 21 million units.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM Cloud</span> Cloud computing services provided by IBM

IBM Cloud is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM.

References

  1. A New Kind of Mafia in Montreal? How a Culture of Startup CEOs are Playing the Angel Game BetaKit. September 3, 2013. Retrieved August 2, 2014
  2. Oakes, Chris (9 February 1999). "Zero-Knowledge: Nothing Personal". Wired. Retrieved 13 May 2020.
  3. "Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language (EPAL)".
  4. "Dr. Stefan Brands Joins Zero-Knowledge Systems". CANADIAN CORPORATE NEWS. February 23, 2000. Retrieved February 4, 2014.
  5. "Stephanie Perrin (Ms), CANADA". Archived from the original on 2015-07-21. Retrieved 2023-08-25.

Further reading