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Comment by y7 | Hacker News Reader

I was slightly puzzled what they meant by "zero-knowledge encryption", but after looking around a bit it looks to be more of a buzzword than really related to zero-knowledge proofs (besides them using SRP for password validation). As far as I know, all password managers like Lastpass, 1Password, etc. use client-side encryption of data. Does this do anything new?

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Yeah, it's puzzling why SpiderOak persists in using the term "zero knowledge" to mean something entirely different from ZKPs. As far as I can tell they're the only ones doing this too.

Especially with zkSNARKs and practical applications like Zcash, all I can think this will accomplish is confusing people.

They tried to coin a new (unrelated) sense of this term about two years ago in order to try to explain services where the service provider doesn't have access to your data. I agree that it's confusing because of the much more clearly established technical term with a different meaning, and I don't think SpiderOak's sense has caught on outside of the company.

Can anyone suggest a better term? Some people like "end-to-end encrypted" even in this context, but that doesn't really make sense for data at rest, which is almost all of what SpiderOak's products deal with.

Edit: SpiderOak has had a super-hard time marketing their privacy features to people who aren't already familiar with the fairly stark distinctions in play in different access models. I'm sure they would appreciate if someone came up with a straightforward way to explain "products where the service provider doesn't have access to your data, and can't get access without your help in any circumstances because of technical constraints".

Steve Gibson calls this type of design "Trust No One" (TNO), which I quite like.

But I think "end-to-end encrypted" is fine and has caught on with the public to some extent.

Of course, you can't really get to "Trust No One" level unless you build your own computer by hand and write its entire software stack from scratch. It's kind of an arbitrary distinction, otherwise.

I think client-side encryption covers it pretty well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_encryption

Because it differentiates them from the likes of Dropbox, who can easily look into your files. What other term would you use? "Client-side encryption" is too diluted a term.

SpiderOak started using the term Zero Knowledge commercially back in 2007, in an attempt to explain the benefits of End-to-End Encryption to customers in a market where most participants were making wildly misleading claims. At the time, Mozy and Carbonite were referring to their systems as fully encrypted, even though all they did was transport encryption, or encryption of content and not filenames and folder names. These days, the term seems to make sense to at least the portion of customers who aren't crypto academics. - Erin @ SpiderOak

That confused me as well. And I find it worrying that the author is apparently confused about this term (or deliberately using it in a non-standard sense).

I've been thinking about this recently, since attending a recent lecture on ZKP by Shafi Goldwasser. Do you use or know of any services currently using zero knowledge proofs? I am curious as to why this isn't in wider use.

I was excited about a password manager that finally manages like, domain names and then scrypts your master-password locally with standardized domain-names (ie: scrypt(masterpassword+gmail.com)) that then transforms the hash into a format that gmail.com accepts. (keeping track of which websites have weird requirements, like !$#% required, or special characters NOT allowed).

And then I realized that the "zero-knowledge" thing is just a buzzword and has nothing to do with the implementation. Ah well.

Have you looked at Master Password?

http://masterpasswordapp.com/algorithm.html

I want that, but the counter and webpage info to be cloud-based storage.

If the cloud-storage gets hacked, the hackers know I'm on my 5th password at gmail.com. Good luck with that info, lol. Otherwise, all my devices are sync'd with regards to password-count.

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