alt Hacker NewsIt is good that Microsoft Vega is popularizing zero-knowledge identity-based attestations. It's unfortunate that they're doing so in a relatively inflexible way.
I wish the Vega people had oriented their work around general-purpose zkVMs instead of application-specific ZK circuits. The latter is a fleeting efficiency win; the former is a permanent flexibility advantage. ZK-based privacy advocates shouldn't over-index on proof performance on today's systems when zkVM systems have been making multiple-OOM performance improvements over the past couple of years.
IOW, with Nova, the Vega people are trying to do something very clever (just as the BBS+ people are trying to do something very cleaver) that general-purpose compute wins have made unnecessary.
Something like RISC Zero will let you run arbitrary Rust code under zero knowledge in a few hundred milliseconds with little fuss. Nobody appreciates that identity verification is one special case of a vast set of useful applications enabled by widespread adoption of a ZK compute platform.
Replies
Can you talk more about RISC Zero? Does it require a TEE of some sort? I had trouble finding a quality mid-detail spec of how it works; lots of marketing materials basically.
Disagree with this.
RISC Zero is useful for crypto use-cases: Other people need to verify an exact program was run.
The identity use case is about connecting sources of trust (document issuers) with consumers of that trust ("this is a real person") in ways that don't release more than the minimum information required ("the passport office has signed that this is a real person so we can trust that").
Single purpose circuits make a lot of sense for this - there is just no need to a full ZK RISC-V VM for this use case.