I dont think its too bad, its fairly intuitive and related english meaning
also. At zero-knowlege we had a precedent of the same use: we used it as an
intentional pun that we had "zero-knowledge" about our customers, and in
actuality in one of the later versions we actually had a ZKP (to do with
payment privacy). Well they were a licensee for Brands credentials but
shamefully the early versions were just relying on no logging in a server to
get privacy for the "paid up account" status necessary to establish a
connection.
One of the fun aspects was totting up the number of people in the company
who actually understood the company name (at a mathematical / crypto level
what a ZKP is), must've been a dozen perhaps out of a peak of 300 employees!
My contribution to their crypto was end-to-end forward anonymity, which
didnt get implemented in the "freedom network" before they closed it down to
focus on selling personal firewalls via ISPs (under their new brand
radialpoint.com). But the e2e forward anon concept was implemented by Zach
Brown and Jerome Etienne in a ZKS skunk works project that never got
deployed. And after ZKS Zach reimplemented something similar in open souce
project cebolla which isnt actively developed at present now but the code is
here:
http://www.cypherspace.org/cebolla/
Now there is ToR and i2p which are actively developed, and I presume at this
point they would both have forward anonymity.
Without e2e forward anon any one of the default 3 hops in your connection
could record traffic passing through and then subpoena the other hops to
identify the source and destination (and web logs perhaps at the dest).
E2e forward anon is pretty simple - establish a forward secret connection
between User and node A call that tunnel 1. Tunnel a foward secret
connection establishment through tunnel 1 between User and node B call that
tunnel 2. Then tunnel a foward secret establishment through tunnel 2
between User and node C. Node A is the entry node, node C is the exit node.
QED. Costs no more than the previous method, and actually as I remember the
establishment is faster and more reliable also.
Adam
Not without some precedent, there was a company called Zero Knowledge
Systems back in the early 2000s that tried to build what we now would
see as a Skype or Tor competitor.
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