Dear all, Upon inheriting the Looking Glass from our predecessors, we identified a number of key issues. Firstly, there were simply not enough articles being published, due both to a lack of submissions from the school community and limited responsiveness from the previous Academic Team. Secondly, the Looking Glass had not been advertised or explained effectively enough to the wider school community. As a result, we plan to implement a more consistent and engaging stream of articles on the Looking Glass. As part of this initiative, we are looking to recruit a select group of keen writers from across the lower school who would be willing to produce one high-quality piece of writing, discussion, or media each month for publication on the Looking Glass. We believe this will be hugely beneficial both to the school community, which will gain access to a wider range of opinions and viewpoints, and to prospective writers, who will be able to reference their experience contributing to the Look...
RIAN DATTA (L6) Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are a powerful asset used in the field of cryptography that allow a party (the prover) to demonstrate to another party (the verifier) that they have access to a certain piece of information, without having to reveal the information itself. Since its first appearance in an MIT paper titled “The knowledge complexity of interactive proof systems” (written by Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali in 1985), ZKPs have quickly become one of the most commonly used methods for keeping data secure online; even being implemented by companies ranging from Visa to Apple. But, why? In this article, the mystery of ZKPs will be unveiled as you learn the fundamentals of how they function, what they’re currently used for - including potential future applications - and their drawbacks. You’re probably wondering how something so counterintuitive can actually exist and, although it may seem like technology straight out of a science-fiction movie, ZKPs use real...