Revolutionary Identity Verification Technique Offers Robust Solution to Hacking

upstart writes:

Revolutionary identity verification technique offers robust solution to hacking:

A team of computer scientists, including Claude Crepeau of McGill University and physicist colleagues from the University of Geneva, have developed an extremely secure identity verification method based on the fundamental principle that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. The breakthrough has the potential to greatly improve the security of financial transactions and other applications requiring proof of identity online.

"Current identification schemes that use personal identification numbers (PINs) are incredibly insecure faced with a fake teller machine that stores the PINs of users," says Crepeau, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill. "Our research found and implemented a secure mechanism to prove someone's identity that cannot be replicated by the verifier of this identity."

The new method, published in Nature, is an advance on a concept known as zero-knowledge proof, whereby one party (a 'prover') can demonstrate to another (the 'verifier') that they possess a certain piece of information without actually revealing that information.

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