Cryptography is widely used in modern technology, particularly in software. The primary purpose of cryptography is to provide confidentiality of data, but it is also used for authentication, and to verify data integrity. However, cryptography is fragile, and a single error in design or implementation can render it completely useless.

Cryptography remains cryptic and complex because most people dont have the time or the desire to become a cryptography expert. But a high-level understanding of applied cryptography and cryptanalysis is valuable to developers and hackers alike. Understanding when, why and how cryptography should be used in different contexts is important to ensure that the software is actually receiving the desired level of protection. And the ability to recognize misuse of cryptography can be useful for a hacker trying to determine whether encrypted data can be broken with ease or is beyond their capabilities.

Before digging into the details of how cryptography is used and can be broken, its important to understand the basic principles of cryptography, the types of cryptographic algorithms and how they can be used.

Symmetric and asymmetric encryption algorithms perform similar actions, but they have their own advantages and disadvantages. Hash functions, on the other hand, may look similar (and are cryptographic algorithms), but they work differently and are used for different purposes. Most cryptographic algorithms have libraries that make them plug-and-play; however, this is of limited utility if you dont know which one is right for the job.

Cryptography is used every day at the core of a variety of technologies and some of the largest applications in the modern world, including:

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the backbone of many modern uses of encryption. Digitally signed email and websites that have URLs that (Read more...)

Originally posted here:
Knowledge and Skills Related to Applied Cryptography and Cryptanalysis - Security Boulevard

The long-awaited Ethereum Istanbul hard fork is scheduled forSaturday(EST). While considered as part of the move to proof-of-stake, the upgrade focuses primarily on improving sidechain support specifically with Zcash-based technology.

The upgrade is the third and final in Ethereums Metropolis era, the last before the introduction of Casper proof-of-stake. Previous updates, Byzantium and Constantinople, are historic names for the city of Istanbul.

A total of six Ethereum Improvement Proposals will be added out of 30 initial candidates. While no single proposal is particularly comprehensive, the cumulative upgrades should expand the possibilities for smart contract developers to introduce large-scale features to the Ethereum chain, such as privacy protocols and side-chain scaling.

Zero-knowledge cryptographic technology has long been identified as a future addition to the Ethereum protocol, allowing for more private ERC-based tokens and improved scalability through off-chain solutions.

EIP-1108 specifically optimizes routines for elliptic curve arithmetic the core of most cryptographic encryption algorithms. The proposal changes the computational pricing of elliptic curve algorithms, following earlier optimizations in their de-facto resource usage. Gas costs for some computations saw as much as a six-fold decrease. This is because gas prices for all computing operations are set manually by the developers only partially reflecting their true cost.

Ethereum developers identified these changes as crucial for a number of projects building on the platform: AZTEC protocol and ZEther are working to implement zero-knowledge proofs and Confidential Transactions for creating private transactions on the Ethereum chain; Matter Labs and Rollup utilize this cryptography to build side-chain scaling solutions.

The team used the AZTEC protocol as an example of the effective reduction offered by the proposal:

It currently costs 820,000 gas to validate the cryptography in a typical AZTEC confidential transaction. If the gas schedule for the precompiles correctly reflected their load on the Ethereum network, this cost would be 197,000 gas [about $0.23 at current average gas prices].

Another proposal, EIP-152, is set to allow for direct integrations with the Zcash privacy coin. The upgrade introduces advanced versions of the Blake2b hash functions, which are significantly less intensive than the current implementation. This feature will facilitate interoperability with Zcash and other Equihash-based coins. Its main use case is to enable trustless atomic swaps between the Ethereum and Zcash chains, providing a way to tap into the privacy coin without relying on centralized exchange operators.

A more general optimization set to benefit zero knowledge-based systems is EIP-2028, which reduces the gas cost of Calldata a data storage instruction. This will allow for increases to bandwidth of data transmission on-chain (with an acceptable cost of network performance). Prioritizing data storage over raw computation paves the way for off-chain solutions, which take over some of the calculation burden at the price of increased data transfer.

Other improvements include more general security and resource usage optimizations. EIP-1344 introduces a new operation that returns the ID of the current chain. This measure was implemented to maintain the security of the network in the event of contentious blockchain splits. It is especially relevant for layer two solutions such as Plasma, which offload some of the transactions outside of the main chain and only update the changes at specified checkpoints.

During a contentious hard fork, such as the one that created Ethereum Classic, the smart contracts may incorrectly pass the data to the wrong chain an event that could result in loss of funds.

EIP-2200 improves the structure of gas metering for data storage with smart contracts. It introduces several optimizations for batched smart contract calls, as well as organizing previous EIPs on these features.

Finally, EIP-1884 is a general repricing of several functions to bring them in line with their actual resource consumption.

Despite being seemingly minor changes, these last EIPs break backward compatibility thus the need for a hard fork. It should be noted that Istanbul is not a contentious fork, and all nodes and miners are expected to comply with the changes. There will be no new Ether in exchanges.

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Ethereums Istanbul Hard Fork: What Will Change? - Crypto Briefing

The news that Interpol is about to condemn the spread of strong encryption is just the latest salvo in the crypto wars, a decades-long controversy between proponents of strong encryption, law enforcement and investigative bodies over the widespread use of encryption by technology companies. The central tenet of the law enforcement argument is that strong end-to-end encryption hinders the investigation and prosecution of crimes when suspects use it on their personal devices. For their part, privacy and human rights advocates contend that there is no mechanism that (both) protects the security and privacy of communications and allows access for law enforcement.

Encryption is the encoding of information such that only authorized parties may access it at the messages final destination. One of the earliest examples of encryption and the most cited in literature on the subject is the Caesar cipher, a substitution cipher where each letter of a message is shifted 3 characters.

The Caesar cipher relied more on the secrecy of the method of encryption rather than the key, and can easily be cracked by observing the frequency of the letters.

In the 20th century, notable uses of encryption and - more pertinently - codebreaking have had major historical impacts. This includes the Zimmerman telegram of World War I, in which Germany urged Mexico to invade the United States if Washington were to join the war against it. The ability of the British to break the German code and the leaking of the contents of the telegram was instrumental in turning American public opinion against Germany and lead to the US entering the war on the side of the Allies.

Later, during World War Two, a British team led by mathematician Alan Turing broke Germany's Enigma code. By some estimates this shortened the war by two years and saved 12 million lives.

While all encryption methods used up until the Enigma machine relied on the concept of security through obscurity, modern cryptography is based on the opposite: security through transparency.

The plans for Enigma were very well concealed and breaking it was not easy. Marian Rejewski at Polands Cipher Bureau and later Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park had to build a computer to help break the codes at scale. Modern cryptographic methods are based on well-known mathematical theorems that are practically unbreakable with current technologies.

For instance, multiplying two prime numbers together is an easy problem. The result is what is called a semi-prime number. Now finding out which two prime numbers were multiplied in the first place to achieve a semi-prime number is computationally difficult: the only way for the current generation of computers is a trial and error process that can take centuries, depending on the length of the semi-prime number. The widely used RSA 2048 encryption method, for example, would take a classical computer 300 trillion years to crack (although quantum computers may one day do the job a lot faster).

Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and other communication apps use an implementation of public key cryptography called end-to-end encryption. Only the end users have access to the decrypted data; the service provider, like Facebook, doesnt. As such, it is theoretically impossible for the company to hand over decrypted data to the authorities.

This is the crux of the debate. It is what has led law enforcement to ask that end-to-end encryption not be rolled out by Facebook, or that 'backdoors' be introduced to aid in surveillance or data recovery.

A first example of this was the San Bernardino terrorist attack of 2015, in which the FBI wanted Apples assistance to open one of the assailants phones. Apples refusal led the FBI to file a case with the US District Court for the Central District of California to compel Apple to aid FBI efforts. The request was eventually withdrawn when an Israeli company found and exploited a vulnerability in the phone to decrypt the data on behalf of the Bureau. While the data revealed nothing about the plot, the case brought widespread criticism of the company for profiting from vulnerabilities in its phone operating system that cybercriminals, terrorists and rogue nations can buy, find and exploit too. Best practice in the cybersecurity industry is for researchers to report these vulnerabilities to the software editor or device manufacturer; this is called responsible disclosure.

A second example of this was this years "Ghost protocol" proposed by UK intelligence agency GCHQ to avoid weakening encryption, which revolved around transferring messages sent by a suspect over WhatsApp or iMessage to a law enforcement agent without notifying the suspect. This was met with vigorous opposition from tech firms.

Privacy advocates do not argue the need for law enforcement to be able to investigate crimes such as child exploitation and terrorism. The general objection from them and other parties interested in keeping messages private is that any weakening of encryption for the benefit of investigators also benefits those with more nefarious intent. They argue that 'backdoor' or exceptional access by law enforcement amounts to the introduction of a weakness to security systems that can be exploited by criminals. This unintended consequence of the desire to provide better protection to, for instance, exploited children, victims of terrorism or human trafficking also exposes regular users to exploitation from cybercriminals by giving these groups a built-in way to access their information.

In 2015 at a talk at West Point, then Vice-Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral James A. Winnefeld, said: I think we would all win if our networks were more secure. And I think I would rather live on the side of secure networks and a harder problem for Mike [then NSA Director Mike Rogers] on the intelligence side than very vulnerable networks and an easy problem for Mike.

The World Economic Forum Platform for Shaping the Future of Cybersecurity and Digital Trust aims to spearhead global cooperation and collective responses to growing cyber challenges, ultimately to harness and safeguard the full benefits of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The platform seeks to deliver impact through facilitating the creation of security-by-design and security-by-default solutions across industry sectors, developing policy frameworks where needed; encouraging broader cooperative arrangements and shaping global governance; building communities to successfully tackle cyber challenges across the public and private sectors; and impacting agenda setting, to elevate some of the most pressing issues.

Platform activities focus on three main challenges:

Strengthening Global Cooperation for Digital Trust and Security - to increase global cooperation between the public and private sectors in addressing key challenges to security and trust posed by a digital landscape currently lacking effective cooperation at legal and policy levels, effective market incentives, and cooperation between stakeholders at the operational level across the ecosystem.Securing Future Digital Networks and Technology - to identify cybersecurity challenges and opportunities posed by new technologies and accelerate solutions and incentives to ensure digital trust in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.Building Skills and Capabilities for the Digital Future - to coordinate and promote initiatives to address the global deficit in professional skills, effective leadership and adequate capabilities in the cyber domain.

The platform is working on a number of ongoing activities to meet these challenges. Current initiatives include our successful work with a range of public- and private-sector partners to develop a clear and coherent cybersecurity vision for the electricity industry in the form of Board Principles for managing cyber risk in the electricity ecosystem and a complete framework, created in collaboration with the Forums investment community, enabling investors to assess the security preparedness of target companies, contributing to raising internal cybersecurity awareness.

For more information, please contact info@c4c-weforum.org.

In Europe, the EU Cybersecurity Agency and Europol issued a joint statement on this topic, recognizing the hurdles of strong encryption in police work, but also acknowledging that weakening encryption technologies for everyone was not the way forward. Rather, they called for research and development efforts to find technical solutions to decrypt communication, all under judiciary oversight.

As the crypto wars continue to seek to strike the correct balance between the needs of law enforcement for access to information to conduct investigations and the need for vulnerable populations to free speech and the general public to have financial and personal information protected, the ultimate decisions will be weighed by those with a view of the entire ecosystem.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with our Terms of Use.

Written by

Adrien Oge, Project Lead, Cyber Resilience, World Economic Forum

Marco Pineda, Head of Security and Innovation, Centre for Cybersecurity, World Economic Forum

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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Privacy vs public safety - the pros and cons of encryption - World Economic Forum

The volatile price fluctuations of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether have attracted huge media and business interest in blockchain technologies. But there is more to the technologies than recording Bitcoin payment instructions on a public blockchain network.

Blockchains are widely regarded as one of the most important technologies of the future, because of the benefits that they promise to deliver: greater cost-savings, enhanced security, and data reliability. Cost savings because they cut out the need to rely on a trusted, always available, central authority and they remove the need to reconcile data between organisations; security because of the use of public key cryptography and digital signatures; and data reliability because of the use of cryptographic hashes in many blockchains any attempt to edit data is immediately obvious to multiple parties.

Many businesses are still in the exploratory phase of working out how the technologies can best be applied. But, reflecting the excitement of their potential, venture capital investment in blockchain technology startups has surged, as has the volume of blockchain-related patent applications.

However, there is no doubt that the media has created a lot of hype around blockchain technologies. Recently, they have slipped into the Trough of Disillusionment in Gartners Hype Cycle. Part of the problem has been a lack of careful application of the technologies to appropriately verified use cases, which has led to failed projects and disappointment. Blockchains and decentralised databases are not, of course, the solution to every problem.

Recent successful use cases include R3s proof of concept trial with HM Land Registry in the UK to create a workflow management tool powered by blockchain software that is designed to make it easier and more secure for disparate participants in a property transaction (e.g. buyers, solicitors, lenders, estate agents, surveyors) to store, share and interrogate data without the need to rely on a central database. The project is powered by R3s proprietary blockchain software, Corda Enterprise. To many this all seems highly complicated and esoteric; many businesses are still struggling to understand the key questions: what are blockchain technologies, why use them rather than a centralised database, who is responsible if things go wrong and what does the future hold?

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There's more to blockchain than Bitcoin! - Lexology

On December 1, OK Group co-hosted the Construction of Hainan (Sanya) International Offshore Innovation and Entrepreneurship Demonstration Zone and Blockchain* Digital Asset Trading Technology Innovation High-Level Forum, in which the first Demonstration Zone in Hainan (Sanya) was officially established. The forum was hosted by the local government in Hainan Province, China to facilitate global innovation and adoption of blockchain technology and industry.

At this forum, OK Group signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Sanya Government. As a result OK Group will set up Asia headquarter to build up the blockchain offshore asset exchange lab, blockchain big data research institute, and blockchain innovation application R&D center in the Sanya Yazhou Bay Science and Technology City.

During a speech on the topic of,

The present and future of blockchain technology, Star Xu, Founder of OK Group said, in practice, blockchain is a distributed and immutable database, and the improvement of database technology makes an important role in facilitating the development of the Internet in the last 20 years. In short, Blockchain is a distributed database technology with notable features such as cryptography and smart contract to enable a new class of applications such as payments, Internet of Things, data collection, and supply chain. Cryptography are a set of tools used in wallets, transactions, security and data privacy. By using cryptography, safe, immutable and trustless peer to peer transactions could be realized for the first time, as only owners will be allowed to access their assets. The smart contract is a protocol intended to digitally verify, facilitate or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract. . . In conclusion, this is blockchain.

OK Group has become a large global blockchain group after 6 years of consistent efforts in the blockchain industry. With global headquarter set in Beijing, OK Group has branches in more than 10 countries, including the United States, Europe, Korea, and Japan. Most importantly, the industry influence, technical strength and talent reserve in the OK Group are all at the top of the industry. We will continue our expansion by setting up the OK Groups Asia headquarters in Sanya to be a key player to contribute to the growth of the blockchain ecosystem in the region.

Disclaimer: Blockmanity is a news portal and does not provide any financial advice. Blockmanity's role is to inform the cryptocurrency and blockchain community about what's going on in this space. Please do your own due diligence before making any investment. Blockmanity won't be responsible for any loss of funds.

Get the latest news on Blockchain only on Blockmanity.com. Subscribe to us on Google news and do follow us on Twitter @Blockmanity

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OK Group has joined the blockchain enterprises settled in the Hainan (Sanya) International Zone - Blockmanity

New details have been revealed on Chinas upcoming digital currency, which appear to confirm speculation that it will be fully centralized.

According to local reports, the digital currency will offer speeds of 220,000 transactions per second, quite a distance from Bitcoins seven. Current blockchain technology doesnt offer such high speeds because keeping a network fully decentralized puts limitations on the number of transactions that can go through. Instead, China will likely be using a much more centralized database, with added cryptography, allowing it to reach a much greater throughput.

However, a centralized digital currency in China is a worrying proposition. Given that its social credit rating systemestimated to go fully live in 2020cracks down on its citizens for violations as small as playing music too loudly on a train, combining this with full control over their wealth makes citizens powerless.

And yet, some argue the high speeds are a good sign.

In terms of technology, China's digital currency excels, whether in its security level or speed, which means it will surpass competitors in user experience, Yang Wang, a senior research fellow with the Fintech Institute of Renmin University of China, told the Global Times.

The timeline for rolling out Chinas digital currency was sped up back in July, due to the perceived threat from Facebooks Libra cryptocurrency, which would be maintained by large multinational companies. Yang estimated that Libra was estimated to push 1,000 transactions per second, not even close to Chinas digital RMB.

China now definitely comes out at the head of the list when it comes to digital currency technology, he added.

While China certainly has stimulated the rest of the world into jumping on the blockchain bandwagon and investigating central bank digital currencies, its level of centralization poses a risk to both individual sovereignty and personal privacy.

Last month, deputy director of the PBoCs Payments Department, Mu Changchun, claimed that Chinas digital currency would strike a balance between anonymity and compliance, in an attempt to assuage those fears.

Be the first to get Decrypt Members. A new type of account built on blockchain.

But the research arm of crypto exchange Binance analyzed a prototype of the digital renminbi, finding that the currency collects innumerable pieces of financial data on each of its users.

With every transaction, the digital currency creates a new string of information harvesting data from user to user, the research showed.

Unlike privacy coins, central authorities would be able to gather information. Eventually, identities would likely be tied to respective individual wallets, hence making it fully non-anonymous, unlike Bitcoin.

And yet, despite all these worriesand China cracking down on crypto exchanges in the regionBinance CEO Changpeng Zhao argues that, in fact, the digital currency will benefit the crypto industry.

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Here is the worrying truth behind Chinas digital currency - Decrypt

Dozens of PlayStation 3s sit in a refrigerated shipping container on the University of Massachusetts Dartmouths campus, sucking up energy and investigating astrophysics. Its a popular stop for tours trying to sell the school to prospective first-year students and their parents, and its one of the few living legacies of a weird science chapter in PlayStations history.

Those squat boxes, hulking on entertainment systems or dust-covered in the back of a closet, were once coveted by researchers who used the consoles to build supercomputers. With the racks of machines, the scientists were suddenly capable of contemplating the physics of black holes, processing drone footage, or winning cryptography contests. It only lasted a few years before tech moved on, becoming smaller and more efficient. But for that short moment, some of the most powerful computers in the world could be hacked together with code, wire, and gaming consoles.

Researchers had been messing with the idea of using graphics processors to boost their computing power for years. The idea is that the same power that made it possible to render Shadow of the Colossus grim storytelling was also capable of doing massive calculations if researchers could configure the machines the right way. If they could link them together, suddenly, those consoles or computers started to be far more than the sum of their parts. This was cluster computing, and it wasnt unique to PlayStations; plenty of researchers were trying to harness computers to work as a team, trying to get them to solve increasingly complicated problems.

The game consoles entered the supercomputing scene in 2002 when Sony released a kit called Linux for the PlayStation 2. It made it accessible, Craig Steffen said. They built the bridges, so that you could write the code, and it would work. Steffen is now a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). In 2002, he had just joined the group and started working on a project with the goal of buying a bunch of PS2s and using the Linux kits to hook them (and their Emotion Engine central processing units) together into something resembling a supercomputer.

They hooked up between 60 and 70 PlayStation 2s, wrote some code, and built out a library. It worked okay, it didnt work superbly well, Steffen said. There were technical issues with the memory two specific bugs that his team had no control over.

Every time you ran this thing, it would cause the kernel on whatever machine you ran it on to kind of go into this weird unstable state and it would have to be rebooted, which was a bummer, Steffen said.

They shut the project down relatively quickly and moved on to other questions at the NCSA. Steffen still keeps one of the old PS2s on his desk as a memento of the program.

But thats not where PlayStations supercomputing adventures met their end. The PS3 entered the scene in late 2006 with powerful hardware and an easier way to load Linux onto the devices. Researchers would still need to link the systems together, but suddenly, it was possible for them to imagine linking together all of those devices into something that was a game-changer instead of just a proof-of-concept prototype.

Thats certainly what black hole researcher Gaurav Khanna was imagining over at UMass Dartmouth. Doing pure period simulation work on black holes doesnt really typically attract a lot of funding, its just because it doesnt have too much relevance to society, Khanna said.

Money was tight, and it was getting tighter. So Khanna and his colleagues were brainstorming, trying to think of solutions. One of the people in his department was an avid gamer and mentioned the PS3s Cell processor, which was made by IBM. A similar kind of chip was being used to build advanced supercomputers. So we got kind of interested in it, you know, is this something interesting that we could misuse to do science? Khanna says.

Inspired by the specs of Sonys new machine, the astrophysicist started buying up PS3s and building his own supercomputer. It took Khanna several months to get the code into shape and months more to clean up his program into a working order. He started with eight, but by the time he was done, he had his own supercomputer, pieced together out of 176 consoles and ready to run his experiments no jockeying for space or paying other researchers to run his simulations of black holes. Suddenly, he could run complex computer models or win cryptography competitions at a fraction of the cost of a more typical supercomputer.

Around the same time, other researchers were having similar ideas. A group in North Carolina also built a PS3 supercomputer in 2007, and a few years later, at the Air Force Research Laboratory in New York, computer scientist Mark Barnell started working on a similar project called the Condor Cluster.

The timing wasnt great. Barnells team proposed the project in 2009, just as Sony was shifting toward the pared-back PS3 slim, which didnt have the capability to run Linux, unlike the original PS3. After a hack, Sony even issued a firmware update that pulled OpenOS, the system that allowed people to run Linux, from existing PS3 systems. That made finding useful consoles even harder. The Air Force had to convince Sony to sell it the un-updated PS3s that the company was pulling from shelves, which, at the time, were sitting in a warehouse outside Chicago. It took many meetings, but eventually, the Air Force got what it was looking for, and in 2010, the project had its big debut.

Running on more than 1,700 PS3s that were connected by five miles of wire, the Condor Cluster was huge, dwarfing Khannas project, and it used to process images from surveillance drones. During its heyday, it was the 35th fastest supercomputer in the world.

But none of this lasted long. Even while these projects were being built, supercomputers were advancing, becoming more powerful. At the same time, gaming consoles were simplifying, making them less useful to science. The PlayStation 4 outsold both the original PlayStation and the Wii nearing the best-selling status currently held by the PS2. But for researchers, it was nearly useless. Like the slimmer version of the PlayStation 3 released before it, the PS4 cant easily be turned into a cog for a supercomputing machine. Theres nothing novel about the PlayStation 4, its just a regular old PC, Khanna says. We werent really motivated to do anything with the PlayStation 4.

The era of the PlayStation supercomputer was over.

The one at UMass Dartmouth is still working, humming with life in that refrigerated shipping container on campus. The UMass Dartmouth machine is smaller than it used to be at its peak power of about 400 PlayStation 3s. Parts of it have been cut out and repurposed. Some are still working together in smaller supercomputers at other schools; others have broken down or been lost to time. Khanna has since moved on to trying to link smaller, more efficient devices together into his next-generation supercomputer. He says the Nvidia Shield devices hes working with now are about 50 times more efficient than the already-efficient PS3.

Its the Air Forces supercluster of super consoles that had the most star-studded afterlife. When the program ended about four years ago, some consoles were donated to other programs, including Khannas. But many of the old consoles were sold off as old inventory, and a few hundred were snapped up by people working with the TV show Person of Interest. In a ripped-from-the-headlines move, the consoles made their silver screen debut in the shows season 5 premiere, playing wait for it a supercomputer made of PlayStation 3s.

Its all Hollywood, Barnell said of the script, but the hardware is actually our equipment.

Correction, 7:05 PM ET: Supercomputer projects needed the original PS3, not the PS3 Slim, because Sony had removed Linux support from the console in response to hacks which later led to a class-action settlement. This article originally stated that it was because the PS3 Slim was less powerful. We regret the error.

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The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers - The Verge

Matter Labs has released its plan to help the Ethereum blockchain scale to thousands, or millions, of users. An idea it has been working on for a year now, following a grant from the Ethereum Foundation.

The Ethereum blockchain struggles to handle many transactions right nownowhere near enough to support high volumes of people using the network. Whenever a platform puts any significant load on the Ethereum network, it buckles under the strain. Currently, Ethereum is undergoing a radical shift to a new blockchain that will be more scalablebut its a challenging move, and one that will take several years (although its next step, the Istanbul upgrade, will be reached tomorrow).

In the meantime, Ethereum diehards have latched onto one particular technology that offers a chance to scale in the short term: optimistic rollups. And Matter Labs has dived in and come up with a proposal that, you never know, might just work.

Today, we at Matter Labs are excited to reveal our vision for ZK Sync: a trustless scaling and privacy solution for Ethereum based on ZK Rollup, with an emphasis on superb user and developer experiences, Alex Gluchowski, founder of Matter Labs wrote, in a Medium post. Were also proud to announce the launch of the devnet for ZK Sync.

ZK Sync will be a new way to make Ethereum transactions, but in a way that doesnt bloat the blockchain or cause transaction fees to rise sky-high. At the same time, transaction information, like how much is being transferred, will be kept private.

The idea is to build a second layer solution for Ethereum, which is built on top of the network and can interact with it. It uses optimistic rollups, a technology highlighted as promising by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, to support more transactions and people using the network.

Optimistic rollups build on the notion of sidechains, where work is offloaded to a parallel blockchain. The sidechain is used to batch a bunch of transactions together and upload them as one transaction on the main Ethereum blockchain. It means that each transaction is protected by the security of the main blockchain, but the strain on the network is lifted from it.

Matter Labss platform will also use complex cryptography known as zero-knowledge proofs to make sure that transactions are kept private. Ethereum is a transparent blockchain, so transactions can be seen by anyonebut using this technology keeps the transaction information hidden from view.

Now, many companies in the crypto space are heavily researching and experimenting with such privacy technologythink the Electric Coin Company and its Zcash privacy coinand some have been looking into optimistic rollups too, like Fuel Labs. But whats interesting about Matter Labs new proposal is that they are going to focus on user experience, something that is wholly lacking in crypto technology across the board, and a friction point for achieving the much-touted goal of mass adoption.

Gluchowski explains that the people who stick with crypto through thick and thin are those who believe in its fundamentalsbut to attract millions, or billions, of people, the technology needs to be smooth.

To attract millions of mainstream users, we need to offer them a user experience that doesnt just match these expectations, but exceeds them, he said, adding, Everything must be fast, simple, intuitive and error-tolerant.

But thats easier said than done.

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Will Matter Labss ambitious new plan save Ethereum? - Decrypt