Hackers have infiltrated the organization responsible for Japan’s national defenses against cyber attacks, according to a report by the Financial Times, and may have gained access to sensitive data for as much as nine months. Such state-level attacks (this one is thought to have been executed by the Chinese) are becoming increasingly common, and attacks on smaller organizations have become routine.
Hackers also accessed the personal data of more than 15.5 million people earlier this summer by breaching the MOVEit file transfer tool, and the number of victims continues to grow. These attacks remind us that data privacy should be a top priority—not only for fear of what big companies or governments will do with user data, but also because so many have failed to secure it.
To limit the damage such attacks can cause, innovators have come up with a breakthrough mechanism to limit the amount of data consumers are required to give to companies with which they interact, known as zk-SNARKs. And one company, VAIOT, has capitalized on this technology to the advantage of users of its AI Legal Assistant.
With zk-SNARKS, VAIOT’s AI Legal Assistant empowers the user to verify information in a legal contract to the other relevant party without revealing specifics, enabling seamless and secure legal support. The assistant is powered by a combination of the company’s own machine learning (ML) algorithms, Microsoft CLU, and OpenAI’s GPT-4.
“Blockchain, and particularly zk-SNARKs, opens a world of options to verify contracts to any party without disclosing sensitive information,” said Paweł Andruszkiewicz, COO of VAIOT.
“In our case, users sharing data coming from legal and formal documentation generated through our AI Assistants can rest assured knowing only information that is required by a certain entity for a particular process will be shared.”
Built on its own ML algorithms designed specifically to provide legal support to users, VAIOT’s AI Legal Assistant now leverages zk-SNARKS to verify information in a legal contract without revealing sensitive information, all while also leveraging the text fluency of GPT-4 when interacting with users.
These same zk-SNARK capabilities are also now available in VAIOT’s AI Assistant designed specifically for citizen services and public administration process automation, which shares the Legal Assistant’s AI engine.
Imagine a scenario, for example, in which you need to prove your monthly income to a government administrator, but you don’t want to reveal the name of the company at which you work, or any other sensitive information. With zk-SNARKs, VAIOT’s Legal Assistant can do that, along with a wide range of other use cases.
AI Legal Assistant uses zk-SNARKs for:
- Proof of income: Whenever there is a need to present a proof of income based on a certain legal document, VAIOT’s AI Legal Assistant will be able to generate a proof of income based on the agreement it created or based on the legal document provided by the user and verified by the Assistant.
- Confidentiality, Non-competition and Penalty Clauses: When creating documents that include confidentiality, non-competition, and/or penalty. clauses, zk-SNARKs can be used to provide a proof that the clause is present and correctly formatted, without revealing any other information about the document.
- Proof of Compliance: When a legal document requires compliance with certain regulations, a zk-SNARK could be used to prove that the document complies, without revealing the specifics of how this compliance is achieved.
Uses for everyday people:
- Proof of Identity: zk-SNARKs can allow a person to prove that they are who they say they are, without revealing any other personal information. This can be useful for age verification, proof of residence, or similar situations where identity needs to be confirmed. VAIOT’s solutions enable users to prove their identity as part of public administration systems integration.
- Purchase Proofs: If a person buys something from a retailer that accepts blockchain transactions, zk-SNARKs can be used to verify that the buyer paid the correct amount without revealing the specifics of the transaction (like the purchased items). In VAIOT AI Legal Assistant, this enables users to present entities with a proof of purchase of a certain good or service without revealing all the data behind the agreement.
- Anonymous Dispute Resolution: After a user passes the privacy-preserving proof-of-identity procedure above, zk-SNARKs can also ensure that in dispute situations on a decentralized network, such as a DAO, only verified users are voting, and only once. This eliminates users creating dozens of wallets to manipulate DAO decisions.
“zk-SNARKs represent a groundbreaking paradigm shift,” said Szymon Reddig, Lead Blockchain Developer of VAIOT. “They offer a remarkable capability to generate proofs for arbitrary computations while revealing zero knowledge to the verifier beyond the validity of the statement itself.”
VAIOT’s $VAI token has been fully regulated by the Maltese Financial Services Authority (MFSA) since 2020.
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