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I am reading the Real-World Cryptography book and in the chapter on signatures it says:

The best way to understand how signatures work in cryptography is to understand where they come from. For this reason, let’s take a moment to briefly introduce ZKPs and then I’ll get back to signatures.

I find this hard to believe. Did digital signatures actually come from Zero Knowledge Proofs? I thought ZKP were a more recent advancement in Cryptography while digital signatures are older. If that is the case how could signatures could have originated from ZKPs?

Finlay Weber
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1 Answers1

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Did digital signatures actually come from Zero Knowledge Proofs?

You are correct; the original proposals for digital signatures were not based on zero knowledge proofs.

The idea of digital signatures were first presented in New Directions in Cryptography, which proposed using a trapdoor permutation to generate signatures (however, they did not give an example of such a permutation).

The first actual signature algorithm proposed was RSA; that is in fact based on a trapdoor permutation (and not a zero knowledge proof).

Now, a number of signature algorithms are, indeed, based on a noninteractive zero knowledge proof, however that's not how it got started (nor is it universal among signature algorithms, even skipping the example of RSA).

poncho
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