Authenticating airline passengers

The events of 11 September 2001 sent a ripple of fear across the United States. The US government sought to alleviate the increased concerns by enforcing strict security in airports, government buildings and athletic stadiums; however, with any security there is a price. For airline passengers that price was long lines caused by multiple security checks placed throughout the nation's airport terminals. Also, security was infringing upon privacy and coming up with very few results. A secure method for authenticating airline passengers while allowing a certain level of privacy would need to be found. To provide security while maintaining privacy is the primary goal of Zero-knowledge. Zero-knowledge, as its name suggests, is an area of mathematics and computer science where the existence of a solution to a problem can be proved without giving away the solution. The goal is to create an application that could be run from any airport terminal to quickly and securely verify a passenger while preserving the passenger's privacy. The Zero-knowledge authentication protocol relies on a category of mathematics problems called NP-hard, where NP means non-probabilistic. The specific NP-hard problem used in this implementation is called the MinRank problem.