Analysis of Zero-Knowledge Proofs Foundations, Methods, and Applications: A Comprehensive Survey

Abstract

Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) play a central role in cryptographically computability, making it possible to verify computation without revealing the underlying information, thereby guaranteeing privacy and trust in decentralized computing. This paper provides a systematized survey of the basic ideas- completeness, soundness and zero-knowledge and categorizes the protocols as interactive or non-interactive. The paper examines the current state of the art uses of ZKPs in the fields of blockchain, federated learning (FL), anonymous authentication, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), and digital identity management. The most notable ones are the Secure and Anonymous Blockchain Verification (SABV) algorithm to perform efficient cross-chain transaction verification, the Decentralized Privacy-preserving Certificateless Zero-Knowledge (DPCZK) protocol to perform certificateless and anonymous device authentication, Zero-Knowledge Federated Learning (ZKFL) to perform secure and high-accuracy FL and phase-mask-based ZKPs to perform one-round visual authentication. Also, self-sovereign identity (SSI) systems and truck platooning that is integrated into blockchains use ZKPs to strengthen privacy, decentralization, and access control. The comparative study highlights that there are major advancements in the area of computational efficiency, consensus mechanisms, and model resilience in adversarial situations. With these advances, there still exist open challenges towards realizing scalability, interoperability and seamless integration at real-time. The given paper summarizes the latest trends and performance standards, research gaps, and sketches the further perspectives of the improvement of ZKP implementation in secure multi-party computation (SMPC), edge intelligence, and autonomous systems, which will allow resilient and private operations in new digital ecosystems.