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.