Recent advances in cryptography have made it practical to prove that you have correctly executed a program, even while keeping details of the execution hidden, and without any trusted parties, custom hardware, or trusted execution environments. Moreover, the execution of arbitrarily complex long running programs can be verified in a small constant time (milliseconds). This talk will provide a basic introduction to the idea of zero knowledge proofs, talk about the current state of the art, examine some of the impacts and consequences of this emerging technology, and provide some pointers for further exploration. We'll leave out the math and focus on explaining the high level concepts in a (hopefully) accessible way.

Kids will have a chance to make their own solar ovens out of pizza boxes, and we can cook s'mores. (Note: this is weather dependent and won't work if it's not a warm day.)