Credible Anonymous Whistleblowers

Screenshots

Problem Statement

Entities, even corrupt ones, are run by humans. Reporting unethical behavior can often result in the persecution and even death of whistleblowers. This project allows contributors, vetted by an editor, to publish stories without revealing their identity. We’ve used optimistic rollups, RISC-V and zero-knowledge proofs to achieve anonymity.

Solution

This project is built on top of Cartesi Rollups, using ZK proofs. The ZK project we used is risc0, a risc-v based zk machine. Its verifier, written in mainstream programming languages, is built to target the Cartesi machine, allowing for proof verification inside the blockchain.Contributors run the prover offchain, and send the generated ZK proof to the editor. The editor then submits this proof to the blockchain, which is then verified by the Cartesi machine.The proof asserts that it was created by a contributor in the set of contributors, without revealing which contributor it was.