While attention has always been prized above money, few people have had the means to attract it to themselves. But the new digital economy has provided everyone with a loudspeaker; thus efforts at getting noticed have rapidly escalated in global society. The attention economy focuses on the mechanisms that mediate the allocation of this scarce entity. Social networks and big data play a role in determining what is noticed and acted upon.

Industrial Internet of Things (IOT) is a distributed network of smart sensors that enables precise control and monitoring of complex processes over arbitrary distances. The great advantage of the industrial IoT is counterbalanced by a security weakness. The insertion of a smart device capable of extracting protected data or malicious actions can infect the whole network with relative ease. Thus it becomes imperative to discover whether or not new devices have the right capabilities and compatibilities with other sensors. This article presents a zero knowledge protocol that achieves precisely that objective while keeping the sensor data private.