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by gigel82 118 days ago
Where can we learn more about your architecture?

Someone brought up the need for device attestation for trust purposes (to avoid token smuggling for example). That would surely defeat the purpose (and make things much much worse for freedom overall). If you have a solution that doesn't require device attestation, how does that solve the smuggling issue (are tokens time-gated, is there a limit to token generation, other things)?

2 comments

We do not require an attestation and things like token smuggling is still a problem we need to solve. We have a system that prioritizes unlinkability. So an issuer cannot track the attribute they give you. And a verifier cannot link multiple disclosures with the same attribute. This privacy really helps things like token smuggling however. Time-gated tokens may increase the difficulty, but will probably not make it impossible. Making it illegal to verify someone else's qr codes could also help of course.
A Verifiable Credential fundamentally doesn't solve the problem of "sharing", "smuggling". All it takes is one verified adult to "leak" their VC somewhere, and millions of underage people would be able to use it to "prove" they are over 18.

This would only work with something like MS TPM 2 / Apple Secure Enclave (device attestation), which is anti-freedom by design. I was curious if they found a way around that (maybe with time/rate limits, or some actual useful use of blockchain tech).

You could use an oblivious pairwise pseudonym, and then you do not require hardware attestation. But that does essentially limit one ID to one account per service.
Lmao how is the Secure Enclqve anti-freedom?
Besides the privacy argument (the claim that the UID can't be used for tracking via derivation is shaky at best, and not much different than MS's EK), there is the freedom argument: as in, who owns the device - the user, or Apple?

If Apple can remotely lock the device that an user bought mistakenly (for example because some corporation somewhere fat-fingers some entries), that fundamentally means the user doesn't own the device they bought and paid for. Add on top DRM and all the other evil that comes along with attestation.

Plus, you can still disable TPM2 (if you don't want to run Windows on your machine), you can never disable Apple's implementation.

I'd like to add we are discussing communication over the internet. It is an open standard. I should be allowed to build my own pcb without a secure element and talk to anyone over http so long as I am abiding by the correct rfcs.