[acgourley]

It's so obvious to me states need to create a soul bound identity system, replace social security numbers with it, and then let everyone else use cryptography on top of that (which is now cheap when you don't care about sybil attacks) to do private stuff.

[realusername]

The places you actually need an ID are so rare, I don't think it's worth it to build such a system (and no, porn or social network definitely aren't valid use cases).

It's a problem in search of a solution.

[elric]

> It's a problem in search of a solution.

The cynic in me suspects it's a way of slowly but methodically eradicating online anonymity and thus anonymity in general.

[acgourley]

I think it would make the web MORE anonymous, not less!

The reason it's hard to boot up a secure social network (such as Signal) is the handshake for (re)identifying people. Signal makes a ton of conceits here (the UX essentially asks people to assume phone numbers are securely held) in the name of low friction and it's why they grew so fast. The "real" secure social networks are essentially too difficult to get real adoption because they don't make these conceits around phone numbers, and demand real key exchanges.

But if you had a L1 set of private and public keys the government works to maintain and defend, the L2 social networks like Signal (or banks, or markets, whatever) can do this cheap and easily.

[kcb]

Any system mandated by the government will have a backdoor to deanonymize users. Nothing would convince me otherwise.

[acgourley]

Let me try anyway (maybe I'm a masochist)

First I'll say the government already has an ID system with a backdoor they mandate you use (your federal social security ID and state ID). The backdoor isn't very interesting because anyone with your ID in hand also has it.

So how about this:

1. State assigns citizens an ID at birth 2. State allows citizens to submit a public key along with their ID at any time 3. Citizens can go to their bank / private social network / whatever and say "this is my public key, you can use it to sign messages to me, and you can verify someone a) alive and b) a citizen of $state is reading it (from here you can bootstrap whatever protocol you want) 4. The state<>citizen network established in (2) is constantly under attack as stealing someones private key valuable so you also need a legal and technical framework to defend it

The protocol for submitting private keys and defending it from attack is a much longer post, I'm convinced there are ways to do it that drastically favor defense over offense, but that's not the point here.

Our question is can a government force it's way into the protocol you bootstrapped on top

How would they?

1. They could reset your public key to one they control the secret to, and then impersonate you digitally to break into your bank or social network. However I don't think they could do this secretly (the key update would necessarily be publically visible), so it's not really a back door. They can already do this with a search warrant. And if you're paranoid you can bootstrap your secondary cryptographic networks with multiple factors. So, this is on net more secure for you.

2. They could try to recover your secret key by force or warrant - but again not a back door.

I think the real concern isn't backdooring it's blacklisting, if this system becomes the L1 for every L2 crytographic interaction, they can practically remove your ability to freely transact. But that's a political problem you address with political means, I'm convinced from a technical perspective this is more secure and far cheaper for everyone.

[rahkiin]

Whatever clever crypto system you think of: if it needs to work for the general population, it needs to go hand-in-hand with UX.

Say your example: a user generates a pub/priv keypair locally and shares the public one with the government. How does the government know you’re rightfully sending the ID? How does the user know what they are sending? Can the app/website/tool/person at post office they are using to generate+store+send the public key be trusted by the user? How can the government give trust to the user that this tool/person can be trusted?

And there we have attestation again. Or walled app stores, or certification as we have for physical services.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

My driver's license should have some anti-tamper identity proof that can do a challenge response. Or let me go pay a few bucks for an identity proof at the post office.

There must be a dozen other ways smarter people can think of but identity verification kills profits so the smart people don't work on them IMO. It's more profitable for social media to be an astroturfed shithole. It's more profitable to remove control of your PC.

[hakfoo]

Social media in an ad economy serves two masters.

End users should be authenticated so you can prove you're selling real eyeballs in the demographic mix you claimed to marketers and to provide lip service for the 'think of the children' regulators.

But anyone who's paying for ads should have as little friction as possible to dropping money and spewing garbage.

I'm surprised nobody is looking at some sort of "corporations are people" angle here-- we've attested the device ownership, but it's owned by the Lorem Ipsum Corporation, which is a legal/demographic dead end and spawned just long enough to buy the device.

[vvpan]

Yeah, agents are making self sovereign identity so much more relevant. We have all the technology. But identity is the main driver of the monopolies, they won't give it up unless forced to, maybe not even then.

[SilverElfin]

We also need liability. Every time someone’s data is lost, the company losing it must be held accountable. They owe us huge amounts of money, and executives + board members should be jailed. No free pass.

Let’s see then if they really want to collect all our information all the time. Right now, they take it and handle it irresponsibly because they’re free from consequences.

[redleader55]

The dependency tree for anything in the software world is so large, that liability like you describe is not feasible. Tomorrow Anthropic's latest model will find a RCE in SYNs being sent to a server? Who is "liable" when you lose your Google account, your bank account, access to your car and all ways to prove to the government you are who you are all at the same time?

[altairprime]

You just need to deploy auditable (source-available, reproducible-build, firmware checksums LCD on-chip) biometrics booths that generate private keys from normalized biometric inputs, and then use those ephemeral private keys to generate and sign portable identity keys. Most people have fingerprints and retina patterns and that’s twelve signatures on an identity alone, allowing for continuity across severe biometrics events like regrown fingertips etc.

A nonprofit business could do this if backed by all existing dotcom and bitcoin billionaires. But they’d all want to profit from it, so either non-profit (NGO) or governmental it is.

Fun fact: this is already a core function of USPS. They serve as an identity verification hub for both US passports and their informed delivery and PO box services. They just have a human-dependent process rather than an identity-generator booth. So they’d be perfectly positioned to take your ID, hand you an attestation request QR code, and get your identity-signatures on it — without being able to reverse-engineer your biometrics from those signatures, but still being able to detect gross variances when someone else tries to lie about being you in a future verification.

Anyways, none of this will likely ever happen, but the rich tech folks could make it happen at any time if they cared to. Instead we get THE ORB which is doing retinas as a for-profit without auditable artifacts or hardware. Sigh.

[acgourley]

I think you can do it without any biometrics at all, although using it as a second factor could make it smoother.

I'd propose the primary factor is social - when a child is born there is a recorded attestation from the family and care providers about the minting of a new soul. When keys are compromised you similarly seek attestations from your social network (or social worker) that you need to furnish a new key.

The network could be attacked by literal force, blackmail, or deception, but it's very expensive compared the defense (strong legal punishment for attempts to subvert the network)

That last part is why I think the state has to do it, not technologists. There has to be a strong legal and cultural immune system in place to defend the network.

[altairprime]

That’s adjacent to birth certificates and passports already, with some variations on a theme per country, but certainly I don’t object to it. But I’m still infuriated at having to provide a birth certificate to LinkedIn to support a legal name change, so I encourage further design at the interface between “citizen identity” and “online identity(s)”. Your idea has merits and isn’t like others I’ve seen, so it’s worth considering in more detail!

[no_time]

>biometrics booths that generate private keys from normalized biometric inputs

Isn't this basically worldcoin? Aside from the fact that worldcoin is run by people I wouldn't trust to watch my cats for an afternoon, the core principle with well thought out ZK crypto could work well.