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White House Looks at Replacing Social Security Numbers
- neilellis 9y agoNow all they need to do is replace birthdays and past addresses.
- saalweachter 9y agoYou gotta love the idea of personally identifying information, known only to you and three large corporations.
- ProAm 9y agoSo little faith in the US government to do this with the least bit of efficacy. It will be contracted out to a big firm, for a ton of money, with project overruns, budget overruns, and in 20 years will probably still be using SSNs while they continue to fix this new system.
- turc1656 9y agoSSN's were never meant to be used for identification purposes like they are used today. They were designed only to be able to make a SS benefit claim when you came of age to help prove you are entitled to the benefit. That's why they gave you a physical card. Combined with your other, regular identification (if requested), you can prove that you are the person you say you are and the benefits available to you have already been recorded. The SSN itself should never have been used in lieu of proper identification.
- athenot 9y agoThis is long overdue. In France, the privacy watchog CNIL was founded in 1978 when the idea of using the social security number for all sorts of other purposes got proposed (and rejected), prompting for some safeguards. In the US, we've been so allergic to a "national ID card" that we just re-purposed the SSN into the very same thing. But then we decided to make it both a unique ID and a password, despite it being a terrible way to perform authentication (and an even worse way to do authorization).
- adventured 9y agoIt's a rare circumstance where there's an allergy to national ID cards on both sides of the political aisle. On the Republican side they (supposedly) fear greater Federal Government power, tracking, etc. On the Democrat side, they're afraid of national ID cards being required at voting locations.
- vacri 9y agoThe two parties in the US are on the same side of the political aisle. The Democrats are 'sane conservatives', actually trying to make policy and govern, and the Republicans are the 'insane conservatives', preferring to resort to sloganeering and worshipping a fantasy ideal rather than making policy.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kmicklas 9y agoWhy would Democrats be afraid of IDs being required for voting if everyone got one? I thought the whole Republican opposition to voting rights stuff from the Democrats was because they know there's a bunch of poor would-be-Democrats who don't currently have the required IDs.
- srdev 9y agoWe’re not. The problem is with the “everyone got one” part. Every time I’ve discussed this issue personally with a republican they act indignant when I assert that the ids need to be free and trivially obtainable. Usually grousing about the cost and “laziness”.
- alex_young 9y agoThe cards used to have "Not For Identification" printed right on them. This has been a known bad idea for decades but we just decided to do it anyway. http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/26/weekinreview/the-nation-not-for-identification-purposes-just-kidding.html http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/26/weekinreview/the-nation-no...
- pc2g4d 9y agoIn practice, doing public/private key instead of SSN would likely work like the EMV cards, right?
- hannasanarion 9y agoIt would require having a central authority that holds, or at least authenticates, all the keys, which many might not like.
- orthecreedence 9y agoWell too bad? I'd much rather have a central authority holding the keys than "oh shit, my private key was compromised, lol guess I'm going to be paying off a lot of random credit card bills for the next 50 years." The SSA that exists now would be able to validate public keys and reissue keypairs, which would absolutely be necessary. So we'd still have the same central authority, but the numbers they give out would actually be useful.
- dredmorbius 9y agoThat's actually a really good, and complex, question. It might be sufficient to have an authority which ensures there are no duplicate numbers issued, though that doesn't get around the problem of a single individual with multiple assigned numbers. In practice, there are methods of determining with a fairly high degree of accuracy whether or not two or more identifiers might indicate the same individual (or at least two very closely related individuals). But if you're looking for a 1:1 signifier-subject relation, you'd want that system to be quite good.
- dredmorbius 9y agoSorry, could you clarify? I'm presuming this EMV card: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV
- V2hLe0ThslzRaV2 9y agoCore issue is not that solutions do not exist, but that the average person simply does not care about security.
- jakelarkin 9y agothe average corporation does not care about security as long as someone else is paying the price. moreover they actively drag on security best-practices if they increase costs or introduce any friction whatsoever into consumer purchases. one of the reasons why we don't have CHIP+PIN in the US
- dredmorbius 9y agoThere are a lot of things the average person simply does not care about as regards standardisation, or codes, or laws, or procedures, which government (or other entities) manage to find solutions for. I would actually put that concern near the top of my list of things that is not relevant to this discussion.
- koolba 9y agoThis would be amazing if done correctly. With modern crypto there's a world of options to enable things like identity validation, attestation, and delegation without giving the keys to your entire identity. It'd also be a perfect candidate for an RFC style process. Unfortunately this is the Federal government we're talking about so the chance of it being completed in any timely fashion are slim.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- maxerickson 9y agoHas the UX been worked out so that disinterested people can successfully and reliably do all that stuff without leaking their private keys? There will be roughly 300 million disinterested users, making it work reliably in that scenario is important.
- Ajedi32 9y agoThe key will obviously need to be stored in a physical token of some kind that's designed to prevent the key from being extracted. Kinda like how U2F and Smart Cards work.
- aaomidi 9y agoAnd somehow you're going to have to accept that fact that people are going to lose their keys. You're going to want to make sure you can properly reissue one to the correct person.
- mankash666 9y agoThe world's moving towards a biometrically backed public-private key pair. Hope this is considered
- jakelarkin 9y agoyou can't rotate biometry if its compromised
- archgoon 9y agoMay be worth it for in-person reclamation of identity. Use biometrics only when acquired in person. Beats having to dreg up my high school year book, social security card, birth certificate, and high school transcript (None of which are actually inspected of course).
- dredmorbius 9y agoHow do you defend against / defeat replay attacks?
- archgoon 9y agoIn person? When you're actually seeing that it's their thumb and eyes that are being scanned?
- dredmorbius 9y agoHow do you, as a third party, know that the validation occurred in person? How do you defend against replay attacks?
- archgoon 9y agoSo you agree that if it is done in person, it'd be difficult to fake?
- 9y ago
- luckydata 9y agoNo mention of blockchain anywhere in the comments. Color me surprised.
- rkuykendall-com 9y ago"Make the stupid comment you expect to see in the world" - Mahatma Gandhi
- ben_jones 9y agoI have plenty of reservations about Big Tech, but why can't Google bid on this? Sure we'd get ads on the ID card but at least they'd get the math right.
- mbroshi 9y agoYou've just rediscovered the premise of David Eggers's The Circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)
- phjesusthatguy3 9y agoWe're already a lot closer to George Saunders' My Flamboyant Grandson[0] than that. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/01/28/my-flamboyant-grandson https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/01/28/my-flamboyant-...
- Ajedi32 9y agoMaybe not Google specifically, but I'd love it if the industry got involved in this somehow. Maybe a standards group like the Internet Engineering Task Force or the FIDO Alliance to work out the spec.
- smitherfield 9y agoAn Apple ID card would be a lot less dystopian. (And would look cooler).
- saalweachter 9y agoI dunno, a lot of dystopian science fiction has the veneer of shiny, and you only find the horrors when you scratch through this shiny surface.
- dredmorbius 9y agoI'd commented to the same effect earlier on Google's own Identity Service: Google+. I think Google's dropped the ball, badly, on identity and authentication (though they're ... making some movement with physical 2FA). I've got massive misgivings myself about private tech firms getting into this space, though I do think they might have useful elements to add by way of suggesting protocols and standards. And I'd be really suprised if various majors aren't part of the discussion. Google, Facebook, Microsoft (remember Passport?), Oracle, IBM. And databrokers such as ADP. Plus banking and financial institutions, who've mostly created the mess....
- ballenf 9y agoLet's be careful not to underestimate the value of deniability. Any change in policy needs to maintain the ability of the citizen to challenge actions taken with a private key (opening an account or borrowing money) and the burden should not shift to the consumer. I fear that financial institutions will use the change as an opportunity to offload their due diligence onto consumers. Someone having my private key should not have any greater ability to implicate or permanently damage me than someone having my SSN.
- maxerickson 9y agoYou let out "further" before "offload" in your 3rd paragraph.
- aerovistae 9y agoYou left out the 'f' in 'left.'
- maerF0x0 9y agoBecause private keys are a far greater tool of proving identity than a SSN, I would argue one should have much greater culpability in an "unauthorized" action. SSNs are lost for good on breaches of companies' infrastructures, but nothing should be lost in a Pub/Priv key scheme. What we'll need is a good key revocation process. So when my identity is compromised (say, malware on a device) then I can be me again.
- AckSyn 9y agoBeing able to revoke my SSN would be nice. What would be even better is if the SSA ran as a CA, then my own "SSN" could be my master key, and I could then issue independent sub-(SSN) keys per institution that requests it. Then if a breach were to occure 1) it would be useless to anyone but the agency/company it was issued to, and 2) I could always revoke the key thereby revoking that companies access to it and any damage they may cause to my credit.
- random023987 9y ago
- vangale 9y agoOT but can be filed under "Falsehoods programmers believe about Social Security Numbers": SSN's are unique per person. A friend of mine worked on a shareholder database for AT&T back in 70/80's and discovered this when they tried to make their SSN column unique.
- specialist 9y agoName + DOB + SSN are mostly unique. No guarantees.
- undersuit 9y agoThrow in Place of Birth and cross your fingers.
- C4K3 9y agoDoesn't the SSN already encode the general area where it was issued (usually place of birth?) https://www.ssn-check.org/decode/ https://www.ssn-check.org/decode/
- dredmorbius 9y agoIt did, by office (through 1972) or ZIP Code (through 2011), but not any longer. If you are on HN and have a randomly-assigned Area Number on your SSN, you are, however, precocious.
- dredmorbius 9y agoI'd addressed that a week or few back regards account security questions. A big problem is that there are only so many place names in any country, and of those, a relatively small set with birthing centres. There are 248 birthing centers in the United States, and only about 1% of all births occur outside of one (typically a BC is at a hospital). https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db144.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db144.htm
- 9y ago
- mmcconnell1618 9y agoIs anyone else suspicious that this could be a backdoor into identifying undocumented workers in the country? Could this be used as another way to purge certain classes of voters from the roles? Social security numbers are fairly easy to "borrow" but if they are no longer accepted for employment documentation or voter registration, it leaves the door open to a much stricter set of rules to obtain whatever new ID is created.
- artursapek 9y agoThat wouldn't be a "backdoor", but rather the system doing its job correctly. However it's obviously not the main goal.
- specialist 9y agoEveryone, including undocumented workers, are already thoroughly, completely, exhaustively tracked. Replacing SSN would daylight this fact, exposing an inconvenient truth.
- anindha 9y agoCan you explain this? If I apply for a lease how does the Fedral government know or block me? If I need to authenticate through their system the Federal government will definitely know.
- specialist 9y agoI didn't follow the leap from undocumented workers reusing SSNs to applying for a lease.
- specialist 9y ago#1 - Privacy minded and anti-government types opposed RealID. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REAL_ID_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REAL_ID_Act Ironically, globally unique identifiers are required to protect our demographic data. Otherwise all records must be stored as plaintext (unencrypted). I was very chagrined when I finally figured this out, causing me to support RealID. https://www.amazon.com/Translucent-Databases-2Nd-Authentication-Steganography/dp/1441421343 https://www.amazon.com/Translucent-Databases-2Nd-Authenticat... Source: Me. I worked on both voter privacy and electronic medical records. #2 - The government, thru contracts with services like Lexis/Nexus (nee Seisent) have already created globally unique identifiers for pretty much every person, living or dead. Replacing SSN would just formalize, simplify, daylight such matters. Alas, wedge issues like voter registration databases (assessing eligibility to vote) and immigration status, in near real-time, would become trivial and nearly error free, so I doubt this commonsense, practical effort will happen any time soon.
- Ajedi32 9y agoSo what _should_ we replace SSNs with? Obviously some kind of system based on asymmetric cryptography would be ideal, but what system, specifically? There are a lot of competing concerns here, not the least among them being privacy. For example, if a system based on public key cryptography becomes commonplace in the US, will websites start using that same system for authentication? There are some rather significant privacy issues associated with having a government issued, globally unique ID associated with your account on random websites. Maybe this is something the tech industry in the US should be involved in? I imagine lots of companies would jump at the chance to be involved in a standards group designing a unified method for citizen authentication in the US.
- vpeters25 9y agoMaybe we don't need a unique id at the federal level after all. Financial institutions are already required to follow KYC (Know Your Customer) laws. For this they need a way to validate the identity of the customers they do business with. I guess they already have enough ways to do this without relying on SSN or a potential national id card. BTW, after the Equifax hack, financial institutions should be mandated to stop trusting SSN as proof of identity.
- dredmorbius 9y agoI'm thinking of the number of government-level identifiers which might be needed / used: * Tax authority (TIN). * Pensions system (e.g., SSN) * Possibly a voting ID, though that's fraught. * Military or national service ID. * State tax ID. * Drivers registration. * Real estate / property ID. * Medical records ID. * Social benefits ID. * Other registrations, e.g., weapons, broadcast licenses, etc.
- pandemi 9y agoIn the Nordic countries we have 2 factor authentication with your bank used as means of authentication. See for example BankId in Sweden. Tools like this reduce the use of SSN to a username instead of a password like it should be.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
- test6554 9y agoThis is simple, I just need a government issued public/private key, a government username/password, a government OAuth servuce and a government mobile authentication app. Most people won't even need to know the public/private key exists, but techies can leverage it to automate their lives some day. Let's say I want to open a bank account with bank X. So I go to bank X's website and click open an account. Select my country and it redirects me to an oauth login page for my government. I log in and authorize the bank to view my basic identity info. Now the bank knows who I am and I can finish opening the account. For in-person interactions, I could have my phone scan some person/company's public key in the form of a QR code and generate a qr code of my own that will let that company instantly authenticate me (airline, cruise line, police officer, etc.) with the government, but that same qr code will not do anything with any other person who sees my code because it is encrypted with the company's public key. My government password can be reset if compromised and I never have to give out to anybody which puts it miles ahead of social security numbers from day 1. My phone is secure if lost, because it requires my government password to unlock the app as well as some biometric information.
- ChrisBland 9y agoWhat about those who do not own a mobile device, or those not comfortable with technology. We live in a large country, and we must have support for ALL of our citizens, not just our younger tech-savy ones. Go to a community of 65+ year olds and explain this to them. You'll get back blank stares. its a non starter.
- anindha 9y agoMake it opt-in. Anyone who isn’t comfortable with the change can continue to use their SSN.
- Godel_unicode 9y agoEvery business will then continue to just use social security numbers since everyone is guaranteed to have one. Half measures won't work, that's how we got here in the first place.
- linsomniac 9y agoGenerally I am for a smaller government rather than larger. But in this case, the private sector has demonstrated that without regulation specifying otherwise, they will do nothing to protect our identities. The Social Security Administration's official policy on SSNs is that consumers don't have to give their SSN to businesses with the exception of tax-related things like employment and banks. But, they also say that businesses can choose to not do business with you if you are unwilling to give out your SSN. And businesses have done nothing to help people secure their identities. In fact, they've done the opposite. Starting around 20 years ago, I refused to give my SSN out except where it was specifically required by the govt. The insurance companies seemed to be the ones who had the hardest time of it, it required hours of effort with my insurance company to let me not have my SSN as my identifier. They ended up putting all zeroes in. But then every time I used my insurance I had to work with them ("What is your SSN?" "The insurance company doesn't use my SSN, they use all 0s." Blank stare). Around 10 years ago it got to the point where there was even more push back and the effort was more than it was worth. It really wasn't helping, being "the one guy who wouldn't give out his SSN". Pretty much every time I explained it to a doctors office they would say "I've never heard of that before, but it makes sense." That sort of pushback only really works if, you know, at least a few people do it. :-)
- larrik 9y agoI've always left it blank on doctor forms, and no one's ever said a word to me...
- avn2109 9y agoJust say you were born abroad, are not a US citizen etc and therefore don't have an SSN, you just happen to speak good English because you went to American school. But you're happy to give them your national ID number from your home country. Bonus points if you actually have another passport to waive around while claiming this. This doesn't work all the time, but it's surprisingly effective in like 90% of cases.
- bhhaskin 9y ago
- 32days8kd 9y agoThe timing of login.gov (www.login.gov; https://fcw.com/articles/2017/01/19/login-dot-gov-mazmanian.aspx https://fcw.com/articles/2017/01/19/login-dot-gov-mazmanian....) going online is convenient...
- kiddico 9y agoI see talk in this thread that uses the term 'private key'. Which makes me think about using a literal cryptographic private / public key combo for this sort of thing. Say I have a private key, and I want a business to have a way to ID me. They give me a key associated with me in their database, and I encrypt it with my private key, and give the results back. Now when someone wants to do business with them in my name they must turn those results back into what the business has in their database. So long as I keep my key safe the business can leak data all they want. This would shift all the work for security over to the citizens though, which could have mixed results...
- simonsarris 9y agoAnd what happens when someone's private key leaks? Do they have to get issued a new one somehow? If someone has gone through 7 private keys, how do you know that the one person-claiming-to-be-someone is giving you the most up to date one vs an older one, etc. There would be a lot of non-trivial considerations by pushing all this on average joes (both as individuals and as people attempting to verify individuals). A system that appears secure but isn't is more dangerous. I can hear a 60 year old now: "Aunt Claire is stuck in london and needs money! We know its her, here's her [expired key] encrypted message!"
- kiddico 9y agoThat is a solid question. The optimist in me says 'well if the private key is leaked we're in about the same spot we are now with SSNs'. Every other part of me just cries. In regards to "which version do we trust if a new key has been issued?": My gut says there would need to be a centralized system to for which ones have been voided, and which ones haven't. At that point what we're doing is making SSN's that we can invalidate, with the added disadvantage of being much more confusing to work with. I have no idea what the right answer is, but Aunt Claire is (possibly) in need so we need to figure this out fast.
- tomschlick 9y agoAs a user above stated, use an oAuth service from the government. When at a business you could "prove" to their system who you are by authenticating with the govt service with your private key (most likely on a smart card like the military's CAC card). The business then gets an oauth token that you could revoke. If you lose your private key you would have to go to some government services office and bring additional documents to prove who you are just like a passport.
- clairity 9y agoreplace it? SSN has one purpose, and that is to identify our national social benefits account. that's it, and it works for that. but we don't need a national ID. at all. the tracking that will most certainly accompany that is diametrically opposed to the concept of a free people. banks take a risk with every account and every transaction. it's up to those institutions to figure out how to manage that risk, without obligating all americans to give up their hard fought and valuable constitutional right to privacy to make it easy for them.
- dredmorbius 9y agoSSN in fact does not work well for that. There are fewer than 1 billion unique SSNs. Yes, there are 8 digits, but there are significant ranges of invalid values. The Social Security Administration will run out of numbers within a few decades, at most. It's one thing to have enough values to assign everybody. It's another for the namespace to be so densely populated that any randomly-chosen value is likely to be valid. This ... creates problems. There are no check or validity values within SSNs. There's a structure to the digits (Area, Group, and Serial numbers), but even those are at best vague, there've been three regimes of assignment (< 1972, 1972-2011, and 2011+), and other than "this value isn't within a validly assigned range", there are, again, no validity checks. Provisions for being issued a new SSN are at best cumbersome. That's just off the top of my head. I've worked in large-scale data analysis and processing, though years ago, and there are long and detailed discussions of the limitations and failures of SSNs even just as account identifiers. Using them outside the SSA only compounds those issues.
- clairity 9y agoyou make good points. in my head, i had simply equated "works for that" with "good enough for now". it seems even for just social security, the SSN numbering system could use an update, integrating everything we've learned about identity schemes in the last 100 years.
- mywittyname 9y agoDoes everyone really need an unique digital identifier? My feeling is, "this is probably you" is good enough for nearly every transaction people will perform. And we've long had a system in place to deal with the special cases in which this is not good enough: notaries. Financial companies need to come to terms with this fact and accept insurance against its exploitation as a cost of doing business. For taxes and other government documents, we should all move to a tax id system, like businesses use.
- dredmorbius 9y agoAbsolutely not for each and every transaction. There are a certain set of activities for which a 1:1 association is highly preferable, though voting is about the most extreme case. For various reasons, there are both problems with trying to create a voter-ID system, political resistance to this, and relatively limited call to do so in the first place (in-person fraud is expensive, risks elsehere are far greater). Much of the remaining argument revolves around credit and risk, and around advertising and tracking. I'd argue that the first does not require single-ID tracking, and the second should under no circumstances be allowed to institute it. Much of the remaining space is national accounts types stuff: tax, pension, and medical authorities, passport/border control, some licensing (much of that at the state/local level). But yes, at the national level, there is a call for 1:1 account assignments, though those need not be unified across all services.
- simplicio 9y agoEh, I still think the best thing for the gov't to do in regards to SS numbers is just publish them all in an open database accessible to anyone. That would put an end to banks and such trying to use them as a way to verify identity. SS are useful as a unique identifier for Americans. But the weird process by which they've become some sort of "password" for accessing credit and such in someones name is crazy, and pretty obviously not working.
- dflock 9y ago> That would put an end to banks and such trying to use them as a way to verify identity. Obviously it should so - but obviously, they shouldn't be using them in the first place. Doesn't seem like it would stop anyone - possibly for regulated entities like banks, maybe - but even then, they'd probably have to be dragged, kicking & screaming.
- simplicio 9y agoYea, but if they were literally all published publicly, banks wouldn't even be able to pretend they provided some measure of security. Though of course whatever banks use as a replacement may be equally bad
- danielrmay 9y agoJust to make a pedantic point, SSNs do not indicate US citizenship or nationality. Permanent residents (green card holders) and those on temporary work visas receive SSNs.
- sxates 9y agoI think Equifax just did that for them.
- cjbarber 9y ago> Eh, I still think the best thing for the gov't to do in regards to SS numbers is just publish them all in an open database accessible to anyone. They basically are available to any business that needs them. Just takes a few months to go through the compliance process for an identity verification company. See https://cognitohq.com/docs https://cognitohq.com/docs Regarding it being a password, yeah that is pretty bad. Some friends of mine are working on Bloom (https://hellobloom.io/ https://hellobloom.io/) which is trying interesting things that hook into the real world (necessary) while also trying to create a better system eventually. Basically, an ID you control with a private key is approved by identity verification services. Your friends basically vouch for the ID being correct. Your identity is tied to that ID. If you lose the private key then you have your friends invalidate the old ID and transfer their vouch to your new ID. Way better than just a secret number.
- tareqak 9y agoTechmeme summary: Rob Joyce, the White House cybersecurity czar, says it wants to end use of Social Security numbers for identification and is examining modern alternatives
- msla 9y agoReplacing it with something more closely approximating a national ID number will run up against religious beliefs that such IDs are Satanic and portend the End Times. Just because you do not share such beliefs does not mean they do not exist, or can be dismissed.
- OrwellianChild 9y agoAm I crazy, or is this backwards? Keep SSN for retirement benefits, and only retirement benefits. Ban SSNs as identifiers with private companies not affiliated with providing retirement benefits. Problem solved.
- dredmorbius 9y agoThere's still the question of a standard for financial identifiers. And as I've commented elsewhere on this thread, SSNs themselves actually do have numerous problems and deficiencies, even if confined to the SSA.
- peterjlee 9y agoFederal government buys Twitter and makes your twitter handle your national identifier. I'm sure Trump is fine with that.
- RandVal30142 9y ago"Great anger" -The damned President, encouraging his people into further divisiveness. Yea no fucking way I'm supporting this admin in cataloging anyone.
- eximius 9y agoThe Keybase folks should seriously consider getting in on this. There are not many groups I'd trust to design something cryptographically sound and friendly enough to be useable (both for citizens and the government - you need at least two tiers so WHEN the inevitable private key leak happens on the government's part, it isn't the master key kept in cold storage).
- bradknowles 9y agoHmm. Almost makes you wonder if maybe the people who hacked Equifax work for some secret branch of the US govt, just so that they could force some sort of change like this down our throats. You know, the situation is really bad when the people you used to think were conspiracy nuts now seem to be people who weren’t thinking in big enough terms.