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In practice, doing public/private key instead of SSN would likely work like the EMV cards, right?
by pc2g4d 9y ago
In 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