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How? It’s a chicken and egg problem. How do you map a public key to a person? You will have to have an Equifax like service that will do the mapping. But th

How? It’s a chicken and egg problem. How do you map a public key to a person? You will have to have an Equifax like service that will do the mapping. But then how do you prove to them that you are who you say you are in order to map you to your public key? Back to, SSN, driving license and what not. Edit: I don't think having a governmental service dealing with thousands of people every day(lost keys etc..) is something that is going to happen in the US.

jstanley 9y ago
Map a public key to a person (in cases where that is even desirable! Which is not most of them) using the web of trust.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  Web of Trust systems only work in cooperative environments. In the presence of malicious parties they fail spectacularly.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    How so?
    - IncRnd 9y ago
      A malicious actor can utilize a botnet to skew the crowdsourcing of trust, for example. In other words, in a WOT for identification, one's identification can be invalidated or stolen by someone who purchases cloud time.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        Web-of-Trust means there's a link between you and the other entity. The number of people who trust something is not really relevant, so crowdsourcing wouldn't matter. I know there was a service called WOT that relied on that, but in my opinion they were simply misusing the concept.
        IncRnd 9y ago
        A pgp wot or the wot that you refer to can be subverted. In the scenario of everyone's identification, the WOT covers everyone in the population not a small WOT inside a relatively much larger population.
        icebraining 9y ago
        How can it be subverted?
zeta0134 9y ago
Because unlike an SSN, you never hand out your private key. Ever. Instead, you encrypt things with your private key, and whomever you are validating your key to looks up the public key, decrypts your message, and has their proof. The public keys can be stolen all day long and they're the only part of the equation that needs to be stored anywhere long term. The private keys are just that; truly private, and ideally extremely difficult to steal. Yes, there will need to be a public service to manage the public keys, and yes this will be able to be compromised in some dangerous ways, but not quite so dangerous as "Whoops, everyone's SSNs are lost, now any attacker can impersonate them because that's all they needed."
- lostlogin 9y ago
  This would be ideal, but imagine trying to implement it. 4 digit banking PIN numbers are already regularly forgotten, even when chosen by the user.
- Spivak 9y ago
  If you think they're going to be difficult to steal you're crazy. They will sit unsecured on personal computers in some folder on the Desktop waiting for any malware to scoop them up. They will overnight beclem the highest value target for hackers. This is even before we talk about how to handle the huge number of people who will lose or delete them. Tech can't solve this prpblem. Any system that requires a secret won't be.
  - mtgx 9y ago
    You give everyone smart cards/tokens with bruteforce-limited PINs on them. That's where the private key will reside. The "only" other problem that will remain is that you will need a secure supply-chain, otherwise this will happen: http://www.zdnet.com/article/id-card-security-spain-is-facing-chaos-over-chip-crypto-flaws/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/id-card-security-spain-is-facin... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gemalto-cybercrime/hack-gave-u-s-and-british-spies-access-to-billions-of-phones-intercept-idUSKBN0LO0K720150220 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gemalto-cybercrime/hack-g... If you do something like this you actually need to be serious about it and establish a rigorous vetting/auditing process -- not just hand the contract to whoever donated the most to your election campaign. Maybe set-up a 3-year long NIST competition or something, like they do when choosing new crypto standards, and establish the winner this way. The other side of the equation, allowing services to interface with these cards securely, is already being solved by the FIDO 2.0 spec.
EvanAnderson 9y ago
In the United States, at least, the U.S. Postal Service is in a unique position to "pivot" to being an identity and "trust" provider. They already provide a physical-to-identity "mapping" service for the vast majority of Americans.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > In the United States, at least, the U.S. Postal Service is in a unique position to "pivot" to being an identity and "trust" provider. The USPS is nowhere near equipped to handle this. And there's no way I'd trust them to be competent enough to handle the task with the level of security that it would entail. > They already provide a physical-to-identity "mapping" service for the vast majority of Americans. They really don't. Even if we ignore the fact that one's identity is completely separate from the question of where they reside, the USPS has no way to verify residence. They don't really even a way to verify mailing addresses, which is at least a more well-defined problem than residence.
  - chickenfries 9y ago
    > And there's no way I'd trust them to be competent enough to handle the task with the level of security that it would entail. Why? Obviously it would be a big undertaking, but the post office already issues US Passports. I'm not sure what you mean by "verifying mailing addresses" because the USPS does provide a way to do verify the correctness and deliverability of an address [1]. The point is that the USPS would be in a good position to become the government body that implements a national identity service. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Management_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Management_System
    - akira2501 9y ago
      > but the post office already issues US Passports. The State Department issues US Passports, the Post Office merely accepts your applications on their behalf. > I'm not sure what you mean by "verifying mailing addresses" because the USPS does provide a way to do verify the correctness and deliverability of an address [1]. It's only vaguely tied to identity. I have my physical address, but because I live in an RV park and move often, I don't actually receive mail there. In about half of the locations I've stayed, you _can't_ receive mail there. I use a private mailbox along with a mail forwarding service in order to receive postal mail. > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Management_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Management_System Is used to solve the problem of sorting and routing mail, which is really what the Post Office spends most of their effort on. Every postal address in the US can be uniquely identified by an 11 digit code: your ZIP+4 and the last two digits of your house number, but it completely ignores multi-tenancy and has no provisions for linking to identity.
Sir_Substance 9y ago
>How do you map a public key to a person? https://e-resident.gov.ee/ https://e-resident.gov.ee/
Simon_says 9y ago
The government keeps a publicly available list of the public keys of the people in their jurisdiction. Even the government has no need to know the private keys of citizens. In a sense, a person's identity is the public key. You prove who you are to a third party by encrypting a challenge text provided by the third party. The only reason the government needs to be involved at all is to prevent a single person from having multiple identities, but with or without the government keeping track of the public keys, bank fraud is made exponentially more difficult, and has to be done on an one-by-one individual basis, rather than the situation today where a single hack exposes the credentials of millions.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  That's false. By centralizing public keys under the purview of the federal government you have created a single point of failure that is susceptible to theft, spoofing, planting, and numerous other issues.
  - jstanley 9y ago
    It's still a strict improvement on what we have at the moment, which is more akin to storing unhashed passwords with the government.
    - IncRnd 9y ago
      It is not an improvement to centralize and require fewer pieces of information in order to make a claim for identification.
heavenlyblue 9y ago
How do you map a passport to something? At least a public key can not be forged without my direct effort.
- zxcmx 9y ago
  Actually e-passports have (in 2017) a pretty competent public-key based issuing scheme behind them. You can read them with NFC and cryptographically authenticate the contents.
  - mycall 9y ago
    So you don't suggest microwaving them anymore?
nickthemagicman 9y ago
What. That's like saying how do you map a bitcoin to a person. Public Private key cryptography and the blockchain. Works great for bitcoins, would work great for identity.
- nsomaru 9y ago
  Lose your private key, lose your identity? Let's play that game :)
astura 9y ago
The US military already does it. They have a PKI infrastructure to authenticate service members, civilian employees,and (some) contractors.
Swizec 9y ago
> How do you map a public key to a person? In Slovenia where I'm from you have to go to a government location, same place that gives out IDs and passports and such, show your government issued ID and sign some paperwork. You are then given a digital certificate that you can use for online banking and e-government stuff. Proper RSA stuff. You install it on your computer and your browser uses it to sign requests. Seems like a pretty good way to do it, if you ask me. A slightly more efficient, if less secure, way is how Apple does it for their Apple Developer program. You have to prove to Apple in a way they like that you are who you say you are, then you are issued a certificate with which to sign your apps. That could work too.
- icebraining 9y ago
  If the private key is on your computer, that's not very secure. I wouldn't trust myself to fully secure my computer, let alone the average person.
  - Swizec 9y ago
    Well it needs to be somewhere for you to be able to use it.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      I think a dedicated device (e.g. smartcard or USB dongle) is a better option. I know they've had their problems, but personal computers get owned all the time, since they're simply too exposed.
      - Swizec 9y ago
        Unless somebody steals it. The part I liked about the system in Slovenia isn't so much the particulars of where or how the certificate is stored, but about how it's issued. Since the bit I was answering was "But how do you map a key to a person"
        9y ago
mycall 9y ago
> How do you map a public key to a person? You do that in person, at the fed/state agency, using facial tech, fingerprints, etc. Once you prove who you are, you get to submit a public key to the agency, which you can revoke at any point -- you take a unique key from them too, and some combination of the two you use when signing up for new financial accounts.

jstanley 9y ago

Map a public key to a person (in cases where that is even desirable! Which is not most of them) using the web of trust.

IncRnd 9y ago
Web of Trust systems only work in cooperative environments. In the presence of malicious parties they fail spectacularly.
- icebraining 9y ago
  How so?
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    A malicious actor can utilize a botnet to skew the crowdsourcing of trust, for example. In other words, in a WOT for identification, one's identification can be invalidated or stolen by someone who purchases cloud time.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Web-of-Trust means there's a link between you and the other entity. The number of people who trust something is not really relevant, so crowdsourcing wouldn't matter. I know there was a service called WOT that relied on that, but in my opinion they were simply misusing the concept.
      - IncRnd 9y ago
        A pgp wot or the wot that you refer to can be subverted. In the scenario of everyone's identification, the WOT covers everyone in the population not a small WOT inside a relatively much larger population.
        icebraining 9y ago
        How can it be subverted?

zeta0134 9y ago

Because unlike an SSN, you never hand out your private key. Ever. Instead, you encrypt things with your private key, and whomever you are validating your key to looks up the public key, decrypts your message, and has their proof. The public keys can be stolen all day long and they're the only part of the equation that needs to be stored anywhere long term. The private keys are just that; truly private, and ideally extremely difficult to steal. Yes, there will need to be a public service to manage the public keys, and yes this will be able to be compromised in some dangerous ways, but not quite so dangerous as "Whoops, everyone's SSNs are lost, now any attacker can impersonate them because that's all they needed."

lostlogin 9y ago
This would be ideal, but imagine trying to implement it. 4 digit banking PIN numbers are already regularly forgotten, even when chosen by the user.
Spivak 9y ago
If you think they're going to be difficult to steal you're crazy. They will sit unsecured on personal computers in some folder on the Desktop waiting for any malware to scoop them up. They will overnight beclem the highest value target for hackers. This is even before we talk about how to handle the huge number of people who will lose or delete them. Tech can't solve this prpblem. Any system that requires a secret won't be.
- mtgx 9y ago
  You give everyone smart cards/tokens with bruteforce-limited PINs on them. That's where the private key will reside. The "only" other problem that will remain is that you will need a secure supply-chain, otherwise this will happen: http://www.zdnet.com/article/id-card-security-spain-is-facing-chaos-over-chip-crypto-flaws/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/id-card-security-spain-is-facin... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gemalto-cybercrime/hack-gave-u-s-and-british-spies-access-to-billions-of-phones-intercept-idUSKBN0LO0K720150220 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gemalto-cybercrime/hack-g... If you do something like this you actually need to be serious about it and establish a rigorous vetting/auditing process -- not just hand the contract to whoever donated the most to your election campaign. Maybe set-up a 3-year long NIST competition or something, like they do when choosing new crypto standards, and establish the winner this way. The other side of the equation, allowing services to interface with these cards securely, is already being solved by the FIDO 2.0 spec.

EvanAnderson 9y ago

In the United States, at least, the U.S. Postal Service is in a unique position to "pivot" to being an identity and "trust" provider. They already provide a physical-to-identity "mapping" service for the vast majority of Americans.

chimeracoder 9y ago
> In the United States, at least, the U.S. Postal Service is in a unique position to "pivot" to being an identity and "trust" provider. The USPS is nowhere near equipped to handle this. And there's no way I'd trust them to be competent enough to handle the task with the level of security that it would entail. > They already provide a physical-to-identity "mapping" service for the vast majority of Americans. They really don't. Even if we ignore the fact that one's identity is completely separate from the question of where they reside, the USPS has no way to verify residence. They don't really even a way to verify mailing addresses, which is at least a more well-defined problem than residence.
- chickenfries 9y ago
  > And there's no way I'd trust them to be competent enough to handle the task with the level of security that it would entail. Why? Obviously it would be a big undertaking, but the post office already issues US Passports. I'm not sure what you mean by "verifying mailing addresses" because the USPS does provide a way to do verify the correctness and deliverability of an address [1]. The point is that the USPS would be in a good position to become the government body that implements a national identity service. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Management_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Management_System
  - akira2501 9y ago
    > but the post office already issues US Passports. The State Department issues US Passports, the Post Office merely accepts your applications on their behalf. > I'm not sure what you mean by "verifying mailing addresses" because the USPS does provide a way to do verify the correctness and deliverability of an address [1]. It's only vaguely tied to identity. I have my physical address, but because I live in an RV park and move often, I don't actually receive mail there. In about half of the locations I've stayed, you _can't_ receive mail there. I use a private mailbox along with a mail forwarding service in order to receive postal mail. > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Management_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Management_System Is used to solve the problem of sorting and routing mail, which is really what the Post Office spends most of their effort on. Every postal address in the US can be uniquely identified by an 11 digit code: your ZIP+4 and the last two digits of your house number, but it completely ignores multi-tenancy and has no provisions for linking to identity.

Sir_Substance 9y ago

>How do you map a public key to a person? https://e-resident.gov.ee/ https://e-resident.gov.ee/

Simon_says 9y ago

The government keeps a publicly available list of the public keys of the people in their jurisdiction. Even the government has no need to know the private keys of citizens. In a sense, a person's identity is the public key. You prove who you are to a third party by encrypting a challenge text provided by the third party. The only reason the government needs to be involved at all is to prevent a single person from having multiple identities, but with or without the government keeping track of the public keys, bank fraud is made exponentially more difficult, and has to be done on an one-by-one individual basis, rather than the situation today where a single hack exposes the credentials of millions.

IncRnd 9y ago
That's false. By centralizing public keys under the purview of the federal government you have created a single point of failure that is susceptible to theft, spoofing, planting, and numerous other issues.
- jstanley 9y ago
  It's still a strict improvement on what we have at the moment, which is more akin to storing unhashed passwords with the government.
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    It is not an improvement to centralize and require fewer pieces of information in order to make a claim for identification.

heavenlyblue 9y ago

How do you map a passport to something? At least a public key can not be forged without my direct effort.

zxcmx 9y ago
Actually e-passports have (in 2017) a pretty competent public-key based issuing scheme behind them. You can read them with NFC and cryptographically authenticate the contents.
- mycall 9y ago
  So you don't suggest microwaving them anymore?

nickthemagicman 9y ago

What. That's like saying how do you map a bitcoin to a person. Public Private key cryptography and the blockchain. Works great for bitcoins, would work great for identity.

nsomaru 9y ago
Lose your private key, lose your identity? Let's play that game :)

astura 9y ago

The US military already does it. They have a PKI infrastructure to authenticate service members, civilian employees,and (some) contractors.

Swizec 9y ago

> How do you map a public key to a person? In Slovenia where I'm from you have to go to a government location, same place that gives out IDs and passports and such, show your government issued ID and sign some paperwork. You are then given a digital certificate that you can use for online banking and e-government stuff. Proper RSA stuff. You install it on your computer and your browser uses it to sign requests. Seems like a pretty good way to do it, if you ask me. A slightly more efficient, if less secure, way is how Apple does it for their Apple Developer program. You have to prove to Apple in a way they like that you are who you say you are, then you are issued a certificate with which to sign your apps. That could work too.

icebraining 9y ago
If the private key is on your computer, that's not very secure. I wouldn't trust myself to fully secure my computer, let alone the average person.
- Swizec 9y ago
  Well it needs to be somewhere for you to be able to use it.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    I think a dedicated device (e.g. smartcard or USB dongle) is a better option. I know they've had their problems, but personal computers get owned all the time, since they're simply too exposed.
    - Swizec 9y ago
      Unless somebody steals it. The part I liked about the system in Slovenia isn't so much the particulars of where or how the certificate is stored, but about how it's issued. Since the bit I was answering was "But how do you map a key to a person"
      - 9y ago

mycall 9y ago

> How do you map a public key to a person? You do that in person, at the fed/state agency, using facial tech, fingerprints, etc. Once you prove who you are, you get to submit a public key to the agency, which you can revoke at any point -- you take a unique key from them too, and some combination of the two you use when signing up for new financial accounts.