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This is cryptoshredding, more or less. There are a couple of wrinkles to your good idea. * It potentially makes updates complicated. * In the event of a key c
by Kalium 9y ago
This is cryptoshredding, more or less. There are a couple of wrinkles to your good idea.
* It potentially makes updates complicated.
* In the event of a key compromise, you're forever hosed.
* You probably shouldn't hand out your private key like that.
* They wouldn't need your private key to read the data you've described, requiring your public key instead.
* You have no ability to revoke someone's access - grant it once and it's eternal.
It's a good start! Cryptography is very powerful and can do a lot to solve this problem. Thank you so much for caring and putting forward an interesting idea.
- neltnerb 9y agoHow about if the owner of the blockchain (here I'm assuming, say, a land-ownership database run by the state) have a private key for each person in their own system which they use to put the relevant data into a blockchain. Then they delete the private key for that person to scramble entries that need deleting so no one can ever access it again. The person doesn't need to have or know their own private key since it's a backend for the municipal service. Now why anyone would want to do this with a blockchain instead of a simple encrypted database... well, maybe someone else can explain that. I'm still assuming you visit deeds.mass.gov or something and have an interface you would use to find out who owns what, so the end user isn't actually touching the blockchain in this case.
- Kalium 9y agoAs I understand PKI, and my understanding is limited so I could of course be very wrong, but in the scenario you describe the deletion of the private key would do nothing to prevent people from decrypting data readable with a public key. This would work with a symmetric key! But as you say, I'm struggling to think of any real advantages to using a blockchain here.
- fastball 9y agoThanks for the thoughtful response. Ok, what about this: Only you have your private key, which must be used to modify the data, everyone else is given a "view key", which is read-only. If at any point a view key is compromised, you can somehow revoke the view key using the private key. Would that not work?
- Kalium 9y agoThanks for humoring me! It sounds a lot like you're trying to re-invent PKI and mutable data stores. Are you sure that isn't what you want here?