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Perhaps unwittingly, you just described PKI. Two keys: one is public and identifies someone (or something), and the other is private and can be used to prove yo
by nulbyte 8y ago
Perhaps unwittingly, you just described PKI. Two keys: one is public and identifies someone (or something), and the other is private and can be used to prove your identity.
Encrypting with the public key can be done by anyone, but only the private key can decrypt. This allows encrypted communication.
But encrypting with the private key can only be done by someone with the private key. It can be decrypted by anyone, but only using your public key, thus proving your identity; or more accuractely, this proving you have the identified party's private key. So I ask you to encrypt some random OTP to prove your identity. Then I decrypt it with your public key to test your proof. This is how cryptographic signatures work.
Government-issued identification seems an obvious application of PKI.
- xorcist 8y agoPKI can be an important part of a system to authenticate your identity, but for that to work you need an identity to start with. You seem to need some sort of identity for a society to scale. Large countries tries to function without, and the result is ad-hoc identity systems instead. A public key can be an identity, it's a perfectly workable outcome of Zooko's triangle, but it's not a very useful one for most use cases. The article is about using phone numbers to uniquely identify people and the problems that brings.