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The government should issue a public/private key to every citizen/resident and provide a verification service that companies can use to verify a citizen's ident
by test6554 8y ago
The government should issue a public/private key to every citizen/resident and provide a verification service that companies can use to verify a citizen's identity without the citizen having to hand over any secret information.
They could even optionally store one or more profiles that you could use for streamlining your interactions with various private industries: financial services, health care, employment, shopping, and travel could all have separate datasets about you stored for convenience.
Then when you want to do business with a company, you grant them access to the appropriate profile. When you conclude your business, you revoke access.
The same would be great for phone and email networks. Basically instead of giving someone your contact info, you give them a voucher to contact you. They call or email to the service and include the voucher (all automated) and the service either forwards it along or ignores it based on whether the voucher is valid. And you can invalidate any voucher at any time for any reason.
For people that like things simple, they could use a single voucher for everything, but for people who want more control they could do separate vouchers for everyone, or some easier middle-ground like family, friends, professional, commercial, and misc.
- sbarre 8y agoYeah until the government database gets compromised and all the private keys get leaked.
- user5994461 8y agoThey couldn't be leaked, they would be in the hands of the people. The government only needs a public key.
- colejohnson66 8y agoThen when the user inevitable loses their private key? Not everyone is tech savvy enough.
- BenjiWiebe 8y agoThen use an annoying lengthy in person procedure to issue a new one.
- fivefive55 8y agoThat doesn't sound any worse than losing your social security number.
- colejohnson66 8y agoYour SSN you can memorize. A 2048 bit+ private key is gonna be a lot harder
- acdha 8y agoSSNs are identifiers and not intended to be private. The only reason anyone cares about SSNs is that some private businesses were negligent in their authentication procedures and have tried to shift the blame to the victims. In contrast, if you have public-key encryption people are going to build systems on the assumption that your private key is only available to you despite several decades of history showing that's not a safe assumption.
- bashinator 8y agoMake issuance and re-issuing of the key contingent on DNA verification.
- andrewla 8y ago... so the government has a copy of your DNA on file? What about when that database gets compromised?
- sneakernets 8y agoThat would be some pretty impressive skills to fake DNA.
- 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gammateam 8y agoYou go in person and give a new public key and cryptographically sign the governments message with it In person the government will have their own redundant and convoluted process to verify you before giving you a message to sign, just like today to reissue a SSN
- pariahHN 8y agoThis isn't how asymmetric encryption works - government would store public keys, users would manage their own private keys +/- passphrases. If there was a breach at central storage, the only thing that could possibly be taken would be the public keys which by definition are useless for anything other than verifying a signed message or encrypting a message to the holder of the private key.
- sbarre 8y agoYou're right, my mistake!