16 ms·

This is a reflection of the fact that we have no good way for someone to digitally prove their identity. Some countries are getting close-ish - Denmark's NemID

by rossng 7y ago

This is a reflection of the fact that we have no good way for someone to digitally prove their identity. Some countries are getting close-ish - Denmark's NemID system, for example, is used by a lot of financial institutions. However, there remains no easy way to make ad-hoc verifiable statements like 'I am John Smith and I authorise you to send this data to xyz@example.org'. Governments, please solve this problem! Essentially: combine NemID with Keybase and build a UI that normal citizens can understand.

giancarlostoro 7y ago
> Governments, please solve this problem! I would prefer governments to solve it with competent Software Engineers in the mix and maybe other professionals from the finances and IT security industries, but never one single large entity.
- rossng 7y ago
  Of course. There are plenty of different ways to build such a platform (or contract it out) - I'm not advocating any in particular. The UK has a rather interesting example in the GOV.UK Verify service, which federates the identity verification and authentication out to third parties. The user can then choose which provider (e.g. Barclays, Post Office) they want to prove their identity through. Experian is also one of the providers, which perhaps illustrates some of the flaws with this design...
- jsgo 7y ago
  I didn't take that as he wanted legislative representatives and the like to solve it, so much as to make it a matter of focus to enlist the kinds of people you're recommending to provide a solution like this. Personally, I really feel we need a private/public-key kind of system in place for certain things like Social Security Numbers (SSNs) in the US. Such that if a leak also includes an SSN (essentially a public key), it could then be regenerated and some apparatus to manage filtering it to the parties it was assigned to prevent needing to redistribute it manually as a consumer/user (like using your Google, Facebook, or whatever OpenID as credentials for another site and it is stored in the account showing that it is being used as such). If they could automatically detect said public keys being exposed and automate the resetting and distribution process, even better (users should still be able to manually do it if they feel it is compromised though).
  - Avamander 7y ago
    SSN should be just an unique number per person, nothing more, nothing less, never used for identification, only for having an unique number per person. It's impossible to ensure such a number doesn't leak so there also must be 0 consequences in that happening. That would require major legislative change.
mrkeen 7y ago
Sweden's BankID is quite good too.
- Nullabillity 7y ago
  BankID is horrible. It's coupled to your phone's OS, so as it becomes even more mandatory you're stuck carrying around an iOS or Android device, even if your primary phone is something like a Librem 5. It also doesn't support anyway to delegate access, either to people ("my partner should have access to this bank account") or computers ("I want to back up my incoming govt. messages automatically").
  - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
    You can install it on your PC or Mac instead if you want, and it is not the only e-ID in Sweden (alas the others aren't so widely adopted, but that should change if/when the new government ID happens). Access delegation not being part of BankID itself is a feature not a deficiency, it would undermine the concept of secure digital ID if someone else could digitally impersonate you with it. Instead, services can choose whether they let you allow someone to log in for you.
    - Nullabillity 7y ago
      > You can install it on your PC or Mac if you want. 1. Same problem. There is still no Linux client, for example. 2. It's a different API. Most services specifically require Mobile BankID these days. Desktop (regular) BankID won't work there. 3. Many applications are only useful on the go, such as Swish. > Access delegation not being part of BankID itself is a feature not a deficiency, it would undermine the concept of secure digital ID if someone else could digitally impersonate you with it. Different kinds of services have different security requirements. If multiple people live together then it makes sense that any of them should be able to send requests to their cleaning service. There is also already a clear precedent to allow delegation of access that require strong authentication IRL. For example, PostNord allows you to retrieve someone else's mail as long as you provide ID for both yourself and the recipient. You can issue a Fullmakt which authorizes someone to take legally binding actions on your behalf. Hell, you can even vote by delegate.[0] Why should those rights not extend into the digital world? > Instead, services can choose whether they let you allow someone to log in for you. And they don't, because they are lazy and think BankID has magically solved all of their authentication woes. [0]: https://www.val.se/servicelankar/teckensprak/satt-att-rosta.html https://www.val.se/servicelankar/teckensprak/satt-att-rosta....
toomuchtodo 7y ago
Hasn't Estonia solved this with their national ID smart card?
- rossng 7y ago
  I have never used it, but I do get the impression that Estonia is pretty far ahead of everyone else. I don't know if this particular use case is natively supported (but would be interested to know). I suppose it would be possible for a third party to build it.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    Yes, it's officially supported by providing everyone the possibility to sign documents with it. It was made an EU-wide standard in 2016 https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_en/319100_319199/31916201/01.01.01_60/en_31916201v010101p.pdf https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_en/319100_319199/31916201/... but previous iterations have existed since 2002. The person you replied to is pretty much right, Estonian ID-card has solved 99.99% of authentication and signing problems for it's citizens, the support is mandated by law and very widespread. There are a few flaws but those are minor compared to the softly put clusterfuck rest of the world is dealing with.
    - wahern 7y ago
      Flaws like this? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/crypto-failure-cripples-millions-of-high-security-keys-750k-estonian-ids/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/crypt... I support such uses of smartcards, but we have to be disciplined regarding our assumptions about non-repudiation.
      - Avamander 7y ago
        I'd rather not start compiling a list of password-username database thefts, credential stuffings, identity thefts, forged paper signatures, the time lost to inefficient paper procedures, secrets stolen due to how hard it is to encrypt things etc. etc. etc. Of course we have to be disciplined, but other things can't even remotely reach the security such a solution provides. Your comment has very FUD-y undertones, rising concern about a very minor thing if you actually look at how much it solves and how much better it is compared to other widespread applications.
mfontani 7y ago
Italy's "PEC"[1] (Posta Elettronica Certificata, or Certified Electronic Mail) comes pretty close. There's even an RFC[2] for it. In order to get one, an individual has to prove their identity via a government-issued ID (ID card or passport), and that email address can henceforth be used to send emails for all official correspondence as if it were certified/verified mail, with the added bonus that both parties "know" the identity of the other party (i.e. the company knows it was very likely me who sent it, as they trust that the people in charge of having verified my ID did their job) and with the added bonus of the _contents_ of the email also being certified to have been sent from that recipient to that destination address, and not to have been tampered with (great thing to have for lawsuit reasons), unlike "standard" registered mail, who only certified that a letter has been sent and picked up. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certified_email#Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certified_email#Italy [2]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6109 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6109
- rossng 7y ago
  Denmark has a similar service called eBoks, but it's a proprietary SaaS product rather than an open standard. What's the user experience like with the Italian system? Does every company support it?
- Avamander 7y ago
  Estonia's ASICe containers have solved signing any electronic files/documents. Italy is reinventing the wheel a bit. ASICe as such is actually an official EU standard since 2016 and EU law¹ enforces that such digital signatures have to be accepted in every EU member state. Estonian digital signatures have used another standards before though, first Estonian digital signature was given in 2002. The ID-card also provides S/MIME should someone want to use it but people usually just use ASICe. [1] - https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/What+is+the+legislation+-+esignature https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/What...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
skrunch 7y ago
Shameless plug: https://www.yoti.com/ https://www.yoti.com/ We're trying to do exactly that.
Avamander 7y ago
> Governments, please solve this problem! Fun fact, the EU has made a law that should force countries to implement their PKIs for people to be able to digitally sign documents and that those signatures are equivalent to hand written ones. https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/What+is+the+legislation+-+esignature https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/What...
PeterisP 7y ago
Latvia's ID cards support e-signing of digital documents, so I could have a pdf "I authorise you to send this data to xyz@example.org" and sign it so that the recipient can securely verify that this was signed by Name Surname ID123. Estonia has it quite similar, I'm not certain if it's technically the same standard or something slightly different.
- Avamander 7y ago
  By EU law it's basically the same.
tremon 7y ago
The Netherlands uses DigID, which is effectively a federated identity provider. Problem is that it was originally intended for government use only (recently it's been expanded to include health insurance providers), and it's not accessible for commercial entities. It was also marred by very bureaucratic policies, for example to get information on account usage (e.g. how many times was my account used, from which IP, to access which site) you would need to file a police report first, and it supported 2FA very early (through SMS service, now via mobile app as well) but the end user could not forcibly enable 2FA, only the target service could determine if they wanted two-factor authentication on their site. Luckily, those have been fixed. Would be nice if they supported open standards like OAuth though.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  I gather the Dutch company behind DigID, digidentity, is also one of the companies behind UK's "Verify" (used on gov.uk). Barclays, Post Office Ltd, and Experian are the other options -- if memory serves these 3 all had major security breaches. I recently had to apply for a criminal records check ("DBS") and the government's DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) required me to give up all my ID to one of those companies "to identify me" before I could apply; in case someone who was not me was applying for the information. Aside, it seems they could have allowed anyone to apply (and pay the £25 fee) but only sent the response to a known address, which they could cross check from my tax record and driving license, and ... which details have to be kept current by law.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> This is a reflection of the fact that we have no good way for someone to digitally prove their identity. Centralized identity isn't a solution, it's the problem. Once you implement something like that, it requires everyone to track everything using it in order for it to be used to authenticate access to the information. Which means everybody has to store the ID number as a field in every database and it becomes a de facto primary key that allows all information to be correlated by every blackhat that compromises more than one data set. Meanwhile there will be the "just make it work" people who are bad at security, who will do whatever is necessary to compromise their own security because the attacker told them to. And then we would then be giving attackers the capacity to take over their entire lives instead of only one relationship with one entity. Moreover, the scope of the damage if someone were to compromise the central identity system in general rather than only for a specific person is horrifying. It would become a single point of compromise for the whole country. And the worst kind on top of that, because everything would hook into it which would cause it to become ossified and difficult to update. If the system was then publicly compromised, how long does it take for everyone everywhere to update every piece of code to use the replacement? Which thing do you do in the meantime, continue using the compromised system as all hell breaks loose, or shut down your entire country? There is a better solution. If you have an account with someone, you make requests by authenticating in the same way you do with your account. And if you don't have an account, you should be able to request deletion of the data associated with e.g. your IP address, but not request to download it -- because there is no way to to verify your identity for that. Even with centralized ID an IP address can be used by multiple people who shouldn't be able to give consent for one another and may not be mutually distinguishable by the party receiving the request, and the same for most other global data (e.g. many people share full names with other people). The only way to make centralized ID work in that context is to tag everything with it to begin with, compromising all anonymity and pseudonymity -- which can't possibly be the right trade off for what is supposed to be privacy legislation.
tialaramex 7y ago
The only way to do what most people want here is to bake this digital identity into humans, which is beyond our present technology and also feels potentially rather like a recipe for authoritarianism. For one thing, if you can lose it, people will. They'll destroy them on purpose, they'll be stolen by crooks, they will forget them at airports or in hotel safes. That's not a problem for baked in things, people don't leave their hearts behind (outside of Country songs) or (outside of maybe China) get them stolen by crooks but any conceivable device, card, key, or document will have this problem. Greg Egan's "Orphanogensis" (http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html a short story setting up the protagonist for his novel "Diaspora") describes making Polis Citizens (people who exist only as software, the other branches of humanity have given themselves bodies suitable for long term existence in space, the Gleisner Robots, or given up on consciousness altogether, the Dream Apes) with a cypherclerk, a component that does public key crypto. Once the system achieves confidence that the process of making a new citizen has been successful and has produced a conscious person, the cypherclerk is initialised and the new citizen has a unique and impossible to fake proof of ID. This plays no major role in the story, it's just there because presumably Greg agrees with you that it'd sure be convenient if there was actually digital ID. But there isn't. Here's a central conflict: I would like to be able to prove that I'm who I say I am, but without being stuck with that identity. This makes the identity disclaimable. You will find plenty of people who feel the same way, and some of them have very concrete practical reasons (e.g. people with stalkers or who ratted on a crime boss). But for a bunch of things people, and especially governments want to do with a digital ID that's no good. A disclaimable ID can work for a driving license. Barry Shitpeas is licensed to drive an HGV, you can either prove you're Barry Shitpeas, or you can get a new license to drive the HGV with the identity you do want to use. But if Barry drink drives, taking away his license, knowing he can just get a new one as Jerry Poocabbage tomorrow, well that's a rubbish outcome, isn't it? We want a way to _stop_ Barry from driving even if he changes identity. And we can't do that with disclaimable ID.
progval 7y ago
In this case, the solution is easy. The user most likely already has an account, so just ask for the account password. If the users claims they lost the password, then do a classic password recovery via email. Of course it's tricky for organizations storing data about users without an account. (eg. Facebook or Google, not sure how they could handle that at all, even with government ids)
runeks 7y ago
In my opinion, we need an open protocol for this. Every government having a separate digital identification tool is a poor solution. The simplest solution I can imagine is to mimic the solution used to digitally identify companies via HTTPS (certificate authorities), but modified with the intent of identifying a person rather than a company.

by rossng 7y ago

giancarlostoro 7y ago

> Governments, please solve this problem! I would prefer governments to solve it with competent Software Engineers in the mix and maybe other professionals from the finances and IT security industries, but never one single large entity.

rossng 7y ago
Of course. There are plenty of different ways to build such a platform (or contract it out) - I'm not advocating any in particular. The UK has a rather interesting example in the GOV.UK Verify service, which federates the identity verification and authentication out to third parties. The user can then choose which provider (e.g. Barclays, Post Office) they want to prove their identity through. Experian is also one of the providers, which perhaps illustrates some of the flaws with this design...
jsgo 7y ago
I didn't take that as he wanted legislative representatives and the like to solve it, so much as to make it a matter of focus to enlist the kinds of people you're recommending to provide a solution like this. Personally, I really feel we need a private/public-key kind of system in place for certain things like Social Security Numbers (SSNs) in the US. Such that if a leak also includes an SSN (essentially a public key), it could then be regenerated and some apparatus to manage filtering it to the parties it was assigned to prevent needing to redistribute it manually as a consumer/user (like using your Google, Facebook, or whatever OpenID as credentials for another site and it is stored in the account showing that it is being used as such). If they could automatically detect said public keys being exposed and automate the resetting and distribution process, even better (users should still be able to manually do it if they feel it is compromised though).
- Avamander 7y ago
  SSN should be just an unique number per person, nothing more, nothing less, never used for identification, only for having an unique number per person. It's impossible to ensure such a number doesn't leak so there also must be 0 consequences in that happening. That would require major legislative change.

mrkeen 7y ago

Sweden's BankID is quite good too.

Nullabillity 7y ago
BankID is horrible. It's coupled to your phone's OS, so as it becomes even more mandatory you're stuck carrying around an iOS or Android device, even if your primary phone is something like a Librem 5. It also doesn't support anyway to delegate access, either to people ("my partner should have access to this bank account") or computers ("I want to back up my incoming govt. messages automatically").
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  You can install it on your PC or Mac instead if you want, and it is not the only e-ID in Sweden (alas the others aren't so widely adopted, but that should change if/when the new government ID happens). Access delegation not being part of BankID itself is a feature not a deficiency, it would undermine the concept of secure digital ID if someone else could digitally impersonate you with it. Instead, services can choose whether they let you allow someone to log in for you.
  - Nullabillity 7y ago
    > You can install it on your PC or Mac if you want. 1. Same problem. There is still no Linux client, for example. 2. It's a different API. Most services specifically require Mobile BankID these days. Desktop (regular) BankID won't work there. 3. Many applications are only useful on the go, such as Swish. > Access delegation not being part of BankID itself is a feature not a deficiency, it would undermine the concept of secure digital ID if someone else could digitally impersonate you with it. Different kinds of services have different security requirements. If multiple people live together then it makes sense that any of them should be able to send requests to their cleaning service. There is also already a clear precedent to allow delegation of access that require strong authentication IRL. For example, PostNord allows you to retrieve someone else's mail as long as you provide ID for both yourself and the recipient. You can issue a Fullmakt which authorizes someone to take legally binding actions on your behalf. Hell, you can even vote by delegate.[0] Why should those rights not extend into the digital world? > Instead, services can choose whether they let you allow someone to log in for you. And they don't, because they are lazy and think BankID has magically solved all of their authentication woes. [0]: https://www.val.se/servicelankar/teckensprak/satt-att-rosta.html https://www.val.se/servicelankar/teckensprak/satt-att-rosta....

toomuchtodo 7y ago

Hasn't Estonia solved this with their national ID smart card?

rossng 7y ago
I have never used it, but I do get the impression that Estonia is pretty far ahead of everyone else. I don't know if this particular use case is natively supported (but would be interested to know). I suppose it would be possible for a third party to build it.
- Avamander 7y ago
  Yes, it's officially supported by providing everyone the possibility to sign documents with it. It was made an EU-wide standard in 2016 https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_en/319100_319199/31916201/01.01.01_60/en_31916201v010101p.pdf https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_en/319100_319199/31916201/... but previous iterations have existed since 2002. The person you replied to is pretty much right, Estonian ID-card has solved 99.99% of authentication and signing problems for it's citizens, the support is mandated by law and very widespread. There are a few flaws but those are minor compared to the softly put clusterfuck rest of the world is dealing with.
  - wahern 7y ago
    Flaws like this? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/crypto-failure-cripples-millions-of-high-security-keys-750k-estonian-ids/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/crypt... I support such uses of smartcards, but we have to be disciplined regarding our assumptions about non-repudiation.
    - Avamander 7y ago
      I'd rather not start compiling a list of password-username database thefts, credential stuffings, identity thefts, forged paper signatures, the time lost to inefficient paper procedures, secrets stolen due to how hard it is to encrypt things etc. etc. etc. Of course we have to be disciplined, but other things can't even remotely reach the security such a solution provides. Your comment has very FUD-y undertones, rising concern about a very minor thing if you actually look at how much it solves and how much better it is compared to other widespread applications.

mfontani 7y ago

Italy's "PEC"[1] (Posta Elettronica Certificata, or Certified Electronic Mail) comes pretty close. There's even an RFC[2] for it. In order to get one, an individual has to prove their identity via a government-issued ID (ID card or passport), and that email address can henceforth be used to send emails for all official correspondence as if it were certified/verified mail, with the added bonus that both parties "know" the identity of the other party (i.e. the company knows it was very likely me who sent it, as they trust that the people in charge of having verified my ID did their job) and with the added bonus of the _contents_ of the email also being certified to have been sent from that recipient to that destination address, and not to have been tampered with (great thing to have for lawsuit reasons), unlike "standard" registered mail, who only certified that a letter has been sent and picked up. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certified_email#Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certified_email#Italy [2]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6109 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6109

rossng 7y ago
Denmark has a similar service called eBoks, but it's a proprietary SaaS product rather than an open standard. What's the user experience like with the Italian system? Does every company support it?
Avamander 7y ago
Estonia's ASICe containers have solved signing any electronic files/documents. Italy is reinventing the wheel a bit. ASICe as such is actually an official EU standard since 2016 and EU law¹ enforces that such digital signatures have to be accepted in every EU member state. Estonian digital signatures have used another standards before though, first Estonian digital signature was given in 2002. The ID-card also provides S/MIME should someone want to use it but people usually just use ASICe. [1] - https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/What+is+the+legislation+-+esignature https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/What...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

skrunch 7y ago

Shameless plug: https://www.yoti.com/ https://www.yoti.com/ We're trying to do exactly that.

Avamander 7y ago

> Governments, please solve this problem! Fun fact, the EU has made a law that should force countries to implement their PKIs for people to be able to digitally sign documents and that those signatures are equivalent to hand written ones. https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/What+is+the+legislation+-+esignature https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/What...

PeterisP 7y ago

Latvia's ID cards support e-signing of digital documents, so I could have a pdf "I authorise you to send this data to xyz@example.org" and sign it so that the recipient can securely verify that this was signed by Name Surname ID123. Estonia has it quite similar, I'm not certain if it's technically the same standard or something slightly different.

Avamander 7y ago
By EU law it's basically the same.

tremon 7y ago

The Netherlands uses DigID, which is effectively a federated identity provider. Problem is that it was originally intended for government use only (recently it's been expanded to include health insurance providers), and it's not accessible for commercial entities. It was also marred by very bureaucratic policies, for example to get information on account usage (e.g. how many times was my account used, from which IP, to access which site) you would need to file a police report first, and it supported 2FA very early (through SMS service, now via mobile app as well) but the end user could not forcibly enable 2FA, only the target service could determine if they wanted two-factor authentication on their site. Luckily, those have been fixed. Would be nice if they supported open standards like OAuth though.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
I gather the Dutch company behind DigID, digidentity, is also one of the companies behind UK's "Verify" (used on gov.uk). Barclays, Post Office Ltd, and Experian are the other options -- if memory serves these 3 all had major security breaches. I recently had to apply for a criminal records check ("DBS") and the government's DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) required me to give up all my ID to one of those companies "to identify me" before I could apply; in case someone who was not me was applying for the information. Aside, it seems they could have allowed anyone to apply (and pay the £25 fee) but only sent the response to a known address, which they could cross check from my tax record and driving license, and ... which details have to be kept current by law.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> This is a reflection of the fact that we have no good way for someone to digitally prove their identity. Centralized identity isn't a solution, it's the problem. Once you implement something like that, it requires everyone to track everything using it in order for it to be used to authenticate access to the information. Which means everybody has to store the ID number as a field in every database and it becomes a de facto primary key that allows all information to be correlated by every blackhat that compromises more than one data set. Meanwhile there will be the "just make it work" people who are bad at security, who will do whatever is necessary to compromise their own security because the attacker told them to. And then we would then be giving attackers the capacity to take over their entire lives instead of only one relationship with one entity. Moreover, the scope of the damage if someone were to compromise the central identity system in general rather than only for a specific person is horrifying. It would become a single point of compromise for the whole country. And the worst kind on top of that, because everything would hook into it which would cause it to become ossified and difficult to update. If the system was then publicly compromised, how long does it take for everyone everywhere to update every piece of code to use the replacement? Which thing do you do in the meantime, continue using the compromised system as all hell breaks loose, or shut down your entire country? There is a better solution. If you have an account with someone, you make requests by authenticating in the same way you do with your account. And if you don't have an account, you should be able to request deletion of the data associated with e.g. your IP address, but not request to download it -- because there is no way to to verify your identity for that. Even with centralized ID an IP address can be used by multiple people who shouldn't be able to give consent for one another and may not be mutually distinguishable by the party receiving the request, and the same for most other global data (e.g. many people share full names with other people). The only way to make centralized ID work in that context is to tag everything with it to begin with, compromising all anonymity and pseudonymity -- which can't possibly be the right trade off for what is supposed to be privacy legislation.

tialaramex 7y ago

The only way to do what most people want here is to bake this digital identity into humans, which is beyond our present technology and also feels potentially rather like a recipe for authoritarianism. For one thing, if you can lose it, people will. They'll destroy them on purpose, they'll be stolen by crooks, they will forget them at airports or in hotel safes. That's not a problem for baked in things, people don't leave their hearts behind (outside of Country songs) or (outside of maybe China) get them stolen by crooks but any conceivable device, card, key, or document will have this problem. Greg Egan's "Orphanogensis" (http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html a short story setting up the protagonist for his novel "Diaspora") describes making Polis Citizens (people who exist only as software, the other branches of humanity have given themselves bodies suitable for long term existence in space, the Gleisner Robots, or given up on consciousness altogether, the Dream Apes) with a cypherclerk, a component that does public key crypto. Once the system achieves confidence that the process of making a new citizen has been successful and has produced a conscious person, the cypherclerk is initialised and the new citizen has a unique and impossible to fake proof of ID. This plays no major role in the story, it's just there because presumably Greg agrees with you that it'd sure be convenient if there was actually digital ID. But there isn't. Here's a central conflict: I would like to be able to prove that I'm who I say I am, but without being stuck with that identity. This makes the identity disclaimable. You will find plenty of people who feel the same way, and some of them have very concrete practical reasons (e.g. people with stalkers or who ratted on a crime boss). But for a bunch of things people, and especially governments want to do with a digital ID that's no good. A disclaimable ID can work for a driving license. Barry Shitpeas is licensed to drive an HGV, you can either prove you're Barry Shitpeas, or you can get a new license to drive the HGV with the identity you do want to use. But if Barry drink drives, taking away his license, knowing he can just get a new one as Jerry Poocabbage tomorrow, well that's a rubbish outcome, isn't it? We want a way to _stop_ Barry from driving even if he changes identity. And we can't do that with disclaimable ID.

progval 7y ago

In this case, the solution is easy. The user most likely already has an account, so just ask for the account password. If the users claims they lost the password, then do a classic password recovery via email. Of course it's tricky for organizations storing data about users without an account. (eg. Facebook or Google, not sure how they could handle that at all, even with government ids)

runeks 7y ago

In my opinion, we need an open protocol for this. Every government having a separate digital identification tool is a poor solution. The simplest solution I can imagine is to mimic the solution used to digitally identify companies via HTTPS (certificate authorities), but modified with the intent of identifying a person rather than a company.