4 ms·

This is why I think we should have public keys we choice on our government IDs. Then we can prove who we are.

by mycall 7y ago

9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
Plenty of countries already do, but at least judging from reading about America on HN its much more difficult to do anything like that in America because of distrust in government. You even vote without ID which is extremely weird for the rest of the world.
- syntheticcorp 7y ago
  Australia and New Zealand don’t require photo ID to cast votes either.
  - richij 7y ago
    nor the UK
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > You even vote without ID which is extremely weird for the rest of the world. The system they use actually works pretty well. They have a list of registered voters and when you vote they cross your name off the list. You have no way of knowing who has already voted, so if you give someone else's name you risk their name already being crossed off, and then you may be in for some questioning. If you want to do something that would actually impact the election results (i.e. vote thousands of times and not just twice) then you would also have to come back in over and over using different names, which creates the obvious potential for the poll workers to recognize you. Avoiding that would require some kind of large conspiracy so that each person doesn't reappear enough times to be recognized or use the same names as one another, which then makes it much more likely that you're caught because one of your co-conspirators turns you in. So the risk of getting caught is pretty high even without ID, especially if you're doing it with enough scale to really matter. Meanwhile the penalty is typically something like a year in prison per offense, which is a pretty high price to pay for one extra vote.
- thebiss 7y ago
  > You even vote without ID which is extremely weird for the rest of the world. Some states do require identification, but it's up to each state decide what is required. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_States#State-by-state_requirements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
Here are several reasons why we should never do that. The first reason is that those IDs would then become massive theft targets. Because they're uniform, it provides economies of scale for criminals to figure out how to extract the private key from the ID, then pickpocket IDs and extract the private keys from them (or worse, figure out how to do it from across the room when it's in your pocket) and then we're back to square one. Associating public keys with names, which is in general completely unnecessary (the key itself is the identity), also becomes a separate centralized single point of failure. Anyone who compromised that system could associate their own public keys with your name, and the more centralized the system is the more powerful the likely attacks against it would be because compromising it then has a higher payout. A large centralized system like that is also inherently slow to change, which would result in a catastrophic failure if a vulnerability was ever discovered in the cryptosystem it uses or its implementation, because not only would every system relying on that system become simultaneously vulnerable, they would all have to be updated, which for a large bureaucratic system could take months or years. In the meantime you're forced to choose between continuing to operate the vulnerable system and being subject to an unlimited amount fraud, or shutting it down and having systems across the country offline for a lengthy period of time while everyone reimplements their interfaces with it. A universal public key is also itself a huge privacy vulnerability. We already have this problem with social security numbers, which were never intended to be used outside of social security but have already entered use as a means to correlate surveillance data about a person. But social security numbers at least are considered sensitive data because they're used as shared secrets. A public key authenticates by use of the associated private key, so knowing the public key doesn't impair its security properties which would almost certainly lead to relaxed security requirements for their disclosure, and thereby further enable problematic public and private mass surveillance by using the public key as a universal database index. The far better solution is to use public key cryptography, but have a separate keypair for each relationship. So you have a bank card and it has your private key associated with your bank account, which allows you to authenticate to your bank. Your employee ID allows you to authenticate to your employer. But then nobody can steal money from your bank account with your employee ID or break into your office with your bank card. And a general compromise of the security used by the DMV doesn't allow criminals to break into power plants and airports and banks and police stations, because they're not all using the same system. This vastly reduces the scope of compromise.

This is why I think we should have public keys we choice on our government IDs. Then we can prove who we are.

by mycall 7y ago

This is why I think we should have public keys we choice on our government IDs. Then we can prove who we are.

Plenty of countries already do, but at least judging from reading about America on HN its much more difficult to do anything like that in America because of distrust in government. You even vote without ID which is extremely weird for the rest of the world.

syntheticcorp 7y ago
Australia and New Zealand don’t require photo ID to cast votes either.
- richij 7y ago
  nor the UK
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> You even vote without ID which is extremely weird for the rest of the world. The system they use actually works pretty well. They have a list of registered voters and when you vote they cross your name off the list. You have no way of knowing who has already voted, so if you give someone else's name you risk their name already being crossed off, and then you may be in for some questioning. If you want to do something that would actually impact the election results (i.e. vote thousands of times and not just twice) then you would also have to come back in over and over using different names, which creates the obvious potential for the poll workers to recognize you. Avoiding that would require some kind of large conspiracy so that each person doesn't reappear enough times to be recognized or use the same names as one another, which then makes it much more likely that you're caught because one of your co-conspirators turns you in. So the risk of getting caught is pretty high even without ID, especially if you're doing it with enough scale to really matter. Meanwhile the penalty is typically something like a year in prison per offense, which is a pretty high price to pay for one extra vote.
thebiss 7y ago
> You even vote without ID which is extremely weird for the rest of the world. Some states do require identification, but it's up to each state decide what is required. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_States#State-by-state_requirements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

Here are several reasons why we should never do that. The first reason is that those IDs would then become massive theft targets. Because they're uniform, it provides economies of scale for criminals to figure out how to extract the private key from the ID, then pickpocket IDs and extract the private keys from them (or worse, figure out how to do it from across the room when it's in your pocket) and then we're back to square one. Associating public keys with names, which is in general completely unnecessary (the key itself is the identity), also becomes a separate centralized single point of failure. Anyone who compromised that system could associate their own public keys with your name, and the more centralized the system is the more powerful the likely attacks against it would be because compromising it then has a higher payout. A large centralized system like that is also inherently slow to change, which would result in a catastrophic failure if a vulnerability was ever discovered in the cryptosystem it uses or its implementation, because not only would every system relying on that system become simultaneously vulnerable, they would all have to be updated, which for a large bureaucratic system could take months or years. In the meantime you're forced to choose between continuing to operate the vulnerable system and being subject to an unlimited amount fraud, or shutting it down and having systems across the country offline for a lengthy period of time while everyone reimplements their interfaces with it. A universal public key is also itself a huge privacy vulnerability. We already have this problem with social security numbers, which were never intended to be used outside of social security but have already entered use as a means to correlate surveillance data about a person. But social security numbers at least are considered sensitive data because they're used as shared secrets. A public key authenticates by use of the associated private key, so knowing the public key doesn't impair its security properties which would almost certainly lead to relaxed security requirements for their disclosure, and thereby further enable problematic public and private mass surveillance by using the public key as a universal database index. The far better solution is to use public key cryptography, but have a separate keypair for each relationship. So you have a bank card and it has your private key associated with your bank account, which allows you to authenticate to your bank. Your employee ID allows you to authenticate to your employer. But then nobody can steal money from your bank account with your employee ID or break into your office with your bank card. And a general compromise of the security used by the DMV doesn't allow criminals to break into power plants and airports and banks and police stations, because they're not all using the same system. This vastly reduces the scope of compromise.