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Sadly, email and phone verification have never been particularly effective methods of proving personhood/identity/non-malevolent intent. Witness the dozens of s

Sadly, email and phone verification have never been particularly effective methods of proving personhood/identity/non-malevolent intent. Witness the dozens of spam phone calls / pig butchering texts / Gmail-originating spam emails one gets a day. I noticed that after enabling iCloud Private Relay on my phone, I get a _lot_ more CAPTCHAs very suspicious of my activity. This is both annoying and logical; a site's confidence in my existence / non-malevolence is much decreased when I don't appear from a consistent IP and the IPs that I appear from have a non-zero quantity of bad actors from which I must now be disambiguated. This seems a classic example of a challenging problem of balancing privacy (wanting an option to be anonymous in my use of a service, including ones where I can post information or message others) with security (wanting to be sure that my counterparties are real humans unlikely to be malevolent or misrepresenting themselves). Service providers get slammed for errors on both sides. That's not to give up on trying to solve it or suggest that the current status quo is optimal. Going out on a limb here, I could imagine a solution where e.g. Private Relay users had egress from a special set of IPs that indicate to service providers that the originating user had indeed been identified/validated by Apple as authentic. Traffic inbound from these IPs could have a slightly relaxed threat posture. This is roughly in line with what Apple has been trying to do with Login With Apple; not just making it easier for users to sign in but helping reduce automated signups. An ideal component missing here would be a way to backchannel to Apple from a service provider "Hey, user $UID did a Bad Thing just FYI" to allow Apple to better risk-score Apple profiles/activity, obviously weighted by Apple for believability on the part of the service provider.

soco 4y ago
What you propose there could be built on the basis of identity federation, right?
- dweekly 4y ago
  In theory, yes, and ideally any of this would be implemented as a standard, for instance as a segment of a TLS ClientHello added by a forwarding proxy (such as Private Relay) that includes a UUID connection identifier, a risk category for the user, the identity of the proxy, and the proxy's signature for the whole of the ClientHello packet. There would then also be presumably a way to interrogate a proxy for reporting back bad actions of a user by a service provider, with those attestations also signed by the service provider. (FLAGGED_AS_BOT, CHILD_PORN_TAKEDOWN, FINANCIAL_FRAUD, SPAMMING, OTHER_TOS_VIOLATION, etc) The service provider would pass in the UUID connection identifier which the proxy could then map back to the known user, weighted by the degree to which the proxy trusts the service provider's reports.
donmcronald 4y ago
> Going out on a limb here, I could imagine a solution where e.g. Private Relay users had egress from a special set of IPs that indicate to service providers that the originating user had indeed been identified/validated by Apple as authentic. It's not that crazy if you think about it. Apple's user base is a juicy target demographic. Apple's "privacy focused" approach is reducing the insights of every other tech company. If they can get it to the point where the other big tech companies have nothing to distinguish legitimate users from bad actors they can make a huge identity and reputation play. I doubt it would be private IPs or anything though. I think it's more likely that Apple assigns some type of trust/relationship score to each user based on Apple's view of them and then let's users opt in to some type of system where Apple vouches for them. Ex: I ask Apple for a short-lived token to attest to facebook.com or microsoft.com that I'm not a bad actor. Apple's userbase would eat that up because they already think they're better than everyone else and now they'll be "rewarded" for that by getting a premium experience online. That would also position Apple as the only company that could do super targeted advertising like Facebook does now.
- cesarb 4y ago
  > Ex: I ask Apple for a short-lived token to attest to facebook.com or microsoft.com that I'm not a bad actor. From a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31751203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31751203

soco 4y ago

What you propose there could be built on the basis of identity federation, right?

dweekly 4y ago
In theory, yes, and ideally any of this would be implemented as a standard, for instance as a segment of a TLS ClientHello added by a forwarding proxy (such as Private Relay) that includes a UUID connection identifier, a risk category for the user, the identity of the proxy, and the proxy's signature for the whole of the ClientHello packet. There would then also be presumably a way to interrogate a proxy for reporting back bad actions of a user by a service provider, with those attestations also signed by the service provider. (FLAGGED_AS_BOT, CHILD_PORN_TAKEDOWN, FINANCIAL_FRAUD, SPAMMING, OTHER_TOS_VIOLATION, etc) The service provider would pass in the UUID connection identifier which the proxy could then map back to the known user, weighted by the degree to which the proxy trusts the service provider's reports.

donmcronald 4y ago

> Going out on a limb here, I could imagine a solution where e.g. Private Relay users had egress from a special set of IPs that indicate to service providers that the originating user had indeed been identified/validated by Apple as authentic. It's not that crazy if you think about it. Apple's user base is a juicy target demographic. Apple's "privacy focused" approach is reducing the insights of every other tech company. If they can get it to the point where the other big tech companies have nothing to distinguish legitimate users from bad actors they can make a huge identity and reputation play. I doubt it would be private IPs or anything though. I think it's more likely that Apple assigns some type of trust/relationship score to each user based on Apple's view of them and then let's users opt in to some type of system where Apple vouches for them. Ex: I ask Apple for a short-lived token to attest to facebook.com or microsoft.com that I'm not a bad actor. Apple's userbase would eat that up because they already think they're better than everyone else and now they'll be "rewarded" for that by getting a premium experience online. That would also position Apple as the only company that could do super targeted advertising like Facebook does now.

cesarb 4y ago
> Ex: I ask Apple for a short-lived token to attest to facebook.com or microsoft.com that I'm not a bad actor. From a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31751203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31751203