Re:On Phone Numbers and Identity
by Razengan on Thursday September 29, 2016 @01:38AM
(#12603480)
> Perhaps some sort of social identity is possible?
That won't work for people with no friends.
> We need a good solution to identity.
Perhaps an offline device, that uses your retina scan, fingerprint(s), and DNA encoding to — I don't know the correct cryptography jargon to describe all this — construct a temporary key, which you use with online service to create a username.
Then, whenever you need to log in to that service, you use the scanning device again to generate another temporary key, and use that a password.
That way, your physical attributes are your identity, but they are never stored or transmitted in a form that can be translated back to its inputs. You could also set a secret word on the device itself so your memory is also part of your identity, as is the norm now.
This system is of course still vulnerable to brute* force [1] but to mitigate that, the scanning device might allow you to set a fake "panic" password, which would generate an incorrect key, and maybe alert authorities.
That won't work for people with no friends.
> We need a good solution to identity.
Perhaps an offline device, that uses your retina scan, fingerprint(s), and DNA encoding to — I don't know the correct cryptography jargon to describe all this — construct a temporary key, which you use with online service to create a username.
Then, whenever you need to log in to that service, you use the scanning device again to generate another temporary key, and use that a password.
That way, your physical attributes are your identity, but they are never stored or transmitted in a form that can be translated back to its inputs. You could also set a secret word on the device itself so your memory is also part of your identity, as is the norm now.
This system is of course still vulnerable to brute* force [1] but to mitigate that, the scanning device might allow you to set a fake "panic" password, which would generate an incorrect key, and maybe alert authorities.
[1]* https://xkcd.com/538/