Right, this is the challenge. The biggest problem is that SSN were used like a password and not a username. If we simply replace it with a different "secret" number, we don't change much. It is also possible we make it worse temporarily as all the attack vectors are exposed. Give people a private key on a card and they'll just put it into their wallet/purse. Stealing the wallet gives someone an un-refutable ability to become you.

There would also be far less hacking to get SSNs if we had a reasonable credit system where our credit is always frozen and only unfrozen for a short window (24 hours?) at our request and this request is verified via a MFA approach of our choosing. As long as you can get $5K credit at the register in 5 minutes, you are going to have a hard time stopping identity theft. Too many people want easy credit. It will always be a balance of security and convenience. Most consumers want convenience and will continue to do so as long as the cost of the fraud is hidden from them.

The other solution would be shifting the burden of proof for an adverse credit action off of the consumer where it currently resides. If you want to tell the world that I fucked off with your money, there should be a pretty high burden of proof since you bear virtually zero risk for getting my identity wrong while I will pay an enormous price for such a mistake.

Isn't it kind of insane that a random entity can destroy your financial reputation with little more than a few bits of info about you? And without any notice before or after of it happening (you have to affirmatively ask about it to find out). It's so strange that you will get notified if you're rejected for credit due to your credit score, but not notified by the party who made the claim on which that decision was based?

It's not so much that the burden of proof is on the citizen, but that the burden of ongoing defence is.

In most cases, if there's a case of fraud, you file a counter, and (modulo various bureaucratic foulups), you're clear. The merchant almost always eats the cost, and that really should be changed, at least balanced with the financial institution.

The burden is more from the "death by a thousand cuts" variety of having to go through the re-assertion process again and again and again and .... I've been looking at attention and cognition mostly in the context of media, but the simple truth is that most of us are bombarded by all sorts of demands and claims, the dealing of with is an increasingly insurmountable burden.

I liken this to point-and-click computer interfaces. It's simple to graphically delete a few files or folders or message notifications. It's a slight chore when that rises to 20 or 30. At the level of a hundred or so items, most people would give up. With more powerful tools, it's possible to manage hundreds, thousands, even millions of items with dispatch. (Of course, that may increase the likelihood that you'll have to do so.)

Given the frequency of issues and the magnitude of them, presented through current financial and authentication mechanisms, even "easy" repudiation becomes untenable at scale.

Further, I think there should be notifications when our credit information changes. How this information is sent is a really good question, but instead of us having to search for modifications, it should just be pushed.

How about an active, closed loop, control solution?

When someone wants to confirm your identity, or otherwise interact with your 'financials', you get sent an email with a quickly expiring link that you click on to view a page where you enter the name of the org or person you /think/ is checking your data, and if it matches things work.

And that email information, and account, are managed where? By what authority? Protected and secured how?

Beware Maginot defences.

Dun and Bradstreet is the business equivalent for credit scores. Businesses can easily sign up for a free service to get instant notification of creditworthiness changes. It's free as a marketing tool to buy their very expensive other services, but works well and is very easy to challenge any adverse reports.

Because private keys are a far greater tool of proving identity than a SSN, I would argue one should have much greater culpability in an "unauthorized" action.

SSNs are lost for good on breaches of companies' infrastructures, but nothing should be lost in a Pub/Priv key scheme. What we'll need is a good key revocation process. So when my identity is compromised (say, malware on a device) then I can be me again.

> Because private keys are a far greater tool of proving identity than a SSN, I would argue one should have much greater culpability in an "unauthorized" action.

If you have the technical know-how to protect your private key, and you're immune from rubber hose attacks, and there's no mechanism for key recovery outside your control, I'd agree.

However, people.

You wouldn't depend on technical know-how, you'd roll it into a card or something like that. Chip & pin cards already do all of this.

And I'm not aware of any system suitable to replace SSN that can withstand rubber hose attacks. That's where law enforcement & the justice department will have to step in, as always.

> You wouldn't depend on technical know-how, you'd roll it into a card or something like that. Chip & pin cards already do all of this.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/how-a-criminal-r...

This attack doesn’t work with smart cards that basically do nothing but act as a HSM. The MITM attack works with a loophole in some EMV cards because the card isn’t signing a transaction request but just saying “PIN is good!”

If your card holds a private key and won’t sign anything without also being fed a correct PIN you’d need a proper exploit of the application on the card to defeat it.

I think what many Americans fail to appreciate is that all the safety guarantees that come with deniability + lax security have a (pretty big) cost, one that YOU are paying in the end.

Like - US for a very long while didn't use chip & PIN - but it was simple to deny the transactions and as a consumer you were somewhat well protected, despite lax security. But this generates large costs, and perversely, the cost/uncertainty affects the small businesses the most.

Yes, when I use 3DSecure for an online transaction, the bank shifts the burden of proof to me (a correctly-authorized 2-factor transaction cannot be simply challenged with a complaint at the bank, I have to prove that it wasn't me). Still, it's hard to argue that 2-factor for online transactions is consumer-unfriendly, even if the consumer loses the deniability

Why does the initial attempt of a solution have to work for everyone overnight? Stop the bleeding with those with tech know how first. The the others will come as the solution matures. What is with people wanting to flip the bit all time jezzz. Run two bits!

You nailed the sentiment that I think the technically inclined get wrong. I respect the position, but think it either fundamentally flawed or just too fast a social transition.

By that I mean that we need to educate the masses that a few letters and numbers are as valuable and powerful as the combination to their home safe or keys to their car. People just aren't inclined to exercise the same degree of caution over some gibberish letters as they are the cash in their sock drawer, even though the gibberish is potentially much more valuable.

I'm skeptical that such an education is possible without it being ingrained from youth and even then it may be impossible to achieve a high enough degree of understanding to make the kind of shift you envision.

If your private key is compromised, then notifying the businesses/government would work as before. Getting a new public certificate would involve going to the government/business in person to get a new one.

If people have to go through a lot of trouble, I suspect they would quickly learn a way to minimize the risk of having to do so. I suspect that most people are careful with their passports so that they don't lose them, because it is a bit of a hassle to get a replacement.

But what about the non-techie who is compromised during a "tech support" scam session or by a phishing email ("This is IRS calling...")? They don't know it's been compromised, don't report it and later have no idea why their reputation is trashed.

I'd have to see more of how you think such an attack might work, and think of how to defend against it. In general though:

1. The use of a physical authentication mechanism makes exfiltration far more difficult. The problem with passwords is that they can be sniffed with absolutely no awareness by the victim. A device or token you have to have yourself is going to make its absence known.

(This presumes it's not cloneable.)

2. That reduces the attack surface for phishing. What I suspect is is that you'd see other forms of attack -- say, trying to get recurring charges inserted into bills or some such, rather than full account access.

3. In the event of token compromise, the ability to determine after the fact that a device was compromised and invalidate the subsequent transactions would be helpful. (Sorting out who bears the risk for that would be an interesting question. I'd like to put the burden on the banks, as they're best positioned to detect such activity.)

the situation is still better because when those people find out they can actually get a new public cert unlike now.

People putting cash in a sock drawer are not exercising caution. They would use a safe if they used caution. I know people who I'm sure have more than $10,000 in cash in their "sock drawer"

Gibberish is not something humans can remember. Technical people use a password manage, but that just limits us to one password that we use often enough that we have a chance to remember it. One wrong knock to the head though and all the passwords stored in the manager are gone - unless you wrote the password down someplace, but then that place is your sock drawer: probably not secure enough.

The manifestation of such a key doesn't have to be "numbers and letters" it could be a passphrased USB key, for example. Maybe applications would be designed where you touch your thumbprint to your USB key and it would unlock it for 60 seconds or w/e.

This is basically what's happening in S.Korea. Instead of investing more in security, banks are offloading the duty to the consumers. They issue a private key and ask for three different layers of password/pins nobody ever remembers. If you (or the bank) ever get hacked, well, you can't prove that it wasn't you "so too bad" is basically what happens.

I'm not following this. When I advocate for globally unique identifiers, I never considered using GUIDs for credentials, key exchange, etc. Just for uniquely identifying people.

You let out "further" before "offload" in your 3rd paragraph.

You left out the 'f' in 'left.'