His argument is valid, what stops you from replacing the retina scan with a random hash replicating a different person scanning each time and collecting new tokens? What ties the hash to the actual retina other than the device that you can mess with?
We’ve really come full circle when a blockchain relies on DRM to work.
1. User has a "fake" biometric A, generated via GAN or [1], that's cheap and easy to produce.
2. Suppose they can present A to any orb device, generating hash(A), which signs hash(A) using its built-in private key as usual.
As long as the user can generate a fake iris biometric scan accepted by an orb, no other part of the system needs to be compromised for this attack to work.
1: http://iab-rubric.org/papers/ICPR14_1649_FI.pdf , note that liveness detection is a cat-and-mouse game
or leaked
Admittedly I never bothered to read about it but the problem they are solving is purely the distribution. Currently there's just no way to do a fair distribution where everyone gets equivalent amounts of it except perhaps with KYC but then they have to store way more personal data.
I'm much more comfortable with someone having a hash based on my biometric data than having my passport and other details.
Same here. My point is - fair distribution is just a means to achieve a goal of "more equality". As a mean it is an equivalent of giving man a fish instead of teaching him how to fish. At most a PR stunt.
Actually, the lowest state of the art false positive rates for biometric id is achieved by iris scans, so I have to wonder why they went with retinal scanning in this case.
Note that I'm not saying you can intentionally cause a false positive or false negative very easily. These are both highly reliable identification methods. But they're not deterministic, so if you're hashing the literal scanned signature, the hash output won't be deterministic, either. Presumably, what they're doing isn't hashing at all. Normally, for biometric id you just store the signature in a database and use a thresholding function to match against it when new scans comes in.
They didn't. It's an iris scan. The article just used "retina" and "iris" interchangeably for some reason. https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works
I don’t know much about retinal scanning. But for this use case, wouldn’t it be trivial to fake via something like different coloured contact lenses?
First, retina scanning output hash is deterministic - it is supposed to generate the same result for the same eyeball. So it can't be replaced with random number generation.
Second, network does not interpret hashes, except for making sure that single hash is awarded funds only ones. Network however pays attention to whom is sending the hashes. It must be "legitimate" Orb units, likely considered to be legitimate because their public keys were whitelisted.
Third, process of distribution of initial tokens is obviously NOT OPEN. You need a "legitimate" Orb unit to participate. Which has nothing to do with how the network will behave for users already on-boarded.
Fourth, PoW has nothing to do with it. PoW is antisybil for people who might add new blocks. PoW has nothing to do with people who just want to transfer or hold funds. Or even with people who can create money according to network rules.