Basically, the core problem is digital identities (accounts, IPs, phone #s etc.) are cheap to create (even considering captchas and all) so fraud is easy. The solution could be just to make it "costly" to create new digital identities. For example, you could get a "verified but anonymous" identity issued by locking some assets (could be real world money, or maybe something intangible like community reputation) as collateral with a trusted party (or, for the crypto people, the blockchain). If you misbehave, you lose your reputation on that identity (and essentially your collateral) and have to start over. This lets anyone bootstrap a "minimal" level of trust at the beginning before they can use time to prove themselves trustworthy.
Note: This model might remind some of things like staking in crypto. However the idea is really not anything new... Putting money on the line is really how most low-trust bootstrapping happens.
*: To name a few:(1) this can result in participation being gated by wealth, which can be unfair. (2) it makes accounts more valuable to hack so people need better security practices [re: twitter checkmark]. (3) one would need some authority to decide how accounts lose their collateral or maybe the collateral is just burned to create that initial credibility...
We already use this model in practice. It's why so many services require a phone number verification now - they are hard enough to get en-masse, especially if you block things like Google Voice. They even have a big advantage in that they are comparatively hard to hack, as the SIM card is effectively a weak form of physical security key.
I think the big problems this causes is discussed on HN quite often.
Similar, the internet is already very difficult for the people with limited means. This would make it even harder.
Go down to your local post office.
They physically hand you an identity token on a physical $2 2fa device if you give some evidence you live nearby. You can put down the deposit or hand over the device for an old id which is cleared and reused.
It's traceable to the post office but no further, nothing is recorded other than that the token is deployed and roughly when.
Local communities can be responsible for cleaning up local messes. No need for the scammers two cities over to effect your reputation. No need for a corrupt employee handing out tokens to effect the reputation of the token you got ten years ago.
And the governments of the world are going to do this is an anonymous way?
Who is going to manufacture these 8 billion (Or at least 3 billion if we only count Facebook's MAU) tokens?
And there still needs to be a global database of valid identifiers, else anyone could just create a software token that they can reprogram ever second.
And we expect all people to carry these 2FA tokens perfectly?
And what happens when someone looses this token? The post office has way to prove you owned that token in your proposal.
Same thing for revoking a token. There is no identity out of the token, so how do you revoke it after it is lost? People are not willing to store a piece of paper in a security deposit box.
This "easy" solution is impossible in practice.
The only purpose is to provide evidence of not being a bot. Not to log in or verify identity. You don't need a server or proof that a particular token is owned by a particular person, just a cert chain and a list of postcodes with current public keys. The post office has a private key. They sign a message saying 'the holder of this token walked into the store'. Let servers make whatever judgements they wish about the chain's credibility. If a particular key signs lots of bots then you know where to look for the source of the bot farm and the people that live there know where to look to fix their reputation.
It doesn't need to roll out simultaneously. Just be an alternative to captcha that isn't as abusive as device attestation.
The manufacturers will be the same ones that manufacture the hundreds of billions of usb drives and phones and smart light bulbs.
The only problems are it's not as useful for abusing users or spying on citizens as revoking access to general purpose computing, and idiots who project problems onto it that come from use cases that are not proposed or say 'big number make thing impossible'.
As for identity theft, it's actually not that common/easy except in the US (which has no centralized national ID issuer and largely depends on hacks building on the SSN).
An besides, protecting digital identity is already important even without this bootstrapping.
> Imagine if your Twitter gets hacked and your digital identity makes it so your Gmail gets blocked.
Flip the services around and you have the reality of today.
I've always thought that client certs would be an interesting solution to this problem. Any given certificate can carry signatures from multiple signing authorities, right? So we could imagine a world where there are many different certificate authorities, each of whom have their own criteria for signing a particular certificate and each of whom offer different varieties of assurance regarding the signature-holder's identity.
From here, the question of "should I allow the user identified by this client cert to use my service" simply becomes a question of 1.) checking the validity of the signatures of the client cert and 2.) deciding if the CA's criteria for signing certs aligns with my desired userbase.
For example, a particular CA might insist that their users go through some real-world process to renew their certification every few years, but when they sign a cert it means that the bearer has been strongly vetted as a real person.
An interesting side effect of this auth model is that a service provider accepting certs from a particular CA has someone to complain to if a user bearing their signature acts improperly on their platform. You could imagine a CA which has a code of conduct expected of the users whose certs they sign, and would perhaps revoke a user's certification if too many websites complain.
I hear that porn tends to be officially frowned on in a fair number of places.
Reading non-approved news is dangerous in some places.
Honestly debating political topics can be super dangerous if you're identifiable.
Sometimes even having a login on a site is dangerous, I think I heard about this after a non-mainstream discussion site got hacked like a hear and a half ago.
- A user bearing a client cert with the name "Jonathan Grant", signed by a U.S. government agency which is known to verify that its signees' certs are a citizen of the United States.
- A user bearing a client cert with the name "Michael Black", signed by Alice, who is known to only sign certs after verifying that the real-world identity of the signee matches the name on the cert.
- A user bearing a client cert with the pseudonym "c00ln4m3", signed by Bob, who is known to only sign a single cert for any given real-world person. (To do so, he verifies the person's real-world identity but does not reveal which cert corresponds to which person.)
- A user bearing a client cert with the pseudonym "hunter217", signed by Charlie, who is known to sign certs without verifying the real-world identity of his signees at all, but who is also known to revoke his signature on certificates if a service provider complains about the user bearing that cert.
- A user bearing a client cert with the pseudonym "cypr3ss", signed by David, who is known to charge $1000/year for a cert bearing his signature but performs no other identity verification.
The point of listing out these different scenarios is that the underlying mechanism (client certs) is the same, but the end-user and the service provider don't actually have to trust each other: they only have to agree on a CA with mutually acceptable policies.
This also reminds me of the anxiety of Google deciding to just ban my account for some reason. They can't be bothered to commit resources to making sure mistakes can be resolved. They don't care to lose a fleetingly small percentage of customers.
Not sure I have an answer. Just a thought.
I'm not understanding the generalized sentiment here. How would, for example, a retailer benefit from this strategy? How does it protect their bottom line?
I can see how a particular kind of "facilitated user economy," such as games, gambling and promotional companies could benefit, but it doesn't seem that broadly applicable to what most people would consider a "mainstream" business.
> so we can lay off the IP-based reputation stuff and the geo-blocking: it's tying some form of personal ID to your browsing activity
And a new market for identity theft is born.
Also, as someone who serves content and geo blocks it, that's not up to me, that's up to the owner of the content or whoever happens to be licensing it for them. So, even if you sent me a picture of your government ID, it changes nothing.
The amount of automated and apparently-manual attempted credit card fraud (and exploit attempts, for that matter) any halfway-prominent site with a CC form is subjected to is hard to appreciate if you've never seen it. It's a whole lot. They aren't even necessarily trying to buy what you have, but to validate that their stolen cards work. And they're quite busy. If too much of that gets through—really, any more than a very tiny amount of it gets through—you're gonna have an extremely bad time.
Various CC service providers like Stripe do provide tools to try to block those attempts, but defense in depth is usually a very good idea, including fairly aggressive firewall-level blocking.
A couple of examples I can think of is blocking bots from scraping their site for pricing and details and from resellers from buying up all of the stock (see sneakers, electronics, etc). The last example doesn't directly impact their bottom line, but it will make customers go elsewhere.
That wouldn't just be bad news, it would be disastrous news. It would immediately render the entirety of the web worthless to me.
And once your spammer has been identified then that's them banned/removed, unable to sign up again.
Would you have to submit a dispute with the internet credit agencies? Maybe join a class action suit against the entity that leaked your ID so that they're forced to give you a year of free internet identity monitoring?
We should be reforming our current credit agency system, not empowering it with a new mandate of judging somebody's social or political creditworthiness.
Keeping with the cloudflare topic, if Cloudflare only permits you 10 requests per second (HTML + JS/images) that's still usable for web browsing, but someone running a cloud of hundreds of bots would be effectively shut down. Similarly with email, an individual probably doesn't need to send more than one email per 10 seconds but email spammers wouldn't find any ROI at that rate - business needs being different might necessitate a different registry or something in that case.
I have bad news about the most-likely fix for it, longer term, so we can lay off the IP-based reputation stuff and the geo-blocking: it's tying some form of personal ID to your browsing activity, so that bears the reputation instead of the address.
Sorry. Said it was bad news.