coldcog

I understand what you are saying, and I agree that this is a risk that we will have to be very aware of.

Right now we are aware of the majority of the websites/institutions that use IRMA, so we can keep track of who ask what attributes for which reasons, and advise them on it. As IRMA usage grows this will probably become unfeasible; but we are planning to see if we can build a button in the IRMA app that, when a website asks for too much information, you can use to send a report to the Authoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP) or ourselves.

In addition I would like to point out that this:

> I don't want to ID myself every time I sign up for some hobbyforum or whatever.

is now against the law (GDPR) - or at least the point you are I think trying to make: websites may request only personal data that is relevant and necessary for their purposes. Most parties seem to want to abide by this law, and perhaps it is just me, but it seems that consumers are slowly becoming more and more aware of the necessity and importance of privacy.

> There used to be a saying "On the internet nobody knows if you're a dog".

That has since long stopped being true. Nowadays many websites have a very clear idea of who you are, even without IRMA, by tracking you across the internet. Probably many of the website you know already exactly know your name and interests, by using Google Analytics or Facebook trackers - unless you take steps to prevent that from happening, which the vast majority of people don't.

The difference with learning who you are by requesting IRMA attributes is that then the website would receive personal data about you that it knows it can trust (in as far as it trusts the issuer who signed the attributes). That is, it becomes more difficult or even impossible to lie about your identity. That could indeed become a problem that we will have to try to prevent from happening as much as we can.

Although developments have slowed down due to the pandemic and now the collapse of the dutch cabinet, the Privacy by Design Foundation and SIDN, who jointly develop and run IRMA, have been in talks and developing pilots with the Ministry of the Interior of the Netherlands to become an accepted party ("toegelaten partij") under the WDO. That would mean that when the WDO comes into effect, the ministry issues basic personal data to IRMA apps, and IRMA becomes one of the ways in which citizens can authenticate to services alongside DigiD.

Indeed the attribute-based nature of IRMA makes it more general than OpenID Connect. Users can collect all sorts of attributes in their IRMA app, and then selectively disclose any subset of those attributes, as appropriate to the use case. This includes authentication like OpenID Connect (e.g. the user could disclose a username attribute), but also other use cases such as indeed proving that you are older than 18, or anonymously proving membership of a group (using unlinkability, see below), or providing authenticated personal data such as your address or date of birth.

In addition to this, a more technical overview of IRMA and its features can be found here: https://irma.app/docs/overview

Here [0] is a list of projects that use IRMA. Indeed there are several healthcare institutions, but there is also https://irma-meet.nl which features authenticated video calling, and there are several municipalities that are planning to allow their citizens to log in using IRMA.

In addition, we are cooperating with several institutions and governments, including the Dutch national government, on future IRMA projects. Given the differences of IRMA from other mainstream authentication mechanisms, however, getting parties and their end users ready to use IRMA can be complicated and takes time.

[0]: https://privacybydesign.foundation/usage/

Hello, IRMA lead developer here.

Since then we have mainly moved from smart cards to a mobile app [0], and focused on getting the IRMA server and frontend software production-ready and developer friendly. Additionally we have worked on connecting existing institutions and companies on IRMA; you have to have parties that issue and verify IRMA attributes before the project can be of use to end users.

As to development, we have a public roadmap here [1].

[0]: https://irma.app/

[1]: https://irma.app/roadmap.html

Have just added alias ls="ls -p" to my .bashrc.

That's a good point, indeed any sequence of bytes can be interpreted as a number. But it may also encode an element of a set that has an ordering differing from that of the numbers. (For example, you could order, let's say, the set of all cat pictures by how cute they are.) That's what makes the difference.

It's important to note that either:

- the things you are encrypting are not numbers, or

- your scheme is not as secure as you would like it to be,

where the second point means that necessarily there is some information leakage: that is, more than just their order can be derived from ciphertexts. This is not necessarily bad; the questions is what it is that is leaked, and if that is harmful to your situation.

The website links to two papers, one for each of the above categories, of which only the second one is sufficiently efficient to be of any use. Apart from the order of two ciphertexts, it reveals the index of the first bit at which the ciphertexts differ.