Comment by SeanAnderson
6 months ago
ZK proofs for identity can't go mainstream quick enough. I agree with what you're saying completely. It's frustrating that we have the technology now to verify aspects of someone's identity without revealing it, but that it's going to take forever to become robust enough for mainstream use.
It's an interesting litmus test because regulators would not accept ZK age proofs unless the stated purpose of age verification laws (reduce harm to minors) is the _actual_ purpose of those laws.
Not some different unstated goal, such as ending online anonymity.
That is exactly what EU is doing with its age verification law. Basically the service provider just has to accept the certificate and check that it is valid and all the cert says is "is over X years old".
https://ageverification.dev/
And the fact that the companies have to implement the system themselves is just crazy. It is very obvious that if the government require such a check it has to provide the proof/way of checking just like in the physical world it provides the id card/passport/etc used for checking this.
> just like in the physical world it provides the id card/passport/etc used for checking this.
In Sweden it wasn't the government that provided id cards, but the post office and banks. It became the government's job sometime after Sweden joined the EU, after the introduction of the common EUID standard.
And even then online identification is handled by a private company owned by banks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID_(Sweden)
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> And the fact that the companies have to implement the system themselves is just crazy.
Isn’t this how most industry regulations work? It’s not like the government provides designs to car companies to reduce emissions or improve crash safety.
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That does not work without treacherous locked-down hardware. The marketing by Google et al is leaving out that fact to privacy-wash what is ultimately a push for digital authoritarianism.
Think about it - the claim is that those systems can prove aspects of someone's identity (eg age), without the site where the proof is used obtaining any knowledge about the individual and without the proof provider knowing where the proof is used. If all of these things are true while users are running software they can control, then it's trivial for an activist to set up a proxy that takes requests for proofs from other users and generates proofs based on the activist's identity - with no downside for the activist, since this can never be traced back to them.
The only thing that could be done is for proof providers to limit the rate of proofs per identity so that multiple activists would be required to say provide access to Discord to all the kids who want it.
If I had my 'druthers, there would be a kind of physical vending machine installed at local city hall or whatever, which leverages physical controls and (dis-)economies of scale.
The trusted machine would test your ID (or sometimes accept cash) and dispense single-use tokens to help prove stuff. For example, to prove (A) you are a Real Human, or (B) Real and Over Age X, or (C) you Donated $Y On Some Charity To Show Skin In The Game.
That ATM-esque platform would be open-source and audited to try to limit what data the government could collect, using the same TPM that would make it secure in other ways. For example, perhaps it only exposes the sum total of times each ID was used at machine, but for the previous month only.
The black-market in resold tokens would be impaired (not wholly prevented, that's impossible) by factors like:
1. The difficulty of scaling the physical portion of the work of acquiring the tokens.
2. Suspicion, if someone is using the machine dozens of times per month—who needs that many social-media signups or whatever?
3. There's no way to test if a token has already been used, except to spend it. By making reseller fraud easy, it makes the black-market harder, unless a seller also creates a durable (investigate-able) reputation. I suppose people could watch the vending-machine being used, but that adds another hard-to-scale physical requirement.
> 2. Suspicion, if someone is using the machine dozens of times per month—who needs that many social-media signups or whatever?
Anyone who visits pornhub and doesn't want to open an account?
Yeah, introducing real world friction is seemingly one of the only ways of actually solving the problems of frictionless digital systems (apart from computational disenfranchisement, of course).
It might be a better idea to frame your idea in terms of online interactive proofs rather than offline bearer tokens. It's of course a lot less private/convenient to have to bring a phone or other cell-modem enabled device to the vending machine, especially for the average person who won't exercise good digital hygiene. Still, some sort of high-latency challenge-proof protocol is likely the way to go, because bearer tokens still seem too frictionless.
For example (3) could be mitigated with an intermediary marketplace that facilitated transactions with escrow. If tokens were worth say $2, then even just getting 10 at a time to sell could be worth it for the right kind of person. And personally I'd just get 10 tokens myself simply to avoid having to go back to the machine as much. In fact the optimal strategy for regular power users might be to get as many tokens as you think you might need to use (even if you have to pay for them), and then when they near expiration time you sell them to recoup your time/cost/whatever.
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>Think about it - the claim is that those systems can prove aspects of someone's identity (eg age), without the site where the proof is used obtaining any knowledge about the individual and without the proof provider knowing where the proof is used.
That is not nessisarially true. There are ZK setups where you can tell when a witness is reused, such as in linkable ring signatures.
Another simple example is blind signatures, you know each unblinded signature corresponds to a unique blind signature without knowing who blinded it.
The easy solution is the best one. Just don't collect the info. Any problems resulting from that need to be handled differently.
Proven to work and we wouldn't be dependent on untrustworthy identity providers.
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Sure, but making use of that introduces new problems.
Fundamentally it limits a person to one account/nym per site. This itself removes privacy. An individual should be able to have multiple Discord nyms, right?
Then if someone gets their one-account-per-site taken/used by someone else, now administrative processes are required to undo/override that.
Then furthermore it still doesn't prevent someone from selling access to all the sites they don't care about. A higher bar than an activist simply giving it away for free, but still.
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You mean not collecting IDs is the real answer. Easy solution is the best solution and it already is mainstream.
This is an example why that was a bad idea in the first place. No damage control for bad solutions will change that.
Mandated age checks (systemic deanonymization) is the gateway to social credit scores
Anonymous proofs of age don't work, because (in theory) I could set up a server, plugged into my ID chip, that lets anyone download age proofs from me, and then anyone can be over 18. They don't just need to know someone is over 18 - they also need to know it's the same person using the website.
Make it so that the proofs are not reusable.
Why does that matter if I can keep generating new ones?
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