Privacy-preserving foundation for online personal identity
Abstract
Today~s Internet has the critical flaw that it cannot securely distinguish between real people and fake accounts. This fundamental weakness is why E-mail is still full of spam . It is why online forums cannot win their endless whack-a-mole war against trolls reappearing under false names. It is why social media news feeds are vulnerable to bot-fueled propaganda campaigns pushing disruption and fake news. It is one key reason we cannot securely vote , poll opinions, ordeliberate democratically online. It is why Bitcoin wastes more energy than many countries use productively , while failing in its key goals of being decentralized and ~open to anyone~ due to mining centralization and specialized hardware . It is why humans feel increasingly irrelevant in a bot-versus-bot world , contributing to a global tech backlash .We might in principle solve this problem by requiring everyone to use strong, unforgeable identities in all their online activities. However, it is not easy to agree Internet-wide on a common identity system, let alone to ensure that these identities are indeed unforgeable, to make online identities available to undocumented populations such as migrant refugees or homeless, or to protect privacy-sensitive online identity information from theft or misuse.The personhood.online project at the Decentralized and Distributed Systems (DEDIS) lab at EPFL is dedicated to address these key security challenges, by developing a person-centric digital trust foundation that tackles the problem of distinguishing real people from fake ones in the digital world, preventing Sybil attacks and sockpuppetry. This personhood layer is built around the concept of proof-of-personhood (PoP), a low-cost physical security process that bindsreal people to minimalistic virtual identities that ensure accountability and ~one-per-person~ equity in allocation while also protecting user privacy and anonymity.Personhood badges potentially offer a low-cost foundation for a wide variety online applications that are currently struggling against abuse through fake accounts or sockpuppetry. This foundation could help ensure that ~likes~ or ~follower~ counts on social networks count only real people; enable democratic debate and deliberation online with ~one-person-one-vote~ security; combat spam by making sender accounts less disposable; and mitigate the destructiveness of fake news by eliminating the amplification power of botnets. A personhood foundation could enable future blockchains and cryptocurrencies to eliminate the tremendous energy waste of Proof-of-Work systems like Bitcoin, while ensuring that participation remains decentralized and open to everyone regardless of wealth or technical expertise, by giving each real person one unit of ~stake~ or consensus power in the blockchain. Personhood.online couldenable cryptocurrencies that give each human participant the ability to mint new currency at a controlled and equal rate, creating a permissionless universal basic income available to all in the form of a cryptocurrency.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- May 23, 2019
- Source ID
- N000141912361
Entities
People
- Bryan Alexander Ford
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
- United States Navy