From 9ea52bb84926d816f007d07957625d066a273d7e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: oskarth Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2024 11:26:21 +0800 Subject: [PATCH] feat(04-01): Add section on ZK and AnonAadhaar --- contents/english/04-01-identity-and-personhood.md | 3 +++ 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+) diff --git a/contents/english/04-01-identity-and-personhood.md b/contents/english/04-01-identity-and-personhood.md index 4176cbbc..1ad87703 100644 --- a/contents/english/04-01-identity-and-personhood.md +++ b/contents/english/04-01-identity-and-personhood.md @@ -125,6 +125,8 @@ At the same time, these systems have important limits on their ability to establ On the other hand, if privacy is protected, as in Worldcoin, by using biometrics only to initialize an account, the system becomes vulnerable to stealing or selling of accounts. Because most services people seek to access require more than proving they are a unique human (e.g. that they have a particular name, an ID number of some type issued to them by a recognized government, that they are a citizen of some country, and maybe some other attributes like educational or employment credentials at a company etc.) this extreme preservation of privacy undermines most of the utility of the system. Furthermore, such systems place a great burden on the technical performance of biometric systems. If eyeballs can, sometime in the future, be spoofed by artificial intelligence systems combined with advanced printing technology, such a system may be subject to an extreme "single point of failure". In short, despite their important capacity for inclusion and simplicity, biometric systems are too reductive to achieve establish and protect identities with the richness and security required to support ⿻. +With recent improvements in the use of Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), digital identity systems such as Aadhaar can also be augmented to better protect the user's privacy without the need for biometrics. Projects such as Anon-Aadhaar [^AnonAadhaar] allow an Aadhaar user to selectively reveal only a subset of information to some entity in a provable way. This method of combining traditional digital identity systems, such as digital signatures by some authority, together with novel Zero Knowledge Proof cryptography, is only possible in recent years and shows a lot of promise. + Starting from a very different place, another set of work on identity has reached a similar challenging set of trade-offs. Work on "decentralized identity" (DID) grew from many of the concerns about digital identity we have highlighted above: fragmentation, lack of natural digital infrastructure, issues with privacy, surveillance and corporate control. A key founding document was Microsoft identity architect Kim Cameron's "Laws of Identity" [^LawsOfIdentities], which emphasized the importance of user control/consent, minimal disclosure to appropriate parties, multiple use cases, ⿻ism of participation, integration with human users and consistency of experience across context. Kim Cameron worked on develoing the cardspace [^CS] system while at MSFT and this became the InformationCard [^icard] standards. These did not get market adoption in part because they were too early - smart phones were not widely adopted yet and the idea that this device could hold a wallet for people. With the emergence of crypto currencies and distributed append only ledgers that can store information indefinately in a public way. The community focused on user-centric identity considered how this could be used to achieve the vision of people really being the pivot point or control locus of their own digital represntations (rather then being at the affect of a central athority assigning them an identifier (corporate SSO or an Aahdaar like system) that they had to authenticate against but ultimately didn't control. They developed the Decentralized Identifiers (DID) standard [^DID] at the W3C that defines a way to have decentralized globally resolvable endpoints with associated public keys. This creates a way to grant individuals "ownership" over identities, rooted in "public" data repositories such as blockchains, and create standardized formats for a variety of entities to issue digital credentials referencing these identifiers. @@ -204,3 +206,4 @@ As we noted above, almost everything relevant about us is known by others and is [^icard]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_card [^CS]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_CardSpace [^DID]: https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/ +[^AnonAadhaar]: https://mirror.xyz/privacy-scaling-explorations.eth/YnqHAxpjoWl4e_K2opKPN4OAy5EU4sIJYYYHFCjkNOE \ No newline at end of file