I saw this tiktok where this guy was talking about how he’d get his hands on real social security numbers… this was a clip from a whole story he told about some criminal shit, I was too distracted by my thoughts on how to fix the exploits he used.
Block chains and cryptographic signatures would solve basically every one of his exploits. But regardless of the myriad of reasons as to why we won’t adopt cryptography into American laws and bureaucracy, imagine if we did do everything involving government and policy in a cryptographically secure environment.
Imagine if everyone who is born gets assigned a gpg secret key signed by the government and that is your government ID for everything from opening a bank account to paying your taxes to claiming benefits. IMPO I think this is a perfect solution (iif you ignore the human element).
So my question is why wouldn’t it be perfect, and what kind of exploits could bad actors use in a cryptographic bureaucracy?
A gpg key has to be stored on something, and that can be stolen or lost. (Or degraded over time).
You are essentially pushing for 1 factor authentication. Its a strong factor, but still just 1.
True,
There are many ways to do this, for example a person can sign a new key with their old key when their old key is due to expire, we have many rotating government IDs.
As for the human element, social security cards and driving licenses get lost/stolen/worn out too, crypto keys have the potential to be just as durable as existing solutions.
I hope I don’t have to remember all of my kids passcodes until they are old enough to have them themselves.
We’d need a purpose made gpg like system for this level of complexity so I have no doubt that there would be a way to have parents cryptographically prove they’re their children’s parents. It’s just a matter of design
We already have quite a few systems in place to prove who the parents are.
Just email it to yourself from your Gmail account. That is perfectly secure.
You have the same problems we have with passkey today. If the key is compromised, and you don’t have a separate recovery method, how would a third-party know if you rotated the key or the attacker did? Keys are the way to go for these things, yes, but processes and management at a human level are required.
Guys
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Cryptography doesn’t replace people… Some bureaucrat will probably manually generate keys for new people… If you make new keys you’re probably gonna go get them signed maybe even in person.
It’s just supposed to replace the garbage ass id systems we have today with something more utilitarian
Yes, that’s what I was saying. In any event, the US is the only country with a dumb sequential SSN anyway, since no one seems to want a secure national ID that everyone else has.
If you provide people with the means to replace lost crypto keys, then you’ve lost the security gained from using them.