Author Topic: How do you prove a person is who they claim to be?  (Read 1688 times)

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Offline Troglodactyl

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Most of the time you don't really care who a person is, as long as they're the same person who built the reputation you're looking at.  Biometrics (examined in person) can be useful for uniquely identifying a person, but they're terrible for automated security: they can be copied, and once copied they can't be changed.

In general, uniqueness is less important than reputation, so getting someone to build and use a reputation using a unique key pair solves a lot of problems.  If uniqueness is a requirement, trusted (possibly several redundant) verifiers should be able to check biometrics in person and sign off linking a hash of biometric results to the public key.

Offline carpet ride

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Reputation and Identity Verification Businesses.

Private sector reputation verifiers, and many of them.  They could use relationships, mother, father, cousin, uncle, brother, son, high school math teacher, swim coach, etc. to let relationships prove identity.  These same verification stations would have to work to keep each other honest by cross checking each other and blowing whistle on bad actors.  Enough signatures from these stations and you can get back your own secret information perhaps.  The real world reputation verifiers are also a concept behind VOTE I believe, and to your point, it could be coupled with biometrics

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« Last Edit: February 28, 2015, 01:50:27 pm by Carpet Ride »
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Offline xiahui135

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Maybe things like connecting to one's facebook can prove. or some special functional delegate can do the work of verification.

Offline starspirit

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Just a question regarding what may be possible in the far future...

Can biometrics or related procedures theoretically be used to identify an individuals uniqueness - ie. that in any future online interaction, they are who they claim to be, and they are definitely alive? For example, fingerprints would fail because there is no way to definitively prove another person is not using a copy of the print, even when the original person is deceased. A password fails, because it can be hacked or stolen.

Can this information be stored in a private encrypted fashion on a block-chain, such that it can be used for verification purposes, but not be abused by others?