“Identity” is a set of features that allow unique identification of a person and distinguishing them from others. That sounds simple enough, but it turns out to have a lot of implications in the modern, connected, global world.
Identity today is government managed. You are nobody if a government hasn’t confirmed that you are indeed somebody. The procedures in the countries vary, but after you are born, you get issued a birth certificate and your name (and possibly number) are entered into a database (either centralized or decentralized). From then on you have an “identity”, which you can later prove using some sort of a document (ID card, passport, driving license, social security number, etc.)
It is not that the government owns your identity, because you are far more than your ID card, but certain attributes of your identity are recorded by the government, and then it certifies (via a document and the relevant database) that this is indeed you. These attributes include your names, which have been used to identify people since forever, your address, your photo, height, eye color. Possibly your fingerprints and your iris. But we’ll get to these biometric attributes later.
Why is all this important? Except for cases of people living in small isolated tribes, where they probably don’t even need names for identifying others, the so called “civilized world” needs to be able to differentiate one person from another for all sorts of reasons. Is the driver capable of driving, is the pilot capable of flying a plane — they may show a certificate, but is it really them that were certified (“Catch me if you can” shows how serious this can be)? Who owns a given property? Is it this one, claiming to be John Smith, or that one, also claiming to be John Smith? The ownership certificate may be lost, but there is a record somewhere that holds the information. We just have to identify the real John Smith.
Traveling is another case — although rather suboptimal, the current world has countries and borders, and various traveling restrictions. You have to prove that you are you, and that you have the right to travel. You have to prove you are American, or that you have a visa, if you want to enter the United States.
There are many other cases — crime-fighting, getting a bank loan, getting employed, etc.
You may argue that you should be able to be totally anonymous and still do all of the above, but unfortunately, in a global society, fraud is too likely to allow us to deal with anonymous people. By that I’m not saying we should be identified for everything we do — not at all, it should be limited to where it makes practical sense. But there is a sufficient number of these use-cases.
Offline identity is one thing, but there’s also the notion of “online identity”. A way to prove who you are on the internet. That is most often (and rightly so) an anonymous registration process, rarely it uses some identity provider like Facebook or Twitter (where again, you don’t have to disclose your true identity), but when doing legally significant actions, or when communicating with governments in order to obtain some data or certificates about yourself, the service provider has to be able to prove it is really you. Here comes the “electronic identification” process, which was recently defined in an EU regulation, and which in most cases means you have a government-issues hardware token that only you own and know how to unlock.
But since identity exists, it can be stolen or forged. There is the so called “identity theft” and it’s used in multiple ways that are out of the scope of this post. But people do steal others identity — online, and offline.
One instance of identity theft is using another person’s identity document. Similarly, one can forge an identity document to say whatever they want it to say. And this may lead to dire consequences for unsuspecting citizens. So government and experts are trying to fight this problem. Let’s take a look at the two distinct use-cases.
Document forgery is addressed by making ever more complicated documents, with all sorts of security features, invisible components, laser engraved elements, using specific laser angels, and so on. This, of course, is imperfect, not only because it is “security through obscurity” (who guarantees that your government won’t leak the “secret sauce” for making its documents, or worse — supply the forgers with the raw materials needed to make a document), but also because a forged document can still pass inspection, as humans are not perfect when inspecting documents. To put it another way — if the one inspecting the document knows what to look for, surely the forger also knows that.
Document theft (including document copying) is addressed by comparing the picture. And that’s about it. If you look similarly to someone else and you get his identity document, you can safely pretend to be him for a long time.
None of the solutions seem good enough. So to the rescue come electronic documents. Passports are a somewhat universal identity document, and most passports are now eMRTD (Electronic machine readable travel document). Issues with them aside, the basic idea is that they have some information stored that a) guarantees the document is issued by a trusted authority and b) it belongs to the person holding it.
The first part is guaranteed via a public key infrastructure — the contents of the document are digitally signed by the issuing authority. So nobody can create his own passport or ID card, because he doesn’t have the private key of the issuing authority (and the private key cannot be extracted, because an HSM, where it is stored, doesn’t allow that).
The second part is trickier. It is currently addressed by storing your facial image and fingerprints on the chip and then comparing the image and fingerprints of the holder to the stored ones (remember that the content is certified by a digital signature, which is practically bulletproof for the time being). The facial image part is flawed, and at the moment barely anyone checks the fingerprint part, but this option exists and it is getting more and more traction “with all that terrorism”.
So starting from the somewhat intuitive concept of identity, we’ve come to the point where governments make databases of fingerprints. And then iris data, and DNA (as in Kuwait, for example).
Although everything above sounds logical, the end result is somewhat scary. People’s biometric information being stored in databases, potentially at risk of breaches, potentially misused by governments, sounds dystopian. As we are no longer the owners of our identity — someone else has collected our attributes — attributes that do not change throughout our entire life — and stores them for future use. For whatever use. That someone doesn’t have to store them for the sake of identification, as there are technologies that allow storing the data on a card that does the comparison internally, without reveling the stored data. But that option seems to be ignored, strengthening the dystopian feeling.
Recently I’ve been thinking on how to address all of these. How to make sure identity still does its job but without compromising privacy. Two hours after I’ve had some ideas, I spoke with someone with far more experience in identity technology than me, and turned out he had had quite similar ideas.
And here technology comes into play. We are a combination of our unchangeable traits — fingerprints, iris, DNA. You can differentiate even identical twins based on these attributes. You also have other, more volatile attributes — height, weight, names, address, favorite color even.
All of these represent your identity. And it can be managed by turning the essential, unchangeable parts of it, into a key. An anonymous key, that is derived using a one-way function, a so called “hash”. After you hash your fingerprints, iris and DNA, you’ll get a long value, e.g. fd4e1c67b2d28fced849ee1bb76e7391b93eb12, that represents you.
This will be you and you will be able to prove it, as every time someone needs you to prove your identity, you will get your fingerprints, iris and DNA scanned, and the result of applying the one-way function will be again 2fd4e1c67b2d28fced849ee1bb76e7391b93eb12.
Additionally, you can probably add some “secret” word to that identity. So that your identity is not only what you are (and cannot change), but also what you know. That would mean that nobody can come up with your identity unless you tell them your secret (sounds a little like “A Wizard of Earthsea”).
Of course, full identification will rarely be required. If you want to buy alcohol, only your age matters; if you want to get a contract for cable internet, only your name and address matter, and so on. For that, sub-identities can exist — they belong to a “parent” identity, but the verifier doesn’t need such a high level of assurance that it is indeed you. The sub-identity can be “just the fingerprints”, or even…a good old identity document. Each sub-identity can prove a set of attributes, certified by an authority — not necessarily a government authority.
Your sub-identity, a set of attributes, can be written on a document — something you carry around that certifies, with a significant level of certainty, that this is indeed you. It will hold your “hash”, so that anyone who wants to do a full check, can do so. The other option is the implant. Scary and dystopian, I know. It seems just a little different than an ID card — it is something you carry with you, and you have to carry with you. Provided that you control whether someone is allowed to read your implant, it becomes a slightly advanced identity card or a driver’s license.
Even when we have an identity string, the related data — owned properties, driving capabilities, travel visas, employment, bank loans — will be stored in databases, where the identity string is the lookup key. These databases are now government owned, but can very well be distributed, e.g. using a blockchain. Nobody can claim he’s you, as he cannot produce the same identity string based on his biometrics. The nodes on the blockchain network can be the implants, which hold encrypted information about you, and only you can decide when to decrypt it. That would make for a distributed human database where one is in full control of his data.
But is this feasible? The complexity of the system, and especially of managing one’s identity, may be too high. We can create a big, complex system, involving implants and biometrics, for solving a problem that is actually a tiny one. This is the first question we should ask before proceeding to such a thing. Not whether governments should manage identities, not whether we should be identifiable, but whether we need a dramatic shift in the current system. Or an electronic ID card with match-on-card (not centrally stored) fingerprints and electronically signed contents solves 99% of the issues?
Although I’m finding it fascinating to envision a technological utopia, with cryptography heavily involved, and privacy guaranteed by technological means, I’m not sure we need that.
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