Comment on Is it completely impossible to do age verification without compromising privacy?
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 3 days agoRead back what you wrote. Your first line was about a trusted credential provider. Thats a middle man. Then you talk about creating a proof. Guess what, that phone and browser are known to spy on you excessively. That’s another middle man. And odds are that same phone or browser it what you will use to access something that needs the verification. So the same phone or browser has all parts of the information.
And of course it’s pointless because anyone could steal an ID and get themselves a key. Or steal your phone… so it wouldn’t even prove anything.
jabberwock@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
I’ll address the second objection first regarding the phone or browser. You’re always going to rely on some technology for the solutions that use cryptography, you just can’t do those calculations long-hand realistically. That said, look up frameworks like CTAP that allow a potentially untrusted user terminal, like a browser, to interact with a trusted hardware token. Those hardware tokens can be made fairly tamper-proof, see FIPS authorized Yubikeys, such that the phone is pretty much removed from the attestation process. Yes these can still be stolen, but they make hardware keys that are fingerprint authenticated and the biometric stays on the device. Doesn’t get much more self-sovereign than that.
The existence of a trusted credential provider is a challenge. Fully self-sovereign credentials need to either be trust on first use or validated against a larger system everyone participates in. Even if we had some system of birth certificates tied to a distributed ledger, we would have to trust the third party recording that certificate in the first place, be it a hospital, doctor, or state entity. These trust and proof systems don’t create the trust, they just allow us to extend that trust from one claimant to a verifier. Whether you place that trust in the state, an individual, or an independent third party is up to you.
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 2 days ago
So, you have fully backed my response. OP didn’t ask if it was possible with some caveats. I understand a (at a high level) the technical options that can get close to what OP asked for, but it fundamentally just isn’t possible without caveats.