I mean…yeah…but it sounds really bad on the surface.
Crypto. Namely, certificates or smartcards.
Imagine if your driver’s license were a smartcard. It’d essentially just be a cryptographic key pair that asserts that you are “you” because the card says you are and you both have the card and know the unlock PIN.
Now, that sounds like the government could easily track you, but not quite. All that really matters is that the certificate is valid. Not expired, not revoked, and there is a mutual trust in a third party (the issuer).
This doesn’t require a query to the issuer. It can, and should, i.e. using OCSP or CRLs. CRLs, in particular, are a bit better here…instead of the service going back to the issuer and saying “is this certificate still good”, instead, the issuer periodically publishes a list of all revoked serial numbers that get downloaded by anybody who wants them.
The important thing is, the service provider (i.e. the website) never has to ask about you by name. They know you are you, because you possess your private keys, and they trust that the issuer of your certificate (a corresponding public key, signed by the issuers private key) is thorough in verifying your identity.
I think a mutual-third-party trust model (basically, certificates) is about as good as it can get. I don’t think you can verify without trust. That’s not how the proverb goes. Not at all.
I mean…yeah…but it sounds really bad on the surface.
Crypto. Namely, certificates or smartcards.
Imagine if your driver’s license were a smartcard. It’d essentially just be a cryptographic key pair that asserts that you are “you” because the card says you are and you both have the card and know the unlock PIN.
Now, that sounds like the government could easily track you, but not quite. All that really matters is that the certificate is valid. Not expired, not revoked, and there is a mutual trust in a third party (the issuer).
This doesn’t require a query to the issuer. It can, and should, i.e. using OCSP or CRLs. CRLs, in particular, are a bit better here…instead of the service going back to the issuer and saying “is this certificate still good”, instead, the issuer periodically publishes a list of all revoked serial numbers that get downloaded by anybody who wants them.
The important thing is, the service provider (i.e. the website) never has to ask about you by name. They know you are you, because you possess your private keys, and they trust that the issuer of your certificate (a corresponding public key, signed by the issuers private key) is thorough in verifying your identity.
I think a mutual-third-party trust model (basically, certificates) is about as good as it can get. I don’t think you can verify without trust. That’s not how the proverb goes. Not at all.