alt Hacker NewsI don’t understand the problem they are trying to solve, and this article is long, so apologies if they actually get around to explaining.
I have a credit card, and an agent. I want a pizza.
These credentials do what, exactly? Prevent the pizza place from taking my money? Allow me to order anonymously so they don’t know where to deliver it?
Also, they are security professionals, so when they say anonymous, they don’t mean pseudonymous, so my agent can produce an unlimited number of identities, right? How do they keep the website from correlating time and IP addresses to link my anonymous requests to a pseudonym?
My cynical take is that the pizzeria has to pay cloudflare a few pennies to process the transaction. What am I missing?
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I think the idea would be that you ask your credit card to convert $10 into 10 untraceable tokens, and then spend them one at a time. You do a handshake dance with the credit card company so you walk away with tokens that only you know, and you have assurance that the tokens are in the same pool as everyone else who asked for untraceable tokens from that credit card company.
Then you can go and spend them freely. The credit card company (and maybe ever third parties?) can verify that the tokens are valid, but they can't associate them with a user. Assuming that the credit card company keeps a log, they can also verify that a token has never been used before.
In some sense, it's a light-weight and anonymous block chain.
The attempt appears to be to rate limit. The acquisition of access tokens is meant to be rate limited.
Similar logic to SMS verification, but actually private.
Although this is clearly the equivalent of Cloudflare propaganda, they are trying to address the issue of connecting a user and an agent in a way that respects the users privacy.
They effectively use credentials and cryptography to link the two together in a zero-knowledge type of way. Real issue, although no one is clearly dying for this yet.
Real solution too, but blind credentials and Chaumian signing is equally naive to think it addresses the root issue. Something like Apple will step in to cast a liability shield over all parties and just continue to trap users into the Apple data ecosystem.
The right way to do this is to give the user sovereignty over their identity and usage such that platforms cater to users rather than the middle-men in-between. Harder than what Cloudflare probably wants to truly solve for.
Still, cool article even if a bit lengthy.