alt Hacker NewsWhen this first landed I asked what the fix could even be. Everyone needs a new ID at a minimum. But then I got to thinking: 1) is that the point? Conspiratorial thinking I know but “hey all Our ids got hacked I guess we need a national id”. And related 2) the current id system from a security standpoint was a band aid fix for outdated world to be shoehorned into a modern one. IDscan was never cryptographic proof you were who you said you were. Maybe better than “enter your name and SSN” but bottom line, at least in US there is no cryptographically secure identity system that proves you are the citizen you say. And that fact bleeds into all sorts of patchwork solutions, fraud, etc. Moreover there are serious philosophical hurdles to getting to one. I’m not even positive I want one. But unless there is some zero-trust way to do this, I’m not sure what the fix would be.
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> IDscan was never cryptographic proof you were who you said you were. Maybe better than “enter your name and SSN”
With the benefit of hindsight, we'd have all been better off if SSNs had been so obviously flagrantly public that nobody would ever consider them a trust-factor.
Passports seem a lot better. You scan it with NFC, and the chip inside proves authenticity via asymmetric crypto.
And then, in real life, one discovers that institutions route around in creative ways for all sorts of different reasons ( recently had to 2fa a transaction at a god damn teller window; you just took my DL ).