Google's Ben Laurie has a new paper called Selective Disclosure in which he argues the importance of zero knowledge proofs and privacy-enhancing cryptography. I fully share his view of the importance of these technologies.
Everyone with a technical interest in identity should look at Credentica’s recently released SDK, called U-Prove. It holistically embodies the cryptographic breakthroughs of Stefan Brands.
There is also a competing system from IBM called IDEMIX, though it is not yet publicly available and I can't talk about it first-hand.
On his way toward explaining how these systems work, Ben takes the time to put forward his own Laws of Identity (“Let a thousand flowers bloom!”) He is responding to my Fourth Law, which asserts the need for the Identity Metasystem to support both public identifiers (for example, my blogging address) and private ones (my account number with a given company, unknown to anyone but me and them). He says:
“For an identity management system to be both useful and privacy preserving, there are three properties assertions must be able to have. They must be:
- Verifiable: There’s often no point in making a statement unless the relying party has some way of checking it is true. Note that this isn’t always a requirement – I don’t have to prove my address is mine to Amazon, because its up to me where my goods get delivered. But I may have to prove I’m over 18 to get alcohol delivered.
- Minimal: This is the privacy preserving bit – I want to tell the relying party the very least he needs to know. I shouldn’t have to reveal my date of birth, just prove I’m over 18 somehow.
- Unlinkable: If the relying party or parties, or other actors in the system, can, either on their own or in collusion, link together my various assertions, then I’ve blown the minimality requirement out of the water.”
These are important things for the Identity Metasystem to support, and I make the same points in my own version of the laws. But I don't think these characteristics are the whole story – rather, they describe requirements for certain use cases. However, there are other use cases, and it was the goal of the original Laws of Identity to embrace them as well.
For example, when I blog I want to use an identity that is linkable. I want anyone who is interested in my ideas to be able to talk about them with anyone else, and tell them how to get to my web site, which is – in the most literal sense of the word – a “linkable” characteristic of my identity.
And when accessing my bank account through the internet, I would rather like to ensure that the party withdrawing the money is tightly linked to a real-world person – hopefully me.
So we don't always want our identity to be unlinkable. We want unlinkability to be one of our options.
Similarly, I don't want every assertion I make to be verified by some bureaucratic process. I don't run around in the molecular world armed with official documents that I present to every Tom, Dick and Harry. Again, I want verifiability to be one of my options, but not more than that. We need to be careful about what we wish for here. Requiring individuals to employ identities verified by third parties in contexts where there is no good reason for it is a slippery and dangerous slope. So I hope that's not what Ben has in mind.
When using a public identity (which I call “omnidirectional” because you share it with everyone) I may want to divulge more information than is necessary for some specific purpose. So even the notion of minimal disclosure doesn't apply within certain contexts and when public personas are involved.
Thus I take Ben's real point to be that an important and mainstream use case is one where verifiability, minimal disclosure AND unlinkability, should all be achievable at the same time. This I agree with.
What strikes me as strange in Ben's document is this comment:
“Note a subtle but important difference between Kim’s laws and mine – he talks about identifiers whereas I talk about assertions. In an ideal world, assertions would not be identifiers; but it turns out that in practice they often are.â€
I say “strange” because when you actually read the Laws of Identity this is what you will find:
We will begin by defining a digital identity as a set of claims made by one digital subject about itself or another digital subject. (page 4)
Is what I called a claim different from what Ben calls an assertion? Well, on page 5 of the Laws, I wrote (citing the Oxford English Dictionary, well known to Ben):
A claim is, “…an assertion of the truth of something, typically one which is disputed or in doubt”.
Clearly I'm going a bit beyond Ben's concerns in that I remind the reader that assertions must be evaluated, not just made. But in no way can I be said to confuse identifiers and digital identity. In fact, I go on to give some examples which make my ideas in this regard perfectly clear. (page 5).
- A claim could just convey an identifier – for example, that the subject’s student number is 490-525, or that the subject’s Windows name is REDMOND\kcameron. This is the way many existing identity systems work.
- Another claim might assert that a subject knows a given key – and should be able to demonstrate this fact.
- A set of claims might convey personally identifying information – name, address, date of birth and citizenship, for example.
- A claim might simply propose that a subject is part of a certain group – for example, that she has an age less than 16.
- And a claim might state that a subject has a certain capability – for example to place orders up to a certain limit, or modify a given file.
These examples demonstrate that there is no difference between my approach to claims in the Laws of Identity and that proposed recently by Ben. Further examples abound:
In proffering this definition, we recognize it does not jive with some widely held beliefs – for example that within a given context, identities have to be unique. (page 5)
Or:
In this scenario we actually do not want to employ unique individual identifiers as digital identities. (page 6)
Or:
It makes sense to employ a government issued digital identity when interacting with government services (a single overall identity neither implies nor prevents correlation of identifiers between individual government departments). (Page 9)
Now I know we're all busy. I don't expect people to be familiar with my work. But Ben explicitly cites what he calls my “famous laws” in a footnote, and calls out the “important difference” in our thinking as being that I'm concerned with identifiers, whereas he is concerned with assertions. He's just wrong, as anyone who reads the Laws can see.
The fact is, I like Ben, and I like a lot of his thinking. I hope he reads my version of the laws before citing them again, and that he corrects his rendition of my thinking about identifiers and claims or assertions. This seems doable since his paper is still a work in progress.
