Re: Who Watches the Watchmen? A Review of Subjective Approaches for Sybil-resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols

PDF is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.05300.pdf

Keywords: decentralized identity, Sybil-protection, crypto-governance

Abstract.

Most self-sovereign identity systems consist of strictly objective claims,
cryptographically signed by trusted third party attestors. Lacking
protocols in place to account for subjectivity, these systems do not form
new sources of legitimacy that can address the central question concerning
identity authentication: "Who verifies the verifier?". Instead, the
legitimacy of claims is derived from traditional centralized institutions
such as national ID issuers and KYC providers. Thisarchitecture has been
employed, in part, to safeguard protocols from a vulnerability previously
thought to be impossible to address in peer-to-peer systems: the Sybil
attack, which refers to the abuse of an online system by creating many
illegitimate virtual personas. Inspired by the progress in cryptocurrencies
and blockchain technology, there has recently been a surge in networked
protocols that make use of subjective inputs such as voting, vouching,and
interpreting, to arrive at a decentralized and sybil-resistant consensus
for identity. In this review, we will outline the approaches of these new
and natively digital sources of authentication - their attributes,
methodologies strengths, and weaknesses - and sketch out possible
directions for future developments.

On Wed, 9 Sep 2020 at 03:21, Wayne Chang <wyc@fastmail.fm> wrote:

> link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.05300
>
> discussion from strangers on the internet:
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24411076
>
>