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

All,

Stepping in as Co-Chair here. I wanted to point out a couple documents
exploring this topic by several CCG members that pre-date the paper/link in
the initial thread post. The context may be of interest.

“Not a Sybil!”: Exploring the Path to Non-Dystopian Approaches to Digital
Personhood by Aleeza Howitt, Daniel Burnett, Frederic Meyer, Kai Wagner,
Zih-shiuan (Spin) Yuan, Francesco Micheli
Link -->
https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot9-prague/blob/master/draft-documents/proof_of_personhood.md

AND

This Jan 7, 2020 iteration of that RWOT
Link -->
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16lYoDT_Mr0_c45Fm-PIl0eQ13bl0cPglz7Pc7nWQFOg/edit


Enjoy,
-Heather, Wayne & Kim
CCG Co-Chairs

On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 1:12 PM Adam Stallard <adam.stallard@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 1:03 AM email@yancy.lol <email@yancy.lol> wrote:
>
>> I agree that a one-person-per-vote system is ideal, however it's hard map
>> such a system to cyber space directly without a central authority.
>
>
>
> It's hard, but that's what we're doing. Instead of trusting a central
> authority, users should trust an anti-sybil algorithm they can verify
> themselves.
>
>
> Consider how one-vote-per-cpu can allow a way to directly prove the number
>> of identities (cpus).  For example we know some entity is 10 cpus because
>> they solve x of the last y blocks.  There is no need to trust any
>> authority, only the  solution.
>>
>> I think Git system might be the closest to one-person-per-vote where you
>> can know about how many people contribute to the longest known chain of
>> commits of a git repo (the trunk branch) aka the current consensus.  Of
>> course this doesn't map directly for a number of reasons (people are not
>> simple cpus for one).
>>
>> -Yancy
>>
>> On Wednesday, September 09, 2020 19:09 CEST, Adam Stallard <
>> adam.stallard@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Verifiable credentials can certainly help. At BrightID, we're working on
>> way for a decentralized group of computer nodes that analyze an anonymous
>> social graph and make determinations about uniqueness to collaborate to
>> sign a credential for a user.
>>
>> These credentials also have a notion of "context" to avoid unwanted
>> linkage between a user as they participate in various apps and networks. A
>> user of app A should be able to prove they're using only one account there
>> without linking that account to an account in app B.
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 9, 2020, 3:55 AM Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I think this was the important insight of the paper here.  And I wonder
>>> if it can be solved with verifiable credentials?
>>>
>>> "If blockchains are to become a significant public infrastructure,
>>> particularly in the space of civic engagement, then Proof of Work's
>>> “one-CPU-one-vote” or Proof of Stake's “one-dollar-one-vote” systems will
>>> not suffice: in order to enable democratic governance, protocols that
>>> signal unique human identities to enable "one-person-one-vote" systems must
>>> be created."
>>>
>>> On Wed, 9 Sep 2020 at 12:50, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> 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
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>

-- 
Heather Vescent <http://www.heathervescent.com/>
Co-Chair, Credentials Community Group @W3C
<https://www.w3.org/community/credentials/>
President, The Purple Tornado, Inc <https://thepurpletornado.com/>
Author, The Secret of Spies <https://amzn.to/2GfJpXH> (Available Oct 2020)
Author, The Cyber Attack Survival Manual
<https://www.amazon.com/Cyber-Attack-Survival-Manual-Apocalypse/dp/1681886545/>
(revised,
Dec 2020)
Author, A Comprehensive Guide to Self Sovereign Identity
<https://ssiscoop.com/>

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