Re: Phil Windley, Biometrics, and Digital Identities

On Mon, Feb 7, 2022 at 10:03 PM Christopher Allen <
ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com> wrote:

> Proof-of-personhood does not require biometrics.
>
> https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2020.590171/full
>
> There is a group of about 20 individuals and half-a-dozen companies that
> have been meeting regularly to try to collaborate on approaches, or even
> merge some efforts. We had a presentation this morning on
> coercion-resistance for voting registration & possibly verifiable claims.
>
> I’m not suggesting that nothing requires biometrics, but far less than you
> think.
>

That presentation on “coercion-resistance for voting registration” is now a
published paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.06692

TRIP: Trustless Coercion-Resistant In-Person Voter Registration

ABSTRACT: Most existing remote electronic voting systems are vulnerable to
voter coercion and vote buying. While coercion-resistant voting systems
address this challenge, current schemes assume that the voter has access to
an untappable, incorruptible device during voter registration. We present
TRIP, an in-person voter registration scheme enabling voters to create
verifiable and indistinguishable real and fake credentials using an
untrusted kiosk inside a privacy booth at a supervised location, e.g., the
registrar's office. TRIP ensures the integrity of the voter's real
credential while enabling the creation of fake credentials using
interactive zero-knowledge proofs between the voter as the verifier and the
kiosk as the prover, unbeknownst to the average voter. TRIP ensures that
even voters who are under extreme coercion, and cannot leave the booth with
a real credential, can delegate their vote to a political party, with the
caveat that they must then trust the kiosk. TRIP optimizes the tallying
process by limiting the number of credentials a voter can receive and
capping the number of votes that a credential can cast per election. We
conduct a preliminary usability study among 41 participants at a university
and found that 42.5% of participants rated TRIP a B or higher in usability,
a promising result for a voter registration scheme that substantially
reduces trust in the registrar.

— Christopher Allen