Re: [GNU/consensus] [SocialSwarm-D] Zooko's Triangle

[carlo von lynX]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 12:40:24AM -0700, elijah wrote:
> We still live under Zooko's triangle. Identity <> key mapping is only
> easy if you exclusively care about globally unique and decentralized,
> but it is very hard if you care also about human friendly.

hi there eli.. well if saying 7yuogiqxgrak36kk is all it takes to
achieve Identity <> key mapping and as hard as human unfriendly gets,
I am positive people out there are going to deal with human unfriendly
for the sake of a truly reliable communications infrastructure.

> You can get all three, if you cheat. Namecoin is an example of cheating
> in a peer to peer way (the cheat is that the global append-only log is
> essentially an authority, derived from consensus of miners). DANE
> achieves all three by relying on the authority of the root DNS zone.
> Nicknym, the protocol we are working on (https://leap.se/en/nicknym)
> also achieves all three by relying on DNS, although in an entirely
> different way.

So in my case the cheat is in selecting a slice of the hash?

> We can, and must, do much better than a secure identity system that is
> unfriendly to humans. It is the 21st century, after all.

The other two goals are a lot more important, so all we want to do
is mitigate this aspect. I see 3 fabulous ways to do it:

- socialist millionaire's shared secret while having a beer together
- public key in a QR code on a business card (printed paper is harder to mitm)
- a slice of the hash confirmed by voice on the phone

Tor is leading the way. Simply by spelling out 7yuogiqxgrak36kk to you
we have a cryptographic guarantee that your tor node will connect to mine
and only to mine. NSA can do a lot, but I doubt they can MITM all mails
and twitters on earth to intercept my hash and replace it with another,
but just in case they'd dare to do so for you because you are their target,
well then you can have a surveilled phone conversation with me and I can
*still* make sure you have my correct public key - no matter how many
people are listening into that conversation.

Many of the MITM problems arise from the abstraction of identity and her
public key. By actually using the key in addressing we solve the problems.
There is no need to maintain abstraction layers that reduce the
security of its users.

So I'd say Zooko is a problem solved.
Back to work, we've got to save the world.

> And yes, I proudly belong to the church of identity in the form of the
> URI commonly referred to as an email address. Not only is address@hidden
> fantastically usable, it is also universally understood by every
> internet user on earth. There are other addressing schemes that are user
> friendly-ish, like twitter @user, or namecoin (although namecoin
> obviously has other problems), but address@hidden is here to stay.

Neither Skype nor Facebook think in terms of address@hidden Actually @domain
is totally distant from average humanity - it's abnormal to think of yourself
in terms of affiliation. No surprise the #1 domain in the world is gmail.com.
People would deal with it, if it worked, but it doesn't. Now it's time to
provide the key instead of the domain. You're living in the past, Eli.  :)