Anti-Sybil academy¶
WARNING!
This document is under construction. Upala insights are on the way…
Basics of digital identity¶
Main challenges¶
Sybil attack. How to prevent a malicious actor from creating multiple accounts?
Account recovery. Relying on password is not enough. Managing private keys or mnemonics is too complex. Hardware tokens are rare. We need to build a secure system for the unskilled, the absent-minded and the naive.
Incentives. Until widely adopted one cannot call it an identity system. We need a lot of businesses and a lot of users. But why would anybody participate?
It does matter who you are, where you are and who you friends with. We will often use this as a metaphor to shape our thinking when solving these problems.
Sybil attack protection¶
The sibyl attack problem
Imagine two situations:
1: Alice and Bob are twins. They live in the same flat. Alice is out in the morning and home in the afternoon. Bob is out in the afternoon and home in the morning. They meet different people when they are out but never the same ones. They never invite guests.
2: Isabel is diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. She has two phones. One has an account registered with her real name. And the other is registered with her alter ego — Sibylla. Isabel is out in the morning and home in the afternoon. There she changes her pale pink standard waitress uniform for a stunning evening gown and goes to a luxurious cocktail party. She gracefully grabs the phone registered for Sibylla. Isabel and “Sibylla” meet different people and never invite anybody to “their” home.
Here Isabel is performing a sibyl attack. We need to “punish” Isabel and “reward” Alice and Bob.
Projects and papers¶
Links for digital identity enthusiasts. I use this document as personal archive and read-later list. I thought it isworth publishing. It is good source of quality info on digital identity and related topics.
Identity projects¶
Uniqeness, trust¶
- Upala - reputation that you own, no social graph analysis.
- BrightID - sybils are detected by analyzing, recovery by friends
- IDENA - sybil protection by meaningful story captcha
- TrustLines - decentralized immutable accounting system for netted IOU balances between trusted parties
- Pseudonym Pairs does it in zero degrees of separation.
- Encointer personhood through pseudonim pairs. People meet physically simultaneuosly. Incentives through UBI. Own blockchain.
- Web Of Trust
- Friend to friend
- https://tse.bitnation.co/
- https://duniter.org/en/
- https://www.humanitydao.org/ - voting for a new member
- https://www.objectivemoney.org/ - voting for a new member
- POAP - The Proof of Attendance Protocol. Allows humans to collect badges in the form of non fungible tokens every time they participate in an activity, in person or remotely.
- UBIC - Universal Basic Income Currency. Sybil-resistance is based on modern E-Passports. Users join by scanning E-Passport via NFC.
- Replica by DemocracyEarth - Quadratic voting.
Storage and access¶
Mainly concerned with granting access to parts of identity inforamtion.
- iden3 - zknarks, griff nentions. a claim-based model. exmp. A university claims, that a useres has a degree. No social graph. No sybil protection.
- Evernym - a hyperledger blockchain project
- uPort - ERC-725
- BlockStack todo
- http://selfkey.org
- https://www.velix.id/ - uses stellar consensus protocol.
- https://www.civic.com/
I categorize project below as ICO-boomers (sorry I may be very wrong):
Recovery¶
- keybase
- gnosis safe - wallet
- Argent - wallet
- ZeroPass - recovery based on key splitting. is building a decentralized solution. ZeroPass is building a decentralized password manager.
- You - You are the password. Decentralized password manager. Uses Phone to login.
- https://securekey.com/ - funded by world bank
- https://pillarproject.io/project - “The Wallet is Everything”. Building a wallet with identity strage functionality. No details about recovery except they are planing to use hardware wallets and friends.
- https://rivetz.com/ - recovery. DUAL ROOTS OF TRUST - software wolutions for splitting keys (expl. SIM card + smartphone secure enclave)
- EIP2429 - Secret Multisig Recovery. Social recovery using address book merkle proofs.
Zero Knowledge, privacy¶
- AZTEC protocol- “Being able to prove that you’re part of a group, without revealing who in the group you are”.
- https://enigma.co/ - secure computation protocol, where “secret nodes” perform computations over encrypted data.
- https://status.im/ - secret messaging check it out
Blockchain social networks¶
- Akasha - соц сеть от Михая todo
- Сикорка - Пруф местоположения на блокчейне ethereum. todo
Other¶
- LNTrustChain - Experiment of trust. People passed an ammount of satoshis to those who they trust.
- https://www.takethetorch.online/Torch
- http://fermat.org/downloads/book-of-fermat.pdf - Person-to-person apps
- BAT - if they pay for ads, how can they tell people apart from bots
- namecoin
- @bloomtoken
UBI and decentralized landing¶
- https://puddle.com - Credit powered by people
- Circles - A decentralised Universal Basic Income platform based on personal currencies
- https://www.wetrust.io/
Articles¶
Sybil attack protection in social networks¶
- SybilAttacks in Social Networks - Survey #1
- Sybil Defense Techniques in Online SocialNetworks - Survey #2
- SybilRank- Aiding the Detection of Fake Accounts in Large Scale Social Online Services
- Sybil attack on lowest id clustering algorithm in the mobile ad hoc network
- Visualization assisted detection of sybil attacks in wireless networks
- The Sybil attack in sensor networks: analysis & defenses by J. Newsome, E. Shi, D. Song, A. Perrig
Reputation-based¶
- Reputation systems - open questions on reputation systems among the list of improtant Problems of Ethereum.
- Sybilproof Reputation Mechanisms - “…there is no symmetric sybilproof reputation function. conditions for sybilproofness for nonsymmetric functions. (we can easily break symmetry by comput-ing reputation values with respect to some fixed node inthe graph. This may be useful when we can identify sometrusted user, or when each user computes separately thereputations of other users with respect to themselves.”
- Propagation of Trust and Distrust - todo
- Ostra: Leveraging trust to thwart unwanted communication
Universal basic income and credit networks UBI¶
Game theory¶
- Deception, identity, and security- the game theory of sybil attacks
- Robust incentive techniques for peer-to-peer networks - Uses graphs. Simplifies sybil detection. Flow-based reputation.
- Richardson, R. Agrawal, and P. Domingos. Trustmanagement for the semantic web. Flow-based reputation.
Zero-knowledge¶
- Tutorial: Proving knowledge of a hash preimage - a good practical example by Zokrates team of zkSNARKS for a quick introduction.
- Getting Started with zkSnarks on ZoKrates - great write up by Gnosis team. Step by step guide to implement zero knowledge.
- Building Identity-linked zkSNARKs with ZoKrates - an example how a sender’s identity could be proven using sender’s private key inside snark.
- Zero-Knowledge Proof-of-Identity - Sybil-Resistant, Anonymous Authentication on Permissionless Blockchains and Incentive Compatible, Strictly Dominant Cryptocurrencies. TODO study
Password storage, Decentralized file access control¶
Decentralized unique identity¶
- Pseudonym_Parties
- Verifying Identity as a Social Intersection
- UniqueID Decentralized Proof-of-Unique-Human - survey of decentralized identity systems
Face-recognition¶
Problems of ID in the world¶
400k people in Europe without IDs - https://apatride.eu Aadhar India - Aadhaar is a verifiable 12-digit identification number issued by UIDAI to the resident of India for free of cost.
Bonding Curves todo - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VNkBjjGhcZUV9CyC0ccWYbqeOoVKT2maqX0rK3yXB20/edit - by Simon - Bonding Curves https://yos.io/2018/11/10/bonding-curves/ - Bonding Curves https://medium.com/thoughtchains/on-single-bonding-curves-for-continuous-token-models-a167f5ffef89
Join us:
Support:
- Please introduce Upala to a fund! We are looking for funding!
- Donate Ethereum
- Donate Bitcoin
- Fund Panvala (Upala is made possible with Panvala)
- Fund our Gitcoin grant
- Buy ads (help Upala and charity)
Other (study) https://identity.foundation/ion/ https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/