Comment by palata

Comment by palata 3 days ago

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But I don't get how is goes for spam or scrapping: if I can pass the test "anonymously", then what prevents me from doing it for illegal purposes?

I get it for age verification: it is difficult for a child to get a token that says they are allowed to access porn because adults around them don't want them to access porn (and even though one could sell tokens online, it effectively makes it harder to access porn as a child).

But how does it prevent someone from using their ID to get tokens for their scrapper? If it's anonymous, then there is no risk in doing it, is there?

986aignan 3 days ago

IIRC, you could use asymmetric cryptography to derive a site-specific pseudonymous token from the service and your government ID without the service knowing what your government ID is or the government provider knowing what service you are using.

The service then links the token to your account and uses ordinary detection measures to see if you're spamming, flooding, phishing, whatever. If you do, the token gets blacklisted and you can no longer sign on to that service.

This isn't foolproof - you could still bribe random people on the street to be men/mules in the middle and do your flooding through them - but it's much harder than just spinning up ten thousand bots on a residential proxy.

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  • palata 3 days ago

    But that does not really answer my question: if a human can prove that they are human anonymously (by getting an anonymous token), what prevents them from passing that token to an AI?

    The whole point is to prevent a robot from accessing the API. If you want to detect the robot based on its activity, you don't need to bother humans with the token in the first place: just monitor the activity.

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    • xlbuttplug2 3 days ago

      It does not prevent a bot from using your ID. But a) the repercussions for getting caught are much more tangible when you can't hide behind anonymity - you risk getting blanket banned from the internet and b) the scale is significantly reduced - how many people are willing to rent/sell their IDs, i.e., their right to access the internet?

      Edit: ok I see the argument that the feedback mechanism could be difficult when all the website can report is "hey, you don't know me but this dude from request xyz you just authenticated fucked all my shit up". But at the end of the day, privacy preservation is an implementation detail I don't see governments guaranteeing.

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      • palata 3 days ago

        > But at the end of the day, privacy preservation is an implementation detail I don't see governments guaranteeing.

        Sure, I totally see how you can prevent unwanted activity by identifying the users. My question was about the privacy-preserving way. I just don't see how that would be possible.

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terribleperson 3 days ago

One option I can think of is that the attesting authority might block you if you're behaving badly.

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  • account42 3 days ago

    That doesn't work without the attesting authority knowing what you are doing, which would make this scheme no longer anonymous.

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    • A1kmm 3 days ago

      It does work as long as the attesting authority doesn't allow issuing a new identity (before it expires) if the old one is lost.

      You (Y) generate a keypair and send your public key to the the attesting authority A, and keep your private key. You get a certificate.

      You visit site b.com, and it asks for your identity, so you hash b.com|yourprivatekey. You submit the hash to b.com, along with a ZKP that you possess a private key that makes the hash work out, and that the private key corresponds to the public key in the certificate, and that the certificate has a valid signature from A.

      If you break the rules of b.com, b.com bans your hash. Also, they set a hard rate limit on how many requests per hash are allowed. You could technically sell your hash and proof, but a scraper would need to buy up lots of them to do scraping.

      Now the downside is that if you go to A and say your private key was compromised, or you lost control of it - the answer has to be tough luck. In reality, the certificates would expire after a while, so you could get a new hash every 6 months or something (and circumvent the bans), and if you lost the key, you'd need to wait out the expiry. The alternative is a scheme where you and A share a secret key - but then they can calculate your hash and conspire with b.com to unmask you.

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      • palata 3 days ago

        Isn't the whole point of a privacy-preserving scheme be that you can ask many "certificates" to the attesting authority and it won't care (because you may need as many as the number of websites you visit), and the website b.com won't be able to link you to them, and therefore if it bans certificate C1, you can just start using certificate C2?

        And then of course, if you need millions of certificates because b.com keeps banning you, it means that they ban you based on your activity, not based on your lack of certificate. And in that case, it feels like the certificate is useless in the first place: b.com has to monitor and ban you already.

        Or am I missing something?

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