Abstract
Observing its lack, we introduce the notion of a genuine personal identifier—a globally unique and singular identifier of a person—and present a foundation for a decentralized, grassroots, bottom-up process by which every human being may create, own, and protect the privacy of a genuine personal identifier. Our solution is based on a web-of-trust and is designed for a distributed realization; we apply graph-theoretic notions to show that digital communities can grow indefinitely while ensuring bounded sybil penetration.
An extended version of this paper that includes proofs and further elaboration appears in [16].
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Notes
- 1.
As the public key may be quite long, one may also associate oneself with a shorter “nickname”, a hash of the public key, e.g. a 128-bit hash (as a UUID) or a 256-bit hash (as common in the crypto world).
- 2.
Birth and death of agents will be addressed in future work.
- 3.
We consider undirected graphs, as we require surety to be symmetric. Indeed, one may consider directed sureties.
- 4.
We allow surety pledges to be made before the corresponding personal identifier declarations, as we do not see a reason to enforce order.
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Acknowledgements
Ehud Shapiro is the Incumbent of The Harry Weinrebe Professorial Chair of Computer Science and Biology. We thank the generous support of the Braginsky Center for the Interface between Science and the Humanities. Nimrod Talmon was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF; Grant No. 630/19).
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Shahaf, G., Shapiro, E., Talmon, N. (2020). Genuine Personal Identifiers and Mutual Sureties for Sybil-Resilient Community Growth. In: Aref, S., et al. Social Informatics. SocInfo 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12467. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60975-7_24
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