Pseudonyms: The Natural State of Online Identity: Via Freedom to Tinker.

I've been writing recently about the problems that arise when you try to use cryptography to verify who is at the other end of a network connection. The cryptographic math works, but that doesn't mean you get the identity part right.

You might think, from this discussion, that crypto by itself does nothing -- that cryptographic security can only be bootstrapped from some kind of real-world identity verification. That's the way it works for website certificates, where a certificate authority has to check your bona fides before it will issue you a certificate.

But this intuition turns out to be wrong. There is one thing that crypto can do perfectly, without any real-world support: providing pseudonyms. Indeed, crypto is so good at supporting pseudonyms that we can practically say that pseudonyms are the natural state of identity online.

To explain why this is true, I need to offer a gentle introduction to a basic crypto operation: digital signatures. Suppose John Doe ("JD") wants to use digital signatures. First, JD needs to create a private cryptographic key, which he does by generating some random numbers and combining them according to a special geeky recipe. The result is a unique private key that only JD knows. Next, JD uses a certain procedure to determine the public key that corresponds to his private key. He announces the public key to everyone. The math guarantees that (1) JD's public key is unique and corresponds to JD's private key, and (2) a person who knows JD's public key can't figure out JD's private key.

Now JD can make digital signatures. If JD wants to "sign" a certain message M, he combines M with JD's private key in a special way, and the result is JD's "signature on M". Now anybody can verify the signature, using JD's public key. Only JD can make the signature, because only JD knows JD's private key; but anybody can verify the signature.

At no point in this process does JD tell anybody who he is -- I called him "John Doe" for a reason. Indeed, JD's public key is a perfect pseudonym: it conveys nothing about JD's actual identity, yet it has a distinct "owner" whose presence can be verified. ("You're really the person who created this public key? Then you should be able to make a signature on the message 'squeamish ossifrage' for me....")

Using this method, anybody can make up a fresh pseudonym whenever they want. If you can generate random numbers and do some math (or have your computer do those things for you), then you can make a fresh pseudonym. You can make as many as you want, without needing to coordinate with anybody. This is all easy to do.

These methods, pseudonyms and signatures, are used even in cases where we want to verify somebody's real-world identity. When you connect to (say) https://mail.google.com, Google's web server gives you its public key -- a pseudonym -- along with a digital certificate that attests that that public key -- that pseudonym -- belongs to Google Inc. Binding public keys -- pseudonyms -- to real-world identities is tedious and messy, but of course this is often necessary in practice.

Online, identities are hard to manage. Pseudonyms are easy.

Read Original Article:(Via Freedom to Tinker.)