Higgins project: anonymous authentication | Hacker News Reader

Higgins project: anonymous authentication

arstechnica.com

5 pointsbootload4 comments

As the Ars Technica article is, uh, rather light on details, here is what appears to be the homepage of the IBM project:

http://www.zurich.ibm.com/security/idemix/

Looks like it's an IBM Research project, which is nice because it means they give you actual technical information rather than burying you in incomprehensible marketing speak.

'... which is nice because it means they give you actual technical information rather than burying you in incomprehensible marketing speak. ...'

Sometimes the message gets lost in the technical detail. Arstechnica usually does a good job of filtering the sig/noise giving you a nice summary at the expense of too much technical detail. But I do agree. If you look at the way most news sites work most of the time acting as second, third and sometimes fourth hand.

So what did you get out of idemix?

Well, I haven't read everything on their site, so I don't understand all the details and I may have misconceptions, but my understanding is this: In the physical world, to prove that you have a driver's license or a valid credit card or that you are over 13 years old, you need to show a credential that also gives away additional information about you. In their system, the government or bank can issue a cryptographic credential to the user which tells the service provider only the information they actually need to know, and does this through a zero-knowledge proof, so that the provider can't link multiple uses of the same credential to the same user.

The "incomprehensible marketing speak" line was aimed at the non-research IBM web pages I've seen, btw, not at Ars Technica :-) ("Delivers a rich, relevant customer and partner experience by extending a common set of business services across every point of interaction" and such.)

'... The "incomprehensible marketing speak" line was aimed at the non-research IBM web pages I've seen, btw, not at Ars Technica :-) ...'

Whoops, sorry. Your summary looks okay. The system allows you to be used to verify your identity (verification) anonymously unlike openid, an 'identity provider'.

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