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Comment by dreadnip | Hacker News Reader

I quite like the EU approach. It's a decent spec. Most countries already have digital apps to verify identity, like Denmark's MitID (https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/get-started-with-mitid/). These could be expanded to fully EUDI compliant wallets and deliver encrypted proof-of-age without exposing any other identity.

For example a gambling site could require MitID auth, but only request proof-of-age and nothing else. You can see in the app which information is being requested, like with OAuth.

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If there's no information provided beyond proof-of-age, what's stopping my friend's 18 year old brother from lending his ID to every 14 year old at school? IRL that's negated by the liquor store clerk looking at the kid who is obviously underage and seeing that his face doesn't match the borrowed card he just nervously presented.

> what's stopping my friend's 18 year old brother from lending his ID to every 14 year old at school?

MitID is 2fa. You log in with username, then you have to open the app, enter password or scan biometric, then scan the QR code of the screen* and you are logged in.

He would need to be next to you every time you log in. I think that is too high friction to make it feasible on large scale.

* Assuming you open the website on the Desktop, and MitID on phone. If both on phone, skip this step.

> He would need to be next to you every time you log in.

Or you can just text him a screenshot of the QR code. You could probably even automate this.

No, the QR code is changing every couple of seconds.

~Maybe~ you can video call, but again it's adding so much friction. Nothing is 100% secure.

The automated attack setup I'm envisioning is something like: 18 year old buys a cheapo laptop + phone and connects the two over ADB or some purpose built automation app (think appium). 18 year old puts the phone on a tripod pointed at the laptop screen. 14 year olds at school pay $10 a year for use of the service and install a browser extension that forwards the QR codes from whichever service they wanna use to the 18 year old's computer. Changing every couple of seconds is not an issue here, they all live in the same city and have <10ms ping.

The only high friction part of this is that someone needs to write the software for it, but that doesn't seem like all that difficult of a project and open source solutions are likely to appear within weeks of social media requiring it. If there really is no information shared with the other party beyond "yup, user is over the age of maturity" you could even run this as a free public TOR service without fear of ever getting caught.

Mhh, but then the Danish Agency for Digitisation will see that the 18 year old does a lot of age request on all day and night long. And block his account. And then he can't use his own banking, health, postal apps.

High risk, low reward.

If he throttles request to stay under a threshold, if the agency knows about it service they could use it and see which account does age requests at the same time.

Ah, so it does leak your identity through the timing side channel. In other words, your anonymity is only dependent on the govt not coordinating with service providers to de-anonymize users. I assumed the 2fa app just held cryptographic keys and did some 0kp magic to show that the cert belongs to a government-attested adult. Phoning home all the time makes it trivial for the government to abuse people's privacy; they can just compel service providers to provide logs of logins.

Well right now THAT service does not even exist. The SSO exist, the anonymous age verification was an idea from another user here. Instead of sending (face)data to a private 3rd party.

My general point is that you can have anonymity or you can prevent ID spoofing, but the two are mutually exclusive.

If people have to go through OS auth flow each time they open a website, that will drive everyone mad. One of the key motivators for politicians is not making everyone mad, so the polls don't drop.

Also, I reckon most children know the password for their parent's phone or computer, and many more will find out if there is a highly motivational factor for doing so. How many exhausted parents just toss their phone to their child to stop them whining?

I suppose it could be a biometric sign-in with facial recognition or fingerprint, but again, that's a tonne of friction for the whole web.

Most people use biometric for MitID, but yes you can set up pin login. Hopefully not the same as your phone login :D

It's already the single sign on for government websites, banking, healthcare, digital post, insurance, law (sign contracts) etc.

Shit man, you can get divorced through that. I really hope most parents don't give their kids access to it.

That's how the user interface works. What is it doing at the protocol level? What stops someone from building a service that mints anonymous verification codes on a massive scale and distributes them to anyone who asks? Maybe with the user interface being an app kids can download to scan any QR code and pass verification.

I don't know. I would assume the account gets blocked if you do it on a larger scale, so you have to rotate account, which gets expensive fast as it's not easy to steal them?

I don’t mean to be as aggressive as this sounds but the frogs probably liked the increasingly warm water too until it started boiling. How many steps between MitID and a fork that is used to enforce extreme censorship?

Everything is a slippery slope if you tilt & twist it enough...

This particular slope has consistently had people pratfalling over and over again for hundreds of years.

MitID is run by the government. How would anyone fork it? Any service implementing MitID auth can verify through signatures that they're connecting to the official service.

I don't want my kids to have access to gambling websites like Stake, but I also want to keep my digital identity anonymous. The eIDAS is a solution that achieves both of these goals.

If you can choose between the discord shitshow with a face scan, or a digital encrypted proof-of-age in a 2FA app you already use, issues and verified only by the government of your country (who have all your personal details anyway), what would you choose?

Having the government be the issuer and verifier of personal IDs is hardly a "boiling frog" situation anywhere in the world.

> During the 19th century, several experiments were performed to observe the reaction of frogs to slowly heated water. In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but an intact frog attempted to escape the water when it reached 25 °C.

From wikipedia.

Gambling sites already have payment information, which should include real names! (no, you should not be allowed to do non-KYC gambling, that's just money laundering)

But how do you go from real name to age verification?

I think it's more that proof of identity from the union of {payment information, KYC} also includes both of age verification and name, not that name leads to age.

Are the payment providers sending the age to the gamling site?

> union of {payment information, KYC}

As in, if you're not matching the payment info to your customer info, you (which may be the company or the government passing the laws the company is following just fine) did it wrong.

Because, as pjc50 wrote, failing to do that is an obvious exploit for money laundering.

Sorry, I don't get it.

If I'm underage, but already have a payment card, the identity of the card matches my name.

That is why dreadnip suggested the MitID approach.

> If I'm underage, but already have a payment card, the identity of the card matches my name.

And if a gambling site stops there and goes "LGTM", it's not the "union of {payment information, KYC}".

Union, as in combination of both.

KYC, as in "Know Your Customer". Looks like MitID is a thing that would be one way to do KYC? But I've only just heard of it, so belief is weakly held.

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