Protecting Online Identity Through Cryptography

A new startup, Credentica, hopes to offer the ability for you to perform secure transactions using the smallest amount of personal information possible. Their goal is to both protect privacy and enhance security, which they hope will be a mutually inclusive process. "The technique employs secure multi-party computation, a branch of cryptography that can calculate meaningful answers about secret information by knowing only some non-revealing clues about that secret. The underlying theory was demonstrated in 1982 by Andrew Yao in the so-called Millionaire's Problem [...] U-Prove employs an ID token, a special kind of digital certificate that allows for minimal selective disclosure. The tokens can store all kinds of information, but users can disclose only the minimum amount of data required in any given transaction. They leave no unwanted data trails and permit both anonymity and pseudonymity."

Comments

Re:Why do we need spy tools?

[ShieldW0lf]

No, it wasn't. I don't want privacy and anonymity. I don't trust people, so I won't support technology that allows them to operate from the shadows with impunity. As far as I'm concerned, if you use it, you're guilty.

Re:Why do we need spy tools?

[ShieldW0lf]

We live in an age where anonymity is almost totally gone. We can hope, now, only for privacy.

I don't hope for that. I hope for pervasive information, where I am always informed, where I never have a smiling snake oil salesman with no integrity moving from victim to victim, where I never have to deal with the hypocrisies of people because they're not practical to maintain anymore. I'd quite happily go to war with an assault rifle in my hands and kill people to prevent something like what you are describing.