Slashdot Mirror
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."
i certainly hope that was an attempt at humor
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
We live in an age where anonymity is almost totally gone. We can hope, now, only for privacy. And the best way to do that is by vigorous demand for encryption methods and other tools that prevent a company or entity from asking a thousand and one personal questions just to pad their database.
To the asshole who tagged the article `terroristsdream': terrorism is not an excuse to erode our right to privacy. Fuck off.