[HN Gopher] Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish y...
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       Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish your
       decentralized identity
        
       Author : decrypt
       Score  : 76 points
       Date   : 2021-11-06 17:22 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (codeberg.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (codeberg.org)
        
       | karmanyaahm wrote:
       | An example user page is my page here:
       | 
       | https://keyoxide.org/4af679d0aba0ed4b07bf7b6932ca3267c8d187d...
       | 
       | Keyoxide is a really nice, but difficult to set up, tool
        
         | kingcharles wrote:
         | Why do some of your "profiles" have Xs?
        
       | greenail wrote:
       | I really like the general idea of decentralized identity.
       | Personally I'd prefer to keep my identities on different
       | apps/platforms mostly (99%) separate. It seems to me that giving
       | an adversary a map (especially usernames and email identities) of
       | your online presence is a bad idea especially if they get access
       | to one account and get some private details they may be able to
       | use to socially engineer their way into other accounts.
        
         | dane-pgp wrote:
         | I'm not sure what the best implementation of decentralized
         | identity is (although proof-of-personhood systems like BrightID
         | seem interesting[0]), but ideally the different platforms would
         | cryptographically sign statements for you like "This user has a
         | positive reputation on our platform" which you can disclose to
         | other platforms without them being able to learn your username
         | on the original platform.
         | 
         | [0] https://www.brightid.org/
        
         | kingcharles wrote:
         | I'm guessing most people try to obtain the same username on
         | every service, so generally it's not hard to trace people's
         | other identities. And some people, including myself, are happy
         | to have all their identities out there.
        
       | crosser wrote:
       | Would the following be functionally equivalent?:
       | 
       | - on each platform, include your pgp key id in the "bio"/"about"
       | of your profile
       | 
       | - in your pgp key, include your profile URLs on each platform as
       | an identity.
       | 
       | (In DNS, CERT RR exists for this purpose already.)
        
       | 1MachineElf wrote:
       | Sounds like what I hoped would become of Keybase.
        
         | kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
         | What has become of Keybase instead?
        
           | lutoma wrote:
           | I'm not OP, but feel similarly about Keybase.
           | 
           | When it originally launched, it marketed itself as directory
           | where you could link your social accounts using cryptographic
           | proofs, so that anyone who was wondering if "@lutoma" on
           | twitter and "lutoma" on Hacker News are the same person could
           | easily check. I.e. pretty much what Keyoxide now seems to aim
           | to do. Simple enough and reasonably useful.
           | 
           | But then at some point they tacked on some sort of Dropbox-y
           | encrypted file system that also kind of but not really
           | includes web hosting if you set your files to public.
           | 
           | And if you visit their website now all their landing page
           | talks about is their Slack clone with end to end encryption
           | without mentioning any of the other stuff.
           | 
           | And I just checked out their docs and there's a section on
           | wallets for the Stellar crypto currency so apparently they
           | also baked that in recently.
           | 
           | idk it just seems like a company with absolutely zero
           | direction that just builds whatever the product managers find
           | interesting at any given time and I gave up trying to
           | understand what it is they do.
           | 
           | But since they sold to Zoom, it seems to have been
           | financially successful so fair play to them.
        
             | woah wrote:
             | Seems like the problem is that their core service simply
             | did not make any money
        
               | Jtsummers wrote:
               | They never charged. People were willing to pay, but they
               | never offered a for fee service.
        
               | djbusby wrote:
               | I don't want a little money every month, I want a lot of
               | money all at once! -- Russ Hannaman (from Silicon Valley)
        
           | infinitezest wrote:
           | Assume that OP is referring to the fact that they were
           | purchased by Zoom recently.
        
       | gnufx wrote:
       | There's also https://keys.pub/ (from someone ex-Keybase, if I
       | remember correctly). I haven't looked at either closely. Can
       | anyone compare and contrast?
        
       | egberts1 wrote:
       | It is only a matter of time before such a website would offer an
       | NFC-credit card to direct you to your account on their website.
        
       | aborsy wrote:
       | PGP is a battle tested tool, widely available and straightforward
       | to use vis Linux command line. It's also well supported, eg, by
       | Yubikeys etc.
        
       | na85 wrote:
       | It'd be cool to see this without PGP. Signatures via
       | signify/minisign are superior in every way.
        
         | georgyo wrote:
         | > are superior in every way.
         | 
         | Besides the fact that a signify/minisign are a raw key instead
         | of being padded with identity information, in what way are they
         | actually better?
         | 
         | Similarly, minisign makes no claims at identity at all. You get
         | a random string, and the user is responsible for knowing which
         | key is for what user. The minisign public key contains nothing
         | but the key.
         | 
         | To me, that is a horrible user experience.
         | 
         | A PGP public key contains many bits of information besides just
         | the key, and that is how this is even possible.
         | 
         | PGP tools are install nearly everywhere (except windows) by
         | default, while minisign is an extra install.
         | 
         | PGP's web-key-directory is making knowing the right for a user
         | trivial and tamper resistant. IE:
         | https://keyoxide.org/wkd/george%40shamm.as
         | 
         | It's hard for me to see any benefits of minisign really besides
         | key size. Calling it "superior in every way." is straight troll
         | bait.
        
           | robinhoodsghost wrote:
           | Nah troll baiting is saying "PGP tools are installed nearly
           | everywhere (except windows) by default" when windows still
           | has almost 80% market share on PCs. Most of the rest are on
           | macos. If you want something to be useful that relies on
           | network effects then they, and mobile users are who you need
           | to accommodate. Linux on the desktop users are a rounding
           | error.
        
             | djbusby wrote:
             | Is 2% a rounding error?
             | 
             | https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-
             | share/desktop/worldwide
        
         | forgotmypw17 wrote:
         | Excuse me, but does your alternative provide toolchains and
         | user interfaces for every major platform in existence today,
         | including Mac, *nix, iOS, Android, Windows, a library for every
         | major language in existence, and 25 years of attempts to break
         | it?
         | 
         | If not, I don't see how you can claim it is superior in every
         | way, because here are at least two ways in which PGP/GPG are by
         | far superior.
        
           | na85 wrote:
           | I dunno about windows but minisign is on Mac and Linux, yes.
           | 
           | As for 25 years to break it, well, go look at CVEs for GnuPG.
           | There have been many.
        
             | forgotmypw17 wrote:
             | The algorithms still stand 25 years later.
             | 
             | Is it also available for iOS and Android? FreeBSD?
             | 
             | Are there libraries for Perl and PHP?
        
         | selfhoster11 wrote:
         | PGP/GPG has much broader adoption, and is not fundamentally
         | broken as a standard. It's also what people are used to. I
         | don't know what to do with a minisign key.
        
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       (page generated 2021-11-06 23:00 UTC)