Re: [Bitcoin-development] secure assigned bitcoin address directory

[Chris D'Costa <chris.dcosta@meek.io>]

The idea was not to register profiles or any human identity, or associate it with any other identity directly. Neither was it to have a massive BlockChain, or use proof of work. In this case proof of work is detrimental to security - you want as many people to know about your keys as quickly as possible. I want to add that this implies a shadow p2p network.

Also it's just a point if view, but I thought it better not to have any specific link to a person's identity, or their Bitcoin "identity" by which I mean no connection to their public addresses. The device keys are not meant to be a permanent identity or to store encrypted data either (think what happens if the device changes hands), so the use case is only to establish secure communications, and to verify signatures whilst still in use by the owner. A new owner would need to establish a new device key - again this is in the details and probably more specific to the project.

Regards

Chris D'Costa




> On 31 Mar 2014, at 13:46, Natanael <natanael.l@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> This sounds like Namecoin. You can already register profiles with it,
> including keypairs. onename.io is a web-based client you can use to
> register on the Namecoin blockchain.
> 
>> On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 1:14 PM, Chris D'Costa <chris.dcosta@meek.io> wrote:
>> Security of transmission of person-to-person pay-to addresses is one of the use cases that we are addressing on our hardware wallet.
>> 
>> I have yet to finish the paper but in a nutshell it uses a decentralised ledger of, what we refer to as, "device keys".
>> 
>> These keys are not related in any way to the Bitcoin keys, (which is why I'm hesitating about discussing it here) neither do they even attempt to identify the human owner if the device. But they do have a specific use case and that is to provide "advanced knowledge" of a publickey that can be used for encrypting a message to an intended recipient, without the requirement for a third-party CA, and more importantly without prior dialogue. We think it is this that would allow you to communicate a pay-to address to someone without seeing them in a secure way.
>> 
>> As I understand it the BlockChain uses "time" bought through proof of work to establish a version of the truth, we are using time in the reverse sense : advanced knowledge of all pubkeys. Indeed all devices could easily check their own record to identify problems on the ledger.
>> 
>> There is of course more to this, but I like to refer to the "distributed ledger of device keys" as the "Web-of-trust re-imagined" although that isn't strictly true.
>> 
>> Ok there you have it. The cat is out of the bag, feel free to give feedback, I have to finish the paper, apologies if it is not a topic for this list.
>> 
>> Regards
>> 
>> Chris D'Costa
>> 
>> 
>>> On 31 Mar 2014, at 12:21, vv01f <vv01f@riseup.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Some users on bitcointalk[0] would like to have their vanity addresses
>>> available for others easily to find and verify the ownership over a kind
>>> of WoT. Right now they sign their own addresses and quote them in the
>>> forums.
>>> As I pointed out there already the centralized storage in the forums is
>>> not secury anyhow and signed messages could be swapped easily with the
>>> next hack of the forums.
>>> 
>>> Is that use case taken care of in any plans already?
>>> 
>>> I thought about abusing pgp keyservers but that would suit for single
>>> vanity addresses only.
>>> It seems webfinger could be part of a solution where servers of a
>>> business can tell and proof you if a specific address is owned by them.
>>> 
>>> [0] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=502538
>>> [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=505095
>>> 
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