
Higgins project: anonymous authentication - bootload
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070411-ibms-higgins-project-offers-anonymous-internet-logins.html
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Benja
As the Ars Technica article is, uh, rather light on details, here is what
appears to be the homepage of the IBM project:

<http://www.zurich.ibm.com/security/idemix/>

Looks like it's an IBM Research project, which is nice because it means they
give you actual technical information rather than burying you in
incomprehensible marketing speak.

~~~
bootload
_'... which is nice because it means they give you actual technical
information rather than burying you in incomprehensible marketing speak. ...'_

Sometimes the message _gets lost_ in the technical detail. Arstechnica usually
does a good job of filtering the sig/noise giving you a nice summary at the
expense of too much technical detail. But I do agree. If you look at the way
most _news_ sites work most of the time acting as second, third and sometimes
fourth hand.

So what did you get out of idemix?

~~~
Benja
Well, I haven't read everything on their site, so I don't understand all the
details and I may have misconceptions, but my understanding is this: In the
physical world, to prove that you have a driver's license or a valid credit
card or that you are over 13 years old, you need to show a credential that
also gives away additional information about you. In their system, the
government or bank can issue a cryptographic credential to the user which
tells the service provider only the information they actually need to know,
and does this through a zero-knowledge proof, so that the provider can't link
multiple uses of the same credential to the same user.

The "incomprehensible marketing speak" line was aimed at the non-research IBM
web pages I've seen, btw, not at Ars Technica :-) ("Delivers a rich, relevant
customer and partner experience by extending a common set of business services
across every point of interaction" and such.)

~~~
bootload
_'... The "incomprehensible marketing speak" line was aimed at the non-
research IBM web pages I've seen, btw, not at Ars Technica :-) ...'_

Whoops, sorry. Your summary looks okay. The system allows you to be used to
verify your identity (verification) anonymously unlike openid, an 'identity
provider'.

