“IDENTITY BASED” NETWORKING
We seldom consider how important identity is in real life. Appearance, voice, dress and mannerisms testify to a friend’s identity; diplomas, professional licenses and other credentials all attach to and
support that single, permanent, lifetime identity. It is that confidence in the security of real world identity which allows us to form communities, develop trust, and engage in commerce.
Currently, on our existing internet, identity is not fixed. On the present version of the internet, anyone can pretend to be anyone; email can appear to be from anywhere; websites are trivially spoofed. The internet has become a realm of shape shifters, and shape shifters, like Navaho Skinwalkers, populate the nightmares of every human culture.
The early internet was very different. Similar to a small town, with tens of thousands of users, security, like the hook and eye latch on a screen door, served more to indicate a boundary than a barrier to actually keep people out.
The 2019 internet is a networked megalopolis of 3.5 billion users with a topology that provides ill-disposed individuals the means to connect, incentive to collaborate and poorly defended access to the critical, insecurable infrastructure of our civilization. Defensive measure are failing, losses to crime are insupportable.
With an additional ~ 5 billion new users coming online over the next decade, if the internet is to be of continued service, identity-based secure networking is critical.
By making network access conditional on authentication of identity, we secure a virtual perimeter, and, to the extent we are successful in doing this we extend global protection to the entire network
infrastructure. It is possible now using existing technology to establish the identity of every user on a network and do so to a level of confidence approximating that of appearance-based identification of an individual known to us in real life.
A network must offer assured elective anonymity to every user by default. Users may split credentials, show true things about them selves selectively, pay anonymously etc
We need the information system of the future to make safe use of VR and MR technologies - to avoid being mind controlled and irreversibly enslaved.