Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who owns your ATProto identity?

kevinak.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 159 posts

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#91

Post by arjie »

Aurornis wrote: post #53
jacobgold wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your DNS provider can obtain a TLS certificate for your domain and cryptographically impersonate https://yourdomain.tld It's not exactly the same thing but it's close.

Still not the same thing as in the article. Server side TLS certificates are widely understood to be tied to the current owner of the domain. In a social protocol or context, I would expect a private key to be in the private control of the individual, such as when someone uses their private key to sign an email or git commit. The purpose of signing your emails or commits is to provide a good indicator that it actuall…

If you use your private key to sign your commit, I don’t see how your PDS can impersonate it. There are different layers here. Your commit is still signed by you and non-impersonatable by the PDS operator. But the ATProto layer signing is under control of the PDS. So in that case you’d see either unsigned or differently signed git commits being reported at the ATProto layer as by you.

That seems entirely normal. The PDS handles ATProto actions but it cannot modify the git signature (obviously!). It’s no different than the fact that GitHub can post that you’ve committed a “verified” badge commit by adding a new signing key to your account and signing new commits with it.

The storage entity can always claim power over this by reporting a new key and signatures with that key. Seems entirely normal.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#92

Post by ftfish »

bikelang wrote: post #24
adithyassekhar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the definition of success here? Instagram like user counts?

Arguing that success is purely about the ultra high numbers seems to miss the forest for the trees. Is HN a failure because it did not reach the level of DAU as Reddit? The quality of discussion and community here is certainly substantially higher. I feel the same about Mastodon and Bsky vs Twitter. I’ll take community I actually want to engage with over sheer numbers any day.

Bluesky has about 2-3 year runway, so, we'll see.

Source: Bluesky COO https://conference.publicspaces.net/en/session/growth-and-su... (somewhere towards the end in the Q&A section).

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#93

Post by ftfish »

jacobgold wrote: post #87
ftfish wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never said that, though, plus provided sources. Just adding context for what the total number of users means.

You still seem to be implying the number of real registered users on Bluesky isn't ~50M, which it is. The PLC identity spam you referenced is not being counted in this number.

If that's the case, then I stand corrected, but a source for that claim would be helpful.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#94

Post by tarpitt »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #5
scyclow wrote: post #4

This is where non-financial use of blockchain could really shine, IMO. Self-sovereign identity management with a smart contract-based process for recovering ids if keys get lost or hacked. Blockchains are pretty out of favor these days, but I really don't see a better solution for decentralized identity management.

What is the incentive for an individual to participate in a non-financial blockchain? Bitcoin-style blockchains “work” because everyone gets the possibility of a little reward for all the hassle and non-negligible CPU time of being a node.

Good question, this made me think.

You get a reward for being a mining node, not just any node. Even then, do miners have much incentive to share blocks, other than the ones they mine?

I think the incentive is mutual for most nodes (aside from the mining aspect). People will set up a node to accept transactions in an automated manner, or to have higher confidence in the state of their accounts.

It's like being on the floor of the stock market. People participating want to be where all the information is (for their own benefit), and there is incentive to bring others in and share information (because it increases the amount of information you have).

I suppose you could be a "selfish" node. The bitcoin-equivalent of someone who leeches and never seeds. But the advantage is low relative to the amount of money moving around. Most people don't care about the bandwidth of running a bitcoin node, they care about latency. Unlike bittorrent, there isn't a de-facto finished version of the file being synced: it's a constantly-updating list that everyone wants to have the latest version of. I can't find the words, but this seems to be the fundamental difference.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#95

Post by tengada1 »

Wait what?! For a protocol that incorporates the DID spec this is disappointing to discover. Unless I'm mistaken the DID spec allows provable hierarchical relationships between DID identities – why can't a child DID be created from our master signing identity that has the authority to CRUD on our behalf but still be provably distinct from our root identity?

Not even sure why the PDS would require our signing key that just seems very sloppy to me. As you can tell I know very little about atProto, and I did participate in the development of the DID standard and I am dismayed to see such an inelegant solution in such a promising protocol.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#96

Post by jacobgold »

ftfish wrote: post #93
jacobgold wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still seem to be implying the number of real registered users on Bluesky isn't ~50M, which it is. The PLC identity spam you referenced is not being counted in this number.

If that's the case, then I stand corrected, but a source for that claim would be helpful.

I was rounding up, the actual number is ~45 million: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats (these stats are based on real activity, not PLC identities)

At current rate it will 50M in 6 months.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#97

Post by verdverm »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #3
verdverm wrote: post #2

Probably doesn't matter for the "40M+ users", most of them have churned at this point and growth is negative. This is good critique for the next iteration of open social protocols, but fundamentally atproto did not fail because of technical reasons. The next iteration should make privacy the default and core to protocol, and be very mindful of how the leadership / social dynamics played out.

Based on all the traffic and development activity I'm not sure on what basis one would say "failed"

They had a vision and goal to change social media, to get people away from Big Social. They haven't failed in the technical sense of closing, there are less than 1.5M daily (the stats trackers are starting to shut down), but they will also never fulfill on the promises. In the startup world, this is called a zombie company.

One way they failed hard is that they talked about how they were against the investors and VC incentives, then they took $100M from Bain Capital (PE) just after peak user count, but didn't tell us for almost a year. They could have put up a simple $5/month to support the cause, but they took investor money instead. This is why I left.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#98

Post by tengada1 »

tengada1 wrote: post #95

Wait what?! For a protocol that incorporates the DID spec this is disappointing to discover. Unless I'm mistaken the DID spec allows provable hierarchical relationships between DID identities – why can't a child DID be created from our master signing identity that has the authority to CRUD on our behalf but still be provably distinct from our root identity? Not even sure why the PDS would require our signing key that…

Oops upon closer reading of the article and the comments here i see that the atproto standard does apparently allow for the above, at least to some degree. If there is indeed hierarchical support for the DIDs then you should be able to disavow any child identity from a master identity and leave no public uncertainty (ie the true owner of the key hereby disavows the following sub keys)

So if the worst case scenario presented in this article took place where a PDS was falsifying information and pretending to be you, you could presumably somehow revoke the child key that you provided to the PDS. I'll have to look more closely at this

You could even publish a signed selective retraction (delete the fake posts or mark them as fake) with proof that you control the key 1 level above the key that posted them

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#99

Post by jeroenhd »

Muromec wrote: post #40

So does a CA issuing my certificate, but there is some oversight in what they do.

That's different. While your CA can hand out new certificates, it doesn't know your keys (unless you messed up when uploading your CSRs).

CAs have to prove they're not faking certs through the certificate transparency logs, there's no such limitation on Bluesky.

A more apt comparison is a shared host that does certificate management for you. Those are also often considered less secure, of course.

Re: Who owns your ATProto identity?

#100

Post by edoceo »

jacobgold wrote: post #59
Aurornis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still not the same thing as in the article. Server side TLS certificates are widely understood to be tied to the current owner of the domain. In a social protocol or context, I would expect a private key to be in the private control of the individual, such as when someone uses their private key to sign an email or git commit. The purpose of signing your emails or commits is to provide a good indicator that it actuall…

This is why your DNS hosting provider, despite not being the "current owner of the domain", being able to impersonate your site (terminate a cryptographically secure TLS session) with your customers is a similar problem. I do agree they're not the same but the trust and risk are very similar.

DNS providers and registrars seem to have a longer trust established, that reduces the risk.

They are similar in that: jerks can be jerks. But one of the jerks I've trusted for 30 years and I hardly know the the other jerk.

Post reply on HN