Who Watches the Watchmen? Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols
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Re: Who Watches the Watchmen? Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols
#2Conjecture: a Sybil attack can always be performed if bootstrapped by some humans.
Re: Who Watches the Watchmen? Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols
#3Conjecture: a Sybil attack can always be performed if bootstrapped by some humans.
My friends voted on it and we decided that Sybil attacks are impossible. Nothing to worry about, please move along.
Re: Who Watches the Watchmen? Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols
#4Conjecture: a Sybil attack can always be performed if bootstrapped by some humans.
My friends voted on it and we decided that Sybil attacks are impossible. Nothing to worry about, please move along.
But none of my friends know any of your friends, so I ignore their votes. Admittedly that means that any sort of consensus reality breaks down online, but hey, it's 2020 and we are where we are.
Re: Who Watches the Watchmen? Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols
#5Of the systems listed in the paper, the only one I'd really heard of was BrightID, and it still seems like potentially the best. The FAQ on their website is a good introduction[0], but the paper seems rightly cautious:
"To control for Sybil attacks BrightID runs GroupSybilRank, a modification of the SybilRank algorithm, to estimate the anti-Sybil score of the network participants based on affinity between groups. Proposed to be used as the official BrightID anti-sybil algorithm, the effectiveness of this algorithm in the presence of multiple attack vectors, remains to be proved."
Unfortunately, just proving personhood is only the first step in deciding someone's reputation, but it seems like a good basis to build some proper decentralized trust systems from, for example [1].
[0] https://www.brightid.org/faq
[1] https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati...
Re: Who Watches the Watchmen? Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols
#6For those of us not familiar with the term (as was I before a few seconds ago): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
Re: Who Watches the Watchmen? Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols
#7Conjecture: a Sybil attack can always be performed if bootstrapped by some humans.
the key feature of sybil attacks is that they are fake or semi fake. the majority overriding the minority (regardless of correctness), is a feature of democracy, not a bug.
Re: Who Watches the Watchmen? Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols
#8Conjecture: a Sybil attack can always be performed if bootstrapped by some humans.
the key feature of sybil attacks is that they are fake or semi fake. the majority overriding the minority (regardless of correctness), is a feature of democracy, not a bug.
What you've got there is majoritarianism not strictly democracy.
We should hope that a democracy would consider not only whether there are more in favour than against but also other factors.
For example. Suppose there are two rabbits and three foxes and the question is what's for dinner? Majoritarianism suggests that the foxes can vote "Rabbit" and then eat the rabbits, all is fair. But I think we'd want our democracies to consider that there is an outsize cost to this choice compared to the 40% vote for "Fresh fruit and vegetables" from the rabbits. [A fox isn't an obligate carnivore, its digestive system is perfectly capable of obtaining nutrients from a meal of fruit and vegetables, although rabbit is delicious].
Re: Who Watches the Watchmen? Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols
#9This paper is really about solving a fundamental problem in decentralized identity, which is to combine the characteristics of self-sovereignty, privacy and Sbil-resistance, which seems to exclude each other.
I previously proposed formalizing this problem as Decentralized Identity Trilemma (http://maciek.blog/dit).
Re: Who Watches the Watchmen? Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols
#10Of the systems listed in the paper, the only one I'd really heard of was BrightID, and it still seems like potentially the best. The FAQ on their website is a good introduction[0], but the paper seems rightly cautious: "To control for Sybil attacks BrightID runs GroupSybilRank, a modification of the SybilRank algorithm, to estimate the anti-Sybil score of the network participants based on affinity between groups. Pro…
The problem is that the more successful the system becomes (i.e. it's used for more valuable use cases) the more incentive there is to attack it. There needs to be a dynamic analogous to Bitcoin where the resources that go into securing the network grow along with the value of the network.