Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish your decentralized identity

When it originally launched, it marketed itself as directory where you could link your social accounts using cryptographic proofs, so that anyone who was wondering if "@lutoma" on twitter and "lutoma" on Hacker News are the same person could easily check. I.e. pretty much what Keyoxide now seems to aim to do. Simple enough and reasonably useful.

But then at some point they tacked on some sort of Dropbox-y encrypted file system that also kind of but not really includes web hosting if you set your files to public.

And if you visit their website now all their landing page talks about is their Slack clone with end to end encryption without mentioning any of the other stuff.

And I just checked out their docs and there's a section on wallets for the Stellar crypto currency so apparently they also baked that in recently.

idk it just seems like a company with absolutely zero direction that just builds whatever the product managers find interesting at any given time and I gave up trying to understand what it is they do.

But since they sold to Zoom, it seems to have been financially successful so fair play to them.

Re: Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish your decentralized identity

#8

Post by greenail » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 8:34 PM UTC

I really like the general idea of decentralized identity. Personally I'd prefer to keep my identities on different apps/platforms mostly (99%) separate. It seems to me that giving an adversary a map (especially usernames and email identities) of your online presence is a bad idea especially if they get access to one account and get some private details they may be able to use to socially engineer their way into other accounts.

Re: Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish your decentralized identity

#9

Post by georgyo » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 8:39 PM UTC

na85 wrote: post #6

It'd be cool to see this without PGP. Signatures via signify/minisign are superior in every way.

> are superior in every way.

Besides the fact that a signify/minisign are a raw key instead of being padded with identity information, in what way are they actually better?

Similarly, minisign makes no claims at identity at all. You get a random string, and the user is responsible for knowing which key is for what user. The minisign public key contains nothing but the key.

To me, that is a horrible user experience.

A PGP public key contains many bits of information besides just the key, and that is how this is even possible.

PGP tools are install nearly everywhere (except windows) by default, while minisign is an extra install.

PGP's web-key-directory is making knowing the right for a user trivial and tamper resistant. IE: https://keyoxide.org/wkd/george%40shamm.as

It's hard for me to see any benefits of minisign really besides key size. Calling it "superior in every way." is straight troll bait.

Re: Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish your decentralized identity

#10

Post by woah » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 9:00 PM UTC

lutoma wrote: post #7

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What has become of Keybase instead?

I'm not OP, but feel similarly about Keybase. When it originally launched, it marketed itself as directory where you could link your social accounts using cryptographic proofs, so that anyone who was wondering if "@lutoma" on twitter and "lutoma" on Hacker News are the same person could easily check. I.e. pretty much what Keyoxide now seems to aim to do. Simple enough and reasonably useful. But then at some point the…

Seems like the problem is that their core service simply did not make any money