POSY Quantum

I saw a fascinating presentation by Ursula Schilling on Infineon on “Securing the Quantum Computer World” in which said was talking about the need to develop cryptography that will be resistant to attacks from quantum computers. It’s a live topic, because if the figures she presented are approximately correct and there will be quantum computers capable of making practical attacks on RSA/ECC with 15-20 years, that means that information currently being secure using asymmetric cryptography (eg, Bitcoin) is essentially being put into the public domain!

Data, oil, pipes

I was amazed to hear at Vendorcom that 30% of population’s income doesn’t get reconciled at HMRC and DWP for reasons such as they only handle RTI from BACS and lots of people use faster payments.

Now I understand! Having recently had occasion to send money to HMRC, I was very surprised to receive a threatening letter from them a month or so later. I can’t remember exactly what it said, but it was something along the lines of “we’ve giving up on chasing Google and Richard Branson, so if you don’t send us tenner the boys are coming round to sort you out”. Shocked, I logged on to my HMRC business account to see that it said that a) I owed them the tenner and b) I’d sent them a tenner that was sitting there “unallocated”. I phoned up and the nice woman up North somewhere said that she would “allocate” the tenner to the money I owed them and it was all good. Afterwards, I did wonder why they thought I’d sent them a tenner (ie, was it for no reason, as they seem to have assumed, or was it in payment for the tenner I owed them).

Will you let a stranger look deep into your bank account?

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People may baulk at sharing access to personal data yet millions are happily using online banking and enjoying the functionality of their bank’s online app. Millions more are content to share all kinds of personal data with Google and Facebook, which already offers debit card-linked payments in the UK via its Messenger app.

From Will you let a stranger look deep into your bank account?

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Cranking it up

Felix Martin, writing in the Daily Telegraph (5th December 2017) says that “We will end by thanking the monetary cranks for inducing some policy sanity – and making our national financial systems fit for purpose once again”, meaning (if I understand him correctly) that while bitcoin may not in the long run prove to be a viable alternative to the existing fiat currency infrastructure, it will stimulate the development of things that are and thus make money more suited to the new economy.

POST Post-modern identity cards

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Why Hong Kong has Mao to thank for ID cards

From Design of new Hong Kong smart identity card revealed | South China Morning Post

Well, we can’t testify to any input from Mao, but we certainly can testify to the great job that Consult Hyperion did helping to design this, the world’s first modern (ie, smart) national identity card, all those years ago!

Which set me thinking. Half a century ago, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan who predicted that seismic social shift that the coming online environment would cause in human relationships said of it that “In the new electric world, where everybody is involved with everybody, where everybody is involved in complex processes, the old identity cards, the old means of finding out who am I, will not work”.

 

Indeed.

So what will work?

McLuhan had this notion of identity as smeared across entities, depending on the relationships and interactions between identities (what Ian Grigg calls “edge” identity). IN t

So what will work? I (and others) have long argued that shifting to an infrastructure where transactions are between virtual identities and enabled by credentials is the way forward.

In Phil Windley’s “Self-sovereign Identity and the legitimacy of Permissions Ledgers” he says, if I interpret him correctly, that a claim is the process of providing a credential and authenticating its use in order to obtain authorisation. That seems like a reasonable working definition, so let’s move forward with that. What McLuhan 

Who might launch the world’s first post-modern (ie, digital) national identity card in the future? To answer this, we first have to think what the defining characteristics of a post-modern national identity might be. Now, as I am sure that you all know, the essence of post-modernism is relativism, so this is that natural place to begin: with symmetry. In a post-modern identity scheme, no identity is privileged. All identities can be validated by all other identities: the identity card of the policeman and the identity card of the citizen are the same and each is capable of checking the credentials of the other in order to ensure that the holder is authorised to perform whatever action they are attempting. So when the policeman says to the citizen “papers please!”, the citizen’s identity card can check that the policeman’s card is valid and that they are entitled to ask for the identification.

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