It’s a chicken and egg problem.
How do you map a public key to a person?
You will have to have an Equifax like service that will do the mapping.
But then how do you prove to them that you are who you say you are in order to map you to your public key?
Back to, SSN, driving license and what not.
Edit: I don't think having a governmental service dealing with thousands of people every day(lost keys etc..) is something that is going to happen in the US.
The USPS is nowhere near equipped to handle this. And there's no way I'd trust them to be competent enough to handle the task with the level of security that it would entail.
> They already provide a physical-to-identity "mapping" service for the vast majority of Americans.
They really don't. Even if we ignore the fact that one's identity is completely separate from the question of where they reside, the USPS has no way to verify residence. They don't really even a way to verify mailing addresses, which is at least a more well-defined problem than residence.
Why? Obviously it would be a big undertaking, but the post office already issues US Passports. I'm not sure what you mean by "verifying mailing addresses" because the USPS does provide a way to do verify the correctness and deliverability of an address [1].
The point is that the USPS would be in a good position to become the government body that implements a national identity service.
The State Department issues US Passports, the Post Office merely accepts your applications on their behalf.
> I'm not sure what you mean by "verifying mailing addresses" because the USPS does provide a way to do verify the correctness and deliverability of an address [1].
It's only vaguely tied to identity. I have my physical address, but because I live in an RV park and move often, I don't actually receive mail there. In about half of the locations I've stayed, you _can't_ receive mail there.
I use a private mailbox along with a mail forwarding service in order to receive postal mail.
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Management_System
Is used to solve the problem of sorting and routing mail, which is really what the Post Office spends most of their effort on. Every postal address in the US can be uniquely identified by an 11 digit code: your ZIP+4 and the last two digits of your house number, but it completely ignores multi-tenancy and has no provisions for linking to identity.
Is that more market ideology ("public services are by necessity so dumb") speaking, or is there something specific with the US postal service?
The US Post Postal Service is most certainly not in a unique position to "pivot" to being an identity and "trust" provider."
It's actually quite unbelievable to think that a bloated organization with 500K employees[1] that relies on manual and mechanical processes can "pivot" to become a tech organization providing digital identity management.
The USPS "pivoted" to delivering junk mail for direct marketers years ago. Given that there largest customer is direct marketing, that alone makes them rather unfit to be an "identify provider."
The USPS government mandate is delivering mail and despite having a government sponsored monopoly to deliver mail to mailboxes it still loses money hand over fist[2].
[1] https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/employees-s...
[2] https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/postal-service...
The public keys can be stolen all day long and they're the only part of the equation that needs to be stored anywhere long term. The private keys are just that; truly private, and ideally extremely difficult to steal.
Yes, there will need to be a public service to manage the public keys, and yes this will be able to be compromised in some dangerous ways, but not quite so dangerous as "Whoops, everyone's SSNs are lost, now any attacker can impersonate them because that's all they needed."
This is even before we talk about how to handle the huge number of people who will lose or delete them.
Tech can't solve this prpblem. Any system that requires a secret won't be.
The "only" other problem that will remain is that you will need a secure supply-chain, otherwise this will happen:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/id-card-security-spain-is-facin...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gemalto-cybercrime/hack-g...
If you do something like this you actually need to be serious about it and establish a rigorous vetting/auditing process -- not just hand the contract to whoever donated the most to your election campaign.
Maybe set-up a 3-year long NIST competition or something, like they do when choosing new crypto standards, and establish the winner this way.
The other side of the equation, allowing services to interface with these cards securely, is already being solved by the FIDO 2.0 spec.
Standards like FIDO and others allow for browsers and websites to utilize these cryptographic functions of smart cards in ways to handle website authentication. The technology exists for smartcards to handle authentication, it is simply a matter of us moving to this technology.
USB smart card readers are fairly cheap. Many business-focused laptops have been available with smart card reader options for many years.
Most modern phones have secure elements that can generate and store a private key that cannot be extracted through software. Also, it is easy to set up things such that a physical confirmation is required to sign something (this is eg. what some U2F keys or touch ID do).
Of course, you still need a procedure to map public keys to identities and people need to secure their phones in order to prevent someone stealing the phone to make signatures.
But using the secure element of a phone for various forms of authentication is orders of magnitude safer than relying on a credit card or social security number.
In Slovenia where I'm from you have to go to a government location, same place that gives out IDs and passports and such, show your government issued ID and sign some paperwork. You are then given a digital certificate that you can use for online banking and e-government stuff. Proper RSA stuff. You install it on your computer and your browser uses it to sign requests.
Seems like a pretty good way to do it, if you ask me.
A slightly more efficient, if less secure, way is how Apple does it for their Apple Developer program. You have to prove to Apple in a way they like that you are who you say you are, then you are issued a certificate with which to sign your apps. That could work too.
The part I liked about the system in Slovenia isn't so much the particulars of where or how the certificate is stored, but about how it's issued. Since the bit I was answering was "But how do you map a key to a person"
Perhaps a better approach regardless of how it's stored is notification of use?
You do that in person, at the fed/state agency, using facial tech, fingerprints, etc. Once you prove who you are, you get to submit a public key to the agency, which you can revoke at any point -- you take a unique key from them too, and some combination of the two you use when signing up for new financial accounts.
At least a public key can not be forged without my direct effort.
That's like saying how do you map a bitcoin to a person. Public Private key cryptography and the blockchain. Works great for bitcoins, would work great for identity.