At some point natural people are going to use cryptographic signatures just to authenticate themselves in daily life. No video, audio, or text can be presumed real unless signed by the human subject.
But hey, at least this will solve the problem of journalists quoting people out of context: they won't be able to claim you've said something without you personally signing off on it with your cryptographic key.
I don't quite understand what you mean. We already trust phones and computers not to be compromised for things like online banking, so why not allow these devices to sign recordings using keys lent to them by the main trust device? You could allow revocation of these keys.
Sorta, kinda. "We already trust phones and computers" because we have no better alternatives yet.
There's a reason online banking is at the front of the push for device attestation, and thanks for Google happily obliging, rooting your Android phone is pretty much pointless now. This is coupled with a parallel push to do your banking through a mobile app, or at least to use it as a second authentication factor, which makes the app necessary just as much. This means we're already undergoing the transition I'm talking about: in the nearby future, you'll have to use a pristine, unrooted, unmodded phone from a blessed corporate vendor, to perform basic functions like paying for things and managing your account. And yes, such device will be appropriate for signing everything else too - and the vendor owning the key will be your Trust Authority.
All digitally approved contracts I‘ve ever encountered were e-"signed" (i.e. me emulating a paper signature at a computer), not digitally signed, due to lack of a mutually trusted public key infrastructure.
In that sense, I would be sad but not surprised if we instead moved to a system of "trusted recording devices", where scanners, cameras and microphones by some vendors are defined to be trusted, signing their outputs and leaving the underlying workflows (signatures, recordings of verbal affirmations etc.) largely untouched.
I think that's a pretty apt summary of the state of digital ID in Germany: Commendable technical basis (with some privacy-preserving aspects too, including selective assertions, e.g. "older than 18" or "EU citizen").
When I called about actually getting such an ID card (several times) as a non-citizen, which is explicitly mentioned as a feature of the scheme, I only received the acoustic equivalent of blank stares.
For that reason, Germany introduced a "non-identity" (i.e. not doubling as a photo ID) e-signature card in 2021, but apparently almost nobody is requesting it, so most administrative offices don't know how to issue one...
> No video, audio, or text can be presumed real unless signed by the human subject.
Where is the controversy in that?
Companies can't even wrap their heads around sim swapping scams and social engineering of secret questions.
Follow the thou g ht through to how it would work and what it would mean in terms of privacy for the average person.
Your niceties seem dystopian to me.
Journalists would have a hard time showing that an interviewee actually said what claim they said.
Wire-tapping by the police also would become useless in court.
⇒ I would adjust it to “unless it has a reliably chain of trust”. That would mean that people could judge differently about whether to accept some things as true, but I think that’s unavoidable.