Harnessing the Power of Proof-of-Humanity: Advancing Trust and Security in Today’s Systems
What’s holding today’s systems in incorporating the FaceID of blockchain?
In an era marked by digital interactions and the rise of decentralized systems, ensuring the authenticity and trustworthiness of participants has become a pressing concern. Even in decentralized systems, it is currently difficult to verify a user behind a wallet and their interests in an organization. This difficulty is the main factor why decentralized exchanges and applications are vulnerable to attacks concerning depleting the storage cap of a token.
Proof-of-Humanity is a concept that has gained popularity in recent years as a means to verify the identity of individuals in a trustworthy way. The idea is to use cryptographic encoding algorithms around a human biometric to produce a signature hash for the biometric, which then acts as the transaction signature on the blockchain. Essentially, by employing PoH, we can address the current challenges, such as fraud, Sybil attacks, fake accounts, and identity theft, while fostering trust and security in today’s systems.
With the increasing number of digital systems, there needs to be an increase in cybersecurity. Thus, here are certain ways Proof-of-Humanity can be used to improve our systems.
Strengthening Decentralized Governance
DAOs hold immense potential for transparent decision-making and community governance and currently, the number of DAOs has been growing exponentially. However, the lack of identity verifications poses a challenge, as it allows for Sybil attacks and undermines the legitimacy of voting processes increasing the probability of a biased result. Therefore, for bigger companies that are in the web3 world (like Starbucks), incorporating a DAO can be dangerous for their processes and company environment.
By integrating PoH, DAOs can ensure that each participant is a unique human entity, preventing the creation of multiple identities and establishing a fair and robust governance framework.
Tackling Fake Accounts and Misinformation
Social networks have become breeding grounds for fake accounts, bots, and the spread of misinformation. According to Kazimierz Rajnerowicz, 10% of Instagram accounts are bots. These issues erode trust and authenticity in online interactions.
PoH can address this challenge by requiring users to provide proof of their human identity. By authenticating participants’ biometrics of theirs, platforms can significantly reduce the presence of fake accounts, automated systems, and malicious actors. It should be recognized that the biometric does not have to be displayed on the front end of the social network but can remain in the backend as a token of security and identity.
Now that I think about it, this can also solve the political campaign issues that occur on social networks (i.e., Instagram, Facebook, etc) with a surplus of political ads from bot accounts with biased and false information to persuade users.
Verifying Identity in Online Marketplaces
Over the past decade, online marketplaces like Amazon have done a great job in verifying if a consumer is real and the transaction that is being made is legit. Though, such marketplaces are struggling to tackle fake reviews, fraudulent sellers, and identity theft. These issues undermine consumer trust and hinder the growth of online marketplaces.
In this application specifically, PoH can be a game-changer with its identity verification protocols. By ensuring that each participant is a verified human during the signup phase of the application by requiring a biometric of theirs, PoH mitigates the risk of deceptive practices, counterfeit products, and identity fraud. As a result, this enhances the trustworthiness of online marketplaces and fosters a safer and more secure shopping experience for consumers.
Empowering Self-Sovereign Identity
We already know that traditional identity systems often centralize personal information, making individuals vulnerable to data breaches and identity theft. However, it is now commonly recognized that by leveraging blockchain technology, individuals can now retain control over their data. However, many governments find this problem not because they are losing control of their citizens, but rather, because their citizens may lose security for their information.
To account for citizen security, PoH-based identity systems can be used to encode the data and each activity (i.e., transaction) by a human biometric that can be wrapped with a secondary cryptographic algorithm like SHA-256 for instance. This empowers individuals to manage their digital identities, reducing the risk of data breaches and putting individuals back in control.
Curbing Spam and Phishing Attacks
The rise of spam and phishing attacks poses significant challenges for email providers and messaging platforms. These malicious activities disrupt communication channels and put users at risk.
PoH can combat these issues by requiring senders to validate their human identity. By implementing PoH-based anti-spam mechanisms, automated systems and bots can be effectively filtered out, ensuring that users receive legitimate and secure messages, ultimately bolstering trust in digital communication platforms.
Why is PoH not Used?
Although PoH brings many positives to today’s systems, why are platforms and organizations not adapting to this new verification protocol?
It should be recognized that although the results of implementing PoH in each application are different, the process of implementing remains the same. For PoH to truly work, each user must use one of their biometrics to be encoded with gets communicated to the system. However, for many, this may be a threat to their security in the first place, which is why striking a balance between identity verification and privacy protection is crucial.
One method is to create this balance is to wrap the biometric through a cryptographic protocol like a transaction block to ensure that no outsider can access the biometric.
Another problem is that PoH solutions often require a centralized authority or process to validate human identity. This can introduce a single point of failure, compromising the decentralized nature of blockchain systems. Currently, there are no algorithms or AI models that can verify if a biometric is real or not, and even if one is created, the computational power will be a lot considering that verification protocols for transactions remain also creating scalability issues. As a result, either there must be a very energy-efficient AI algorithm to verify biometrics, or there must be an architecture makeover of the blockchain for PoH-based systems.
Improving PoH Architecture
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach, here are some potential ways to address the security and scalability issue.
Privacy-Preserving Techniques
One method is to develop privacy-preserving techniques that allow for identity verification without exposing sensitive personal information. Techniques like Zero-Knowledge proofs or selective disclosure can enable participants to prove their humanity without revealing unnecessary details, striking the balance between identity verification and privacy protection.
Decentralized Identity Verification
Another method, which may be more complex, is to explore decentralized identity verification mechanisms that eliminate the need for a centralized authority. This can be achieved through the use of decentralized identifiers (DIDs), self-sovereign identity, or peer-to-peer verification protocols through a private but local network.
Scalability Solutions
There must be research done to develop scalability solutions to handle the increasing volume of identity verification requests. This can involve optimizing the verification process, utilizing off-chain or layer-two solutions, or implementing sharding techniques to parallelize the verification process across multiple nodes.
Multi-Factor Authentication
There can be an implementation of a multi-factor authentication method that go can beyond proof of humanity alone. By combining various factors such as biometrics, device identification, location data, and behavioural analysis, the overall security and resilience of PoH systems can be enhanced. However, the introduction of proving various user factors like the user’s network may breach their privacy — decreasing the probability of using this approach for scaling.
Sybil Resistance Mechanism
We can improve the design and implement mechanisms that make Sybil attacks more challenging. This could involve reputation systems, social graph analysis, or consensus algorithms that rely on reputation-based voting rather than simply verifying human identity. By considering the behaviour and interactions of participants, the system can detect and mitigate collusion attempts.
Final Words
Proof-of-Humanity presents an incredible opportunity to enhance trust and security across a range of digital systems. By validating human identity in decentralized governance, social platforms, online marketplaces, and more, PoH can revolutionize how we interact online. With PoH at the core, systems can promote authenticity, combat malicious activities, and foster trust among participants. Though, before PoH can be fully integrated as the next protocol, we must overcome the challenge of finding the balance between identity verification and privacy by improving our digital systems.
Reach Out!
LinkedIn: jaivalpatel
Twitter: patjaival
Github: GEEGABYTE1
