s1113645@tesla.cc.uottawa.ca writes:
I had an idea for an advertising based net-payment scheme that has a particular security flaw making it totally untrustworthy unless it is possible to prove that you are not a particular person (the publisher receiving the ad money) when consuming (viewing or otherwise) the ads.
BTW, we had some interesting postings here last year from Jason Solinsky (solman@mit.edu) about schemes involving advertising and payment, where people would get paid to view advertisements. Is this the kind of thing you're thinking of? I posted some ideas once on how to prove that you are not someone else. Any such scheme has to be grounded in a physical mechanism to determine that two people are different. For example, you might be able to get some special cryptographic signature or credential from an agency by showing some biometric information, such as retina or thumb prints. You wouldn't necessarily have to reveal your name, identity, or any other information; just something which would allow the agency to be sure that they had not given such a credential out to you before. If you didn't care about privacy, your problem could then be solved simply by having each person exhibit his credential (these are often called "is-a-person" credentials). The more interesting question then becomes exhibiting that credential in a privacy protecting way, but still being able to tell if two people are showing the same or different credentials. There are various ways of doing this; one of the simplest would be for the agency to give you a blind signature using a particular exponent, where you would be allowed exactly one of each exponent. You unblind these, and to show you aren't Bob both you and Bob show your signatures for some matching exponent, which will be different. Because of the blinding, no one will link the credential to your identifying information, and because it is a signature from the agency, no one can forge a credential different from the one they have. Depending on the situation and your tradeoffs between convenience and privacy, you might discard used credentials (for maximum privacy), or you might reuse them in a particular forum where you have persistent identity (for maximum convenience). In the latter case, the exponent used could be associated with the forum, which is the idea behind Chaum's pseudonym system. Hal Finney hfinney@shell.portal.com