[HN Gopher] Who Watches the Watchmen? Sybil-Resistance in Proof ...
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Who Watches the Watchmen? Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood
Protocols
Author : nabla9
Score : 35 points
Date : 2020-09-08 18:12 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Conjecture: a Sybil attack can always be performed if
| bootstrapped by some humans.
| jhardy54 wrote:
| My friends voted on it and we decided that Sybil attacks are
| impossible. Nothing to worry about, please move along.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| But none of my friends know any of your friends, so I ignore
| their votes. Admittedly that means that any sort of consensus
| reality breaks down online, but hey, it's 2020 and we are
| where we are.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| For those of us not familiar with the term (as was I before a few
| seconds ago): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Of the systems listed in the paper, the only one I'd really heard
| of was BrightID, and it still seems like potentially the best.
| The FAQ on their website is a good introduction[0], but the paper
| seems rightly cautious:
|
| "To control for Sybil attacks BrightID runs GroupSybilRank, a
| modification of the SybilRank algorithm, to estimate the anti-
| Sybil score of the network participants based on affinity between
| groups. Proposed to be used as the official BrightID anti-sybil
| algorithm, the effectiveness of this algorithm in the presence of
| multiple attack vectors, remains to be proved."
|
| Unfortunately, just proving personhood is only the first step in
| deciding someone's reputation, but it seems like a good basis to
| build some proper decentralized trust systems from, for example
| [1].
|
| [0] https://www.brightid.org/faq
|
| [1] https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-
| moderati...
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(page generated 2020-09-08 23:00 UTC)