« Austin is one of the best geek cities | Main | Donate to Worldchanging »

Nog

Marsha and I went to some Christmas parties last night, including Andrew Donoho's famous annual nog party, where he serves tons of homemade eggn nog (great stuff) to a diverse mix of people that he knows from tech and alternative energy communities in Austin. Sufficiently lubricated by nog, Andrew and I were having a discussion of various technologies we've been thinking about, and when I mentioned digital identity, he talked a little about an idea he'd had for very secure identity management. It's called Papillon. I found a blog entry at The Escapist that includes an explanation of the technology...

Papillon will give users the power of "persistent anonymity." Those of us who inhabit virtual worlds already enjoy this power, to a certain extent. In one sense, it's nothing more than the identity of your avatar: Those who know the avatar Walker Spaight count on the fact that the same person (me) is behind him each time he appears in Second Life. What's important, here, is merely that it's the same person, not which particular person it is. Walker's identity is persistent, but at the same time it's anonymous in real-world terms.

The problem is, how can you know for sure? Passwords aren't the most secure pieces of information in the world. Of course, not many people are too concerned about who's at the controls of Walker Spaight. But if Walker were up to anything interesting - like selling Second Life currency on eBay, for example, or developing a project for someone in the virtual world - you'd at least want to know Walker was always Walker, and you'd probably want to know Walker was always me.

Papillon will allow users to make connections between their online identities that can verify both those claims. Rather than storing passwords or real-world identity information, Papillon will only store associations between identities in different contexts, encoded in such a way that the information is secure, even if it falls into the wrong hands. It seems a trivial thing on the surface, but the tools it makes possible could change how we think of our identities in online worlds. With Papillon, knowing eBay's WoWSalez0r is really the World of Warcraft toon he says he is becomes a trivial matter of simply asking at a Papillon-enabled Web site. If WoWSalez0r has registered there, you have your answer. And if he hasn't, you can make your own decision as to whether or not to do business with him, just as we do today.

Andrew mentioned that he hasn't had time to do much more work on Papillon, so it hasn't really been developed much further. If it's as powerful as his nog, it could be very useful.

jon posted this at 9:24 AM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend

 Subscribe to RSS feed for Weblogsky