Deception, Identity, and Security

"When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats." Decades before the advent of the Internet, Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa assumed a variety of identities with the ease that has become common in cyber-social platforms--those where cyber technologies play a part in human activity (for example, online banking, and social networks). Pessoa, a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher, and philosopher, wrote under his own name as well as 75 imaginary identities. He would write poetry or prose using one identity, then criticize that writing using another identity, then defend the original writing using yet another identity. Described by author Carmela Ciuraru as "the loving ringmaster, director, and traffic cop of his literary crew," Pessoa is one of the foremost Portuguese poets and a contributor to the Western canon. The story of Pessoa illustrates a key insight that holds true for the cyber-social systems of today: Identity costs little in the way of minting, forming, and maintaining yet demands a high price for its timely and accurate attribution to physical agency. Along with the low cost of minting and maintaining identities, a lack of constraints on using identities is a primary factor that facilitates adversarial innovations that rely on deception. With these factors in mind, we study the following problem: Will it be possible to engineer a decentralized system that can enforce honest usage of identity via mutual challenges and costly consequences when challenges fail? The success of such an approach will remedy currently deteriorating situations without requiring new infrastructure. For example, such a system should be able to reduce fake persons in social engineering attacks, malware that mimics the attributes of trusted software, and Sybil attacks that use fake identities to penetrate ad hoc networks. Note that many cyber-physical facilities--those where a physical mechanism is controlled or monitored by computer algorithms and tied closely to the internet and its users (for example, autonomous cars, medical monitoring)--also aim to enable users to remain anonymous and carry out certain tasks with only a persistent but pseudonymous identity. This form of short-term identity (especially in the networks that are ad hoc, hastily formed, and short lived) can remain uncoupled from a user's physical identity and allow them to maintain a strong form of privacy control.