Proof of Personhood in Blockchain And Benefits of POP

Proof of Personhood

A technology framework called Proof of Personhood (PoP) was created to confirm people’s identities in online settings. Its fundamental objective is to distinguish between humans and bots and AI agents, assigning each person a unique identity. Digital interactions and artificial intelligence have made online authentication while respecting privacy and rights essential.

Why Proof of Personhood is Needed

PoP tackles basic issues in distributed systems, including Sybil Attacks, in which a single attacker fabricates several false identities in order to manipulate networks or obtain undue influence. Bots and AI agents are susceptible to assaults because traditional security mechanisms, such as usernames and passwords, are frequently insufficient against them.

Key issues PoP aims to resolve include:

• Limitations of Traditional Consensus Mechanisms: While Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) rely on staked capital or processing capacity to protect networks, they are unable to confirm an individual’s identity. This can result in the concentration of power in the hands of wealthy people or mining pools, giving one party the ability to control several identities and influence the network. PoP seeks to offer a more egalitarian substitute in which power is determined by each individual’s distinct human life rather than by financial or technological investment.
• Inadequacy of CAPTCHAs: CAPTCHAs are inadequate because, despite their best efforts to differentiate humans from machines, they nevertheless permit a single user to create several accounts by completing several riddles. Additionally, they pose accessibility challenges for people who have learning disabilities or visual impairments, which some AI can now resolve.
• Privacy and Barriers to Entry with Strong Identities: Requiring IDs from people who have been verified by the government or a reliable third party may go against the objectives of privacy and anonymity and make it more difficult for individuals to join.

How Proof of Personhood Works

There is no one best way to implement PoP; instead, different strategies are being investigated, frequently combining several strategies, each with trade-offs between security, decentralization, and privacy.

Important techniques and strategies for verification include:

Biometric Verification: This involves using unique physical characteristics like facial scans, iris patterns, or fingerprints to confirm uniqueness and liveness. For example, Worldcoin uses an iris scanner (“Orb”) to record a unique iris pattern, which is then transformed into an iris code, hashed, and stored to verify uniqueness without retaining raw images. While offering strong uniqueness guarantees, this method raises significant privacy risks and hardware dependency concerns.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs): These are cryptographic protocols that allow a user to prove knowledge of a fact (e.g., being a verified human) without disclosing the fact itself or sensitive personal data. ZKPs ensure privacy by preventing data exposure while maintaining trust.

• zk-SNARKs and zk-STARKs: These are common types of ZKPs used in decentralized identity protocols. zk-SNARKs produce compact proofs and offer fast verification, but require a trusted setup. zk-STARKs do not require a trusted setup, are quantum-resistant, and offer higher transparency and scalability, although their proofs can be larger and verification more resource-intensive.
• Combination with Biometrics: Biometrics provide the raw uniqueness and liveness check, while ZKPs ensure this verification can be shared securely and privately in decentralized systems, solving privacy issues by enabling selective disclosure and unlinkability.

Document Authentication: Validating identity claims through government-issued IDs or other official documents.

Digital Footprint Analysis: Assessing behavioral patterns, wallet activity, and past interactions to gauge trustworthiness. Consistent, legitimate engagement signals a genuine user, while anomalies may indicate fraud or automation.

User Uniqueness and Liveness Checks: Confirming that an individual or entity is distinct from others and ensuring the identity is active rather than a fake or static representation.

In-person Events (“Pseudonym Parties”): Taking advantage of the fact that a human can only be in one location at a time, participants physically meet at predetermined times and locations to confirm one another’s physical presence. This is changed in the Encointer experiment, where participants gather in small groups at locations selected at random. The difficulty in setting up federated parties and the hassle of in-person attendance are disadvantages.

Social network verification is the process of using people to confirm and attest to one another’s identities by creating a “web of trust.” This strategy is employed by initiatives such as BrightID. The challenge of determining if a social connection in discontinuous social networks has produced additional Sybil identities is a critique.

Online Turing tests and puzzles: Using the CAPTCHA principle, these systems employ tasks that are challenging for computers but simple for people. For example, the Idena network uses “FLIP tests” to assign participants to check one another. There are worries about the possibility of sophisticated AI/deepfake technology to solve these exams as well as the inconvenience.

Strong Identities: Demanding that participants have confirmed identities that are subsequently anonymized or concealed for future usage. This method has been criticized for privacy, surveillance hazards, and accessibility issues for individuals who lack the necessary documentation or who make biometric mistakes.

Crypto-biometrics with Confidential Computing: A more recent method encrypts biometric data using homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and confidential computing so that the original data never leaves the user’s device. The decentralized network is only given pertinent data to confirm humanness.

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Benefits and Applications of pop

PoP offers significant benefits by enhancing fairness and security in digital interactions.

• Bot/AI Impersonation Detection: Stops AI or scripts from impersonating people in order to trick or influence them.
• Privacy Preservation and Granular Anonymity Control: These features let users customize information disclosure and selectively regulate their privacy level, particularly with ZKPs that limit data exposure and offer unlinkability.
• Scalable verification makes it possible to validate a large number of users or transactions in an effective and trustworthy manner.
• Strengthening Platform Integrity: This lessens scams on social media and other platforms by preventing fraudulent participation and enhancing access control for digital services.
• Fairer Token Distribution: By guaranteeing a decentralized and equitable token distribution, preventing Sybil attacks, and guaranteeing a more equitable distribution of assets to legitimate user interaction, PoP improves airdrop techniques in the cryptocurrency industry.
• Decentralized Governance (DAOs): By guaranteeing a “one person, one vote” system and barring entities from having disproportionate control, DAOs and smart contract settings allow for democratic decision-making.
• The universal basic income (UBI) is necessary for the safe and equitable decentralized distribution of the UBI, guaranteeing that every individual gets their fair share.
• Public Goods Funding: Ensures that community contributions are equitably matched by thwarting Sybil attacks in quadratic funding models (like Gitcoin).
• Improved Accuracy of Platform Statistics: Promotes honesty and trust by offering a more trustworthy indicator of participation and engagement.
• Self-Sovereign Digital Identities (SSIs): PoP supports SSI by enabling users to selectively disclose identity attributes while enabling human uniqueness and authenticity checks in a decentralized, privacy-preserving manner.

Challenges and Criticisms of Proof of Personhood

Despite its potential, PoP faces significant hurdles:

• Privacy Concerns: Because sensitive information may be misused, leaked, or centralized, the acquisition of personal data, particularly biometric data, raises significant privacy and security issues. Worldcoin, for example, has drawn criticism for its lack of user erasure rights, excessive data collection, and centralized storage.
• Scalability: It can be challenging to expand techniques that call for in-person interaction or intricate social graph analysis on a worldwide scale. Large-scale ZKP protocol implementation with acceptable usability and performance is another technological issue.
• Fraud and Fake Identities: Advanced assaults like biometric spoofing (e.g., 3D-printed irises, fabricated fingerprints) may still be able to fool some systems.
• User Resistance: Individuals may be hesitant to trust technologies that demand sensitive biometric information or physical identification verification.
• Inclusivity and accessibility: Techniques that depend on particular physical places or technologies (such as cameras or smartphones) may leave out people who lack access to transportation. Visually impaired people may likewise find CAPTCHAs challenging.
• Centralization Risk: Techniques that depend on a single business for biometric verification run the risk of introducing centralization, which runs counter to the fundamental principles of blockchain.
• Vulnerability of Trusted Setup: Certain ZKP versions, such as zk-SNARKs, necessitate a trusted setup, which could be vulnerable if it is compromised.
• AI Advancements: A future challenge is the possibility that deepfake and artificial intelligence technologies will be able to pass Turing tests or persuade actual participants that a synthetic user is human.

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Challenges of PoP

Attack Vectors and Defense

Attack vectors like Sybil attacks and biometric spoofing can be used against PoP systems. AI-powered anomaly detection, multi-factor authentication that combines cryptographic proofs and biometrics, liveness detection methods, sophisticated hardware security modules, and frequent re-verification are some examples of countermeasures. ZKPs provide cryptographic protection against impersonation and replay attacks.

Interoperability Across Chains

The compatibility of PoP protocols across networks (such as Ethereum, Polygon, and Binance Smart Chain) becomes increasingly important as blockchain networks become more diverse. ZKPs make this possible by permitting the confirmation of verifiable credentials across chains without causing data duplication or jeopardising privacy.

Essentially, Proof of Personhood serves as a virtual bouncer for decentralized networks and applications, which are the most exclusive clubs on the internet. Like fingerprint scanning at a voting booth to guarantee one person, one vote, but done in a way that respects your privacy, it verifies that you are a unique human being, giving everyone a fair and equal chance to participate, rather than determining whether you have enough money (Proof of Stake) or processing power (Proof of Work).

Examples of PoP Projects in Web3

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