Papers

The Seven Privacies: Ugly Baby Pageant The privacy equivocation mind virus 2 RERI & https://keri.one https://github.com/WebOfTrust Samuel M. Smith Ph.D. sam@keri.one

‘https://keri.one/keri-resources/ s netings apen soucecode Apches, pacication o) ‘https://github.comWebOfTrust “https://github.com/WebOfTrust/keri “ToIP: (specifications OWF License) (New KERI Suite Working Group) o et o0 ttps:trustoverip.github.oftswe-cesr-specification] Ry i Ao Do Sl padaton o e ool Ttofss o (GLEIF (1S0) VLEI: htps:wwwwgeff.orglenlelsolutions/glefs-digial strategy-for-the fefintroducing.the-verifiable et vie s i o healthKERI: https:ffhealthkeri.com! Provenant: https://provenant.net! e oo 5 WEE @ @oewwr health<=R & RERI © Ze% B @poireatust hpglth<=

Equlvocatlon noun the use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth o to avoid committing oneself; prevarication: | say this without equivocation. Implies using words having more than one sense so as to seem to say one thing but intend another. Words convey both meaning and emotion. Emotional equivocation leverages the emotion of one sense to buttress a different sense. Conveys a false impression. Self-induced equivocation, believing your own hype. Meaning trap. Knowledge representation and uncertainty: Likelihood, imprecision, and ambiguity. Polysemy: same word; multiple related meanings. (form of ambiguity) Ten most polysemous, single syllable words are: cast (69), cut (63), draw (62), point (50), serve, strike, and through. Polysemous dift can be extreme enough to reach its own antonym: to dust; remove particulates; add particulates Hallucinations in LLMs are often the result of polysemy. Undetectable attack on LLM s to inject phrases with high polysemous ambiguity.

Private (19) adjective . + belonging to some particular person: private property. % secluded: He wants to meet us in a more private + pertaining to or affecting a particular person or a small pre'emn ivaoy: refiing: & very privale person. group of persons; individual; personal: for your private i"mim ‘E_g"t’osl pgrvsfl%nvate’z Zham’” - satisfaction. + intimate; + confined to or intended only for the persons « o, having, or receiving special hospital faciliies, immediately concerned; confidential: a private meeting. ~ Privileges, and services, espedially a room of one's own + personal and not publicly expressed: one’s private and liberal visiting hours: a private room; feelings. a private patient. « not holding public office or employment: private « of lowest military rank. citizens. of, relating to, or coming from nongovemmental sources: + not of an official or public character; unrelated to one's pyivate funding official job or position: a former senator who has noun ;eg’;:; ‘z r’;g‘;’fi;t”sfz; eking in s private capaciy as | @ S0Idier of one of the three lowest enlisted ranks. a legal expert. /:1;:.?“' private parts. + removed from o out of public view or knowledge; i erivate, secret: private papers. . - . - not open or accessible to the general public: a private MOt Publicly; secretly: The hoaring will be condusted in beach. private. + undertaken individually or personally: private research. « without the presence of others; alone: Lef's go info another room where we can be private.

Confidential (4)

adjective - spoken, written, acted on, etc., in strict privacy or secrecy; secret: a confidential remark. « indicating confidence or intimacy; imparting private matters: a confidential tone of voice. « having another's trust or confidence; entrusted with secrets or private affairs: a confidential secretary. « (of information, a document, etc.)

• bearing the classification confidential, usually being above restricted and below secret.

« limited to persons authorized to use information, documents, etc., so classified.

Compare classification (def. 5).

Authentic (6)

adjective

« not false or copied; genuine; real: an authentic antique.

« having an origin supported by unquestionable evidence; authenticated; verified: an authentic document of the Middle Ages; an authentic work of the old master.

« representing one's true nature or beliefs; true to oneself or to the person identified: a story told in the authentic voice of a Midwestern farmer; a senator’s speech that sounded authentic.

« entitled to acceptance or belief because of agreement with known facts or experience; reliable; trustworthy: an authentic report on poverty in Africa.

• Law. executed with all due formalities: an authentic deed.

• Music.

• (of a church mode) having a range extending from the final to the octave above. Compare plagal. « (of a cadence) consisting of a dominant harmony followed by a tonic.

Why equivocation of the polysemous ambiguity of privacy is a mind virus! The language we use shapes the way we think. We can't think of certain thoughts if we don't use precise, unambiguous meanings of words to convey those thoughts. Lera Boroditsky s en wikpedia rgikiLere Borodisiy o ot 50 comiciing s borodieky. how angusge. shapes he way e tikivansar?aucdo-ananguage=en Cultures that use languages without counting words, e.g. One, two, many, don’t develop math. When we abuse the concept of privacy by ascribing technology as privacy- preserving by equivocating on what “privacy” means, the result of using that technology is often the opposite of what was intended. Using privacy as a sledgehammer to imbue technology with the emotion of privacy but without the actual qualities of privacy

PAC Theorem Authentic / Trade-offs required! " / > 9/ NS S ® N [§3 An interaction between two parties may be two of the three, private, authentic, and confidential to the same degree, but not all three at the same degree.

Common Law Entick 1765 https://web.archive.org/web/20031021121842/http://www.constitution.org/trials/entick/ entick v_carrington.htm “Papers are the owner’s goods and chattels: they are his dearest property; and are so far from enduring a seizure, that they will hardly bear an inspection; and though the eye cannot by the laws of England be guilty of a trespass, yet where private papers are removed and carried away, the secret nature of those goods will be an aggravation of the trespass, and demand more considerable damages in that respect.” Supreme Court of the US describes Entick thusly: “a ‘great judgment, ‘one of the landmarks of English liberty', ‘one of the permanent monuments of the British Constitution', and a guide to an understanding of what the Framers meant in writing the Fourth Amendment". Personal papers cannot be seized; private thought crimes (sedition libel)

US Law 4th and 5th amendments. Boyd 1886 (unity of 4th and 5th amendments) “Both amendments relate to the personal security of the citizen. They nearly run into, and mutually throw light upon, each other. When the thing forbidden in the Fifth Amendment, namely, compelling a man to be a witness against himself, is the object of a search and seizure of his private papers, it is an "unreasonable search and seizure" within the Fourth Amendment.”

US Law Continued Katz 1967: Reasonable Expectation of Privacy; Non-content metadata vs content data. Fisher: 1976: Separation of Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Subpoena power to collect evidence in any recorded form (not direct testimony). Personal private papers are no longer protected. A court order to reveal secret keys to unlock data creates the “cruel trilemma” by forcing one to decide whether to 1) tell the truth and incriminate one’s self, 2) lie and perjure one’s self, or 3) refuse to answer and face contempt and jail. FTC late 1990s: private data rights as consumer rights when promises of notice and consent with respect to shared data are violated (j.e. unfair trade practice).

Three Party Information Sharing and Leakage Model Information is Shared between two parties. Third party observers may obtain information: Indirectly as meta-data about the sharing interaction via leakage of the channel. Directly from either of the first two parties and/or their supporting infrastructure including intermediaries. Surveillance: privacy is when third parties have no knowledge of who is sharing information confidentiality is when third parties have no knowledge of what was shared. intermediary third party frst party —————— 3/ second party first party second party ‘ support support

Shared or not Shared; Secret or not Secret. Information that is not-shared = private (one party data) Information that is shared with restrictions = confidential (two party data, sensitive, protected)

Information that is shared without restrictions = non-confidential (any party data, public)

Surveillance Non-content meta-data (unrestricted, information about the parties to the interaction) Content data (confidential) Content data is confidential, and meta-data about that content is not observable by third parties. (meta-data confidentiality, private network)

Combinations not shared. (hiding, off-grid, air-gapped, physical possession, remote controlled) shared but restricted i.e confidential (permissioned) (shared secret) sensitive protected shared but not surveillable (meta-data and content) shared de-identified but re-identifiable shared cryptographically un-linkable but re-identifiable (unrestricted, surveillable, and correlatable) shared but de-identified and non-re-identifiable: un-correlated, de-correlated, non-correlatable unlinked un- linkable. private (not shared, not surveilled, and not identified) private keys public keys exposed secret keys (side-channel attacks) shared secrets of all types (passwords, bearer tokens, passcodes, keys, DH exchanged keys, security questions. PI)

“Hard” privacy (NOT) with ZKPs j | = i % Leaky contexts are anti-patterns for ZKPs. O ZKPs are largely misapplied in identity applications =

Interaction Contexts that defeat ZKP cryptographic unlinkability Any interaction where the person is physically present at the time of presentation Any interaction over a publicly routable network Any virtual private network that does not route through a non-treaty country Any interaction that uses conventional payment rails " A Any interaction that uses a conventional mobile phone ~ DS <ot a3 sl masr o ShEpeSPAC_Msssegeoct wt Yols fooatt T i = 5 I :o‘ .|"|. D i " amss = = —_ —

Fallacy of argument that we should always start with crypto un-linkability as baseline * Cryptographic unlinkability is not free. It forces hard tradeoffs. *ZKPs in general are less secure that other mechanisms for selective disclosure. Detection of issuer key compromise requires breaking unlinkability. * Insecurity increases the vulnerability of breach which increases the disclosure of data. eIt is easy to defeat in leaky interaction contexts, so bare crypto unlinkability is insufficient. It MUST require tight control over the interaction context, and the tight control must be compatible with the application adoption constraints. (no free lunch) *The hard problem is not un-linkability but holding the 2nd party (verifier) accountable in order to ensure continued confidentiality of the selectively disclosed data. +ZKP mechanisms defeat non-technological mechanisms for enforcing confidentiality.

[NOJMORE] HALFINERSURES] Beware of half-measures that defeat full-measures

What is easily correlatable today is exponentially greater than what was correlatable 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 2 years ago

2024/01/24 Mother of all breaches (MOAB) 26 Billion Records: https:// www.mcafee.com/blogs/internet-security/26-billion-records-released-the-mother-of- all-breaches/ 2024/04/01 NDP Data Breach 2.9 Billion Records: https://npdbreach.com/ 2024/02/01 Change Health Care Breach: 190 Million Records https:// www.securitymagazine.com/articles/101340-19om-impacted-by-change-healthcare- breach-security-leaders-discuss 2023 Health Care Data Breaches 168 Million Records: https://www.hipaajournal.com/ healthcare-data-breach-statistics/ Reach and Scope of Modern Data Aggregators:

ChatGPT4 = 1 PetaByte Training Data Set Size, not including all dynamically available

data via connected agents.

Nation State Funded 5GW (Fifth Generation Warfare)

Corpus of personally linkable knowledge via re-identification attack name, postal address(es), phone number(s), email address(es) SSN, birthdate, age biometrics: face, voice, DNA, fingerprints, gait old passwords any secrets previously used as shared AuthN factors credit card numbers credit history medical history anything from commercial background check, criminal history text, email, social media Google drive, MS Sharepoint drive mobile GPS tracking data surveillance data, security camera, ALPR etc Any breached data of any kind Anything scraped by LLM Al (ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, etc)

Every act of Selective Disclosure contributes to this corpus of knowledge The act of selective disclosure “singles-out” an individual thereby enabling correlation of the context of the act of disclosure to the corpus of knowledge about the individual. The selectively disclosed data along with the context of the act of disclosure is then added to this corpus of knowledge.

Therefore, counter-intuitively, selective disclosure increases the traceability of individuals, contradicting its falsely purported benefit of reducing the traceability.

The only individuals for whom this is not true are those that are “off-grid” or have fake identities The only material benefit of selective disclosure is that the undisclosed information is not contributed to the corpus of knowledge, so it satisfies the principle of least disclosure, which reduces the rate at which the corpus of reidentifiable information grows over time.

Because the act of disclosure itself is sufficient to correlate that act to the corpus of knowledge that may be tracked/traced to the individual performing that act, the use of a cryptographic identifier in that disclosure is largely immaterial to the traceability of the act.

So whom or what does cryptographic “unlinkabililty” actually protect?

The flawed misconception of “unlinkability” Unqualified “unlinkability” is impossible. Every act in the defined use cases is easily statistically contextually linkable (correlatable) to the corpus of knowledge. Qualified “cryptographic unlinkability" is a very weak form of unlinkability that actually defeats more comprehensive protection measures and increases traceability in the typical use cases. The only unlinkability that matters is “contextual unlinkability,” Given the extant corpus of knowledge, there is no technology that provides “contextual unlinkability”. Therefore, providing “unlinkability” is not a viable policy goal.

Logical Entailment and Policy A necessary condition means the consequent does not occur when the condition is absent. A sufficient condition means the consequent must occur when the condition is present A necessary condition appears as a subset of every sufficient condition What are sufficient conditions for protecting an individual from tracking with respect to digital identity? Is there a technology that provide a sufficient condition for protecting an individual from tracking? Given a sufficient condition for protecting an individual from tracking does the addition of a given technology defeat that sufficient condition (i.e. does the technology itself make the sufficient condition insufficient)? Can’t evaluate net benefit of any measure until we identify at least one sufficient measure. Insufficient half-measure may defeat a sufficient full measure

What is the Policy Goal that defines sufficiency The best that we can do? The best we can do is a slippery slope. It is the rationale used to justify half-measures. ZKPs and Selective Disclosure are justified as the best we can do, when indeed: 1) they are not the best we can do even only technologically 2) they are net counter productive Suggested Policy Goal: Exploitation of individuals wrt to tracking behavior by legitimate entities is protected such that on balance the expected cost of exploitation exceeds the expected benefit of exploitation. How to achieve: Legal and regulatory measures coupled with technology that supports the legal and regulatory measures that in combination disincentivizes exploitation by legitimate entities.