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Fraudsters of Lemmy, how would you commit fraud if governments embrace cryptography (programming.dev)

submitted 5 months ago by danhab99@programming.dev to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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I saw this tiktok where this guy was talking about how he'd get his hands on real social security numbers.. this was a clip from a whole story he told about some criminal shit, I was too distracted by my thoughts on how to fix the exploits he used.

Block chains and cryptographic signatures would solve basically every one of his exploits. But regardless of the myriad of reasons as to why we won't adopt cryptography into American laws and bureaucracy, imagine if we did do everything involving government and policy in a cryptographically secure environment.

Imagine if everyone who is born gets assigned a gpg secret key signed by the government and that is your government ID for everything from opening a bank account to paying your taxes to claiming benefits. IMPO I think this is a perfect solution (iif you ignore the human element).

So my question is why wouldn't it be perfect, and what kind of exploits could bad actors use in a cryptographic bureaucracy?

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[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 6 points 5 months ago

Fraud is conducting business under false pretenses.

What you’re referring to with obtaining social security numbers is basically “identity theft”, a term which makes a lot of sense in cybersecurity.

An SSN is basically (terrible) authentication credentials. So it’s credential theft. If you want you can call a bundle of credential factors an “identity” and then real life and computer identity theft become the same thing.

So basically you can go two ways with it.

One is fraud’s still the same and that wasn’t fraud per se that you were referring to before (except technically, in the sense identity theft is a subset of fraud).

The other is that to get your hands on people’s credentials, you’d get a copy of that GPG key. Maybe that means physical access, stealing the key, whatever. If you said biometric then that’ll eventually be spoofable due to biotech.