[Freedombox-discuss] FOAF developers taking FreedomBox into their equation

[James Vasile]

On Thu, 10 Mar 2011 15:40:32 +0100, Henry Story <henry.story at bblfish.net> wrote:
> How annoying is it going to be to rebuild your identity?

Ian and I have been brainstorming a scheme to rebuild identity.  It goes
something like this:

Assume distributed backups place encrypted copies of your data
(including keys, relationships, etc.) on your close friends' machines.
("Close" can be described explicitly by you or derived heuristically
from your interactions) Now take the decryption key and encrypt a bunch
of copies of it using your friends' keys.  Layer these encryptions in
enough combinations that, say, any combination of 7 of your 10 close
friends can get together and produce the decryption key that will let
you have your backups back.

While it's true that any 7 of your 10 closest friends can now betray
you, social dynamics make this extremely unlikely in the absence of some
real justification.  You could always raise the numbers (15 of 20, 99 of
100, etc.).  If you don't trust your friendship group enough, obviously
you can just store the key somewhere safe and not empower them.  But
most people have reliable friends and lack reliable off-site storage, so
we think a scheme like this has some promise.

I don't think everybody would use a scheme like this (Ian and I
wouldn't), but for the average user, it could be quite attractive.

With this scheme in place, rebuilding your identity would involve
plugging in a new freedombox, telling it who your friends are and
waiting for your friends to authorize the restoration of your digital
identity.  Presumably you would call them and tell them it's ok to
authorize in this manner.  That strikes me as not very annoying at all.