Identity on the Internet Security, Traceability, Privacy and Anonymity W3C workshop Paris 25 march 2014
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- Identity on the Internet – Security, Traceability, Privacy and Anonymity – W3C workshop Paris 25 march 2014
- Slide 2 - Who and What needs an identity on the Internet
- Slide 3 - Is that really you
- Slide 4 - One or many identities
- Slide 5 – Security Traceability v Privacy Anonymity
- Conclusions if I want
- Additional points
Identity on the Internet – Security, Traceability, Privacy and Anonymity – W3C workshop Paris 25 march 2014Slide 1 - IntroductionM  y name is Louise Bennett. I Chair the BCS Identity Assurance Working Group whose remit is to raise awareness of and help to solve the issues connected with achieving identity assurance on the Internet with Governments in the UK and Internationally through EuroDIG, the UN IGF and others. One of the major problems when discussing standards for identity on the Internet is different national views and legal requirements concerning: security, traceability, privacy and anonymity and this is what I will outline this afternoon.
Slide 2 - Who and What needs an identity on the Internet?On the Internet you need identifiers for users (both individuals and businesses) and also for things and other resources such as applications. The key point here is that it is the 35 Billion things, not the human beings that are directly linked to the Internet. When it comes to the Internet of things it remains critical to have trustworthy identifiers associated with them in order to know you are getting the right data from the right place (the right on-line shopping site, the right sensors, the right medical diagnostics and so on). You also need to be certain, in some contexts of use, whether the identifier is immutably bound to the thing of interest or not (such as RFID tags applied to parcels in transit or manufactured into items of value). So, since people and organisations are not directly attached to the Internet how can you know who is using the thing that is attached? You can’t just assume that your friend is texting you from his phone, what if it has been stolen or someone has borrowed it? The same applies to a PC, not just in an Internet cafe, but also in your home, where other members of your family may share it, or in a library. This also applies when a device has been compromised by a criminal or a malicious individual. So identity on the Internet is really about identifying things and in some contexts knowing who is using the thing. How certain do you need to be that it is me or my company who is using this thing? This is a challenge for security and identity standards. Slide 3 - Is that really youIn the virtual world we may want to know who we are dealing with, but with varying levels of certainty according to the context of our interactions. When we identify someone, we sometimes want to establish that they are a unique biological being as recorded on their birth certificate (the root identity) and sometimes that they are the same “persona” who did something at a different time. You need to know my biological identity when you are issuing a passport, but only the avatar when I engage with you in an on-line game. Even if I want to withdraw money from the bank account I opened last week, the bank only really needs to know the persona I am using. This is because in a banking or any other trading transaction the key thing that matters from the bank and customer perspective is that I am the same persona who opened the account and deposited the money. Here different legislative jurisdictions kick in to any standards work, because legislation and regulation over financial transactions usually brings in another legal “know your customer” perspective. Slide 4 - One or many identities?The next key point is should each object or personal identity be unique? In my view objects and things do need to be uniquely identified, but do users need to have just one identity? This is an area of rare unanimity of views among all the groups who have taken part in our identity workshops over the last three years. At all of our workshops, when the participants were asked if they thought people should have one unique identity on the Internet or multiple identities, almost everyone was in favour of the latter. S However, there are many people, particularly officials from repressive regimes who think that IPv6 will allow every individual to have their own single unique identifier to use on line and this would solve all the ID problems. Or as the Korean Government tried to do recently to ensure that only nationally accredited identities can access sites in their country. Happily OpenNet Korea got this overturned as unconstitutional in 2012. The reality is people do not want to be pushed to have one identity. They want a Paypal identity, a Google identity, a government identity, a Facebook identity and so on. There was a very strong thread both in European and UN meetings that said the misuse of information access and the ability to identify individuals, especially by oppressive governments, meant that online we need the ability for the same individual to be anonymous for expressing opinions and fully identifiable for online banking and commerce. Separating the two can be very difficult. In the UK the passionate concerns of some people about anonymity tend to revolve around such things as on line bullying of children and all aspect of defamation. In on-line commerce you need to be able to prove that you are able to honour the transaction and pay. However, for legal compliance reasons an organisation you are doing business with may also need to know who you really are. Here we come back to the vexed questions of registering and accrediting ID, jurisdiction and how much personal information you may need to reveal to prove identity. Slide 5 – Security & Traceability v Privacy & AnonymityThere are significant differences between security and traceability and between privacy and anonymity. On the Internet, anonymity is the ability to perform actions without them being traced to the person. This ensures both that individuals can have the right to free speech without fear of repercussions; but also that people cannot easily be identified and held accountable for their actions. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves. Privacy is the ability to provide personal information only to those who a person chooses to provide the information to of their own free will (or to those entitled to it by law). Privacy protects people’s rights, and does not per se damage national security and law enforcement (although it can make them harder to achieve). However, anonymity can cause damage. Anonymity is not necessary for privacy, but is often misinterpreted as being synonymous with privacy. In my view it is more synonymous with traceability. Those that advocate privacy are in some respects after security for the individual, be that from intrusion into their personal life or preventing targeted actions. Protection of personal data is very much a security issue, especially where large databases hold many millions of personal records. Hence security and privacy are closely intertwined. Many of the arguments raised against privacy advocates on the Internet concern the inability to hold people accountable for their actions. These concerns normally stem from anonymity rather than privacy. Even in EU data protection legislation, there are clauses for law enforcement and national security that take precedence over privacy and this reduces the impact of data protection on true national security objectives. A n anonymous person committing fraud, bullying, a terrorist or serious criminal act over the Internet is very difficult to catch and hold accountable for their actions. However, anonymity is reasonable in connection with many transactions, interactions or conversations. Anonymity, in the form of traceability, is also needed where there are fears of reprisals such as under certain regimes. The problem is that in some cases anonymity is used by those who wish to commit acts that are either illegal or immoral without fear of being caught.
I was really struck, when talking to activists involved in the Arab Spring that they said anonymity was essential to them. However, if you think about it they did not actually want anonymity, what they sought was secrecy of their communications from the Authorities – that is to say non-traceability by the state and privacy of communications to their friends and fellow activists. If they had truly been anonymous, then their fellow activists could have been trapped by responding to their Facebook gatherings and tweeted meeting places. So what they needed was lack of association between their biological identity and the thing they were using for communication. Many of us achieve this by using different identities in different circumstances. We may use one name and email address for banking, another for gaming. We may have a home computer and a work computer. We use multiple identities in both the physical and online worlds. In defining standards for Internet identity these competing views have got to be allowed for. It is not just a question of balancing Western democratic views against views of authoritarian states. Even within Western democracies views vary enormously. For example in the USA freedom to trumps freedom from. In Western Europe freedom from harm trumps freedom to act. So for Americans freedom of speech is more important than privacy through personal data protection. These issues are a major challenge for open standards for identity and payments. Conclusions if I want1. There is still a lot of work to do to understand the different drivers for security, privacy and anonymity, including how they pull against each other or overlap. There will never be global agreement on proportionality, but we should work towards global understanding of different perspectives and be able to accommodate most of them. 2. Identity, discovered through data aggregation, is already used as a form of currency on the Internet, with people providing personal information in order to gain free or low cost services in return. This allows the "payment" of those services to come from targeted marketing and other sources. 3
All this can be done because anonymity removes accountability, and makes the job of law enforcement even harder online than it is in the physical world. 4. Those who oppose the imposition of electronic identity for national security purposes emphasise the advantages that anonymity in cyber space gives those with good intent:
All this can be done because anonymity protects the weak individual from abuse by the powerful, and provides the transparency that holds the powerful in check. Additional pointsBeing certain of my biological identity (often called a root identity online) involves what is called a chain of trust. A chain of trust is the classic passport model where you can match the credential for the identity to the biological person. To demonstrate this on line typically the individual uses a token – “What you have”, this is linked to some biometric “What you are” if you want a high level of security. This may be picture of your face, a fingerprint in India, voice print or even in New Zealand your DNA. It is also likely to be linked to some attribute about yourself “What you know” – your date of birth, school, mother’s maiden name for interactions needing a lesser degree of certainty. I A network of attributes provides an authorisation model using multiple low assurance sources of identity and associated attributes. Whether you identify someone through a chain of trust or a network of attributes is all a matter of the risks you and the other party are prepared to take in the context of the transaction you are involved in. I would argue that one of the real problems we have online is what I call identity discovery through data aggregation. When we think about privacy, particularly in relation to commercialisation of the internet, and Government surveillance and data collection, this is what people really object to. The so called “analysis of “big data””, without either their knowledge or permission. Yet those same people may be happy to build up a reputation score on auction sites like e-bay to ensure they have a reputation as a trustworthy person to do electronic business with, irrespective of whether they are using their real root identity or an “anonymous” e-bay identity. In UK law we can use multiple identities (which may not be allowed in other countries) and there is no problem with us doing that provided we are not intending to deceive or defraud others We all know that there are many commercial models on the Internet and that some services are free or below cost because there is value in the data that you, as a customer, give up when you use those sites or services. The quid pro quo is usually targeted advertising. The saying goes: “If you are using a free service you’re not a customer, you’re a product.” I think it is important that we recognise and accept that truth. You cannot have your cake and eat it. There are costs associated with the Internet, if you do not want to pay for services with cash, you must realise that you are paying for it some other way, maybe, through your taxes. If you do not pay tax, then through someone else’s taxes, or through your identity and the aggregation of attributes and activities associated with your identity. It can be a win / win situation, but if you do not want your identity attributes to be used and privacy really matters to you, then you either get off line or you have to pay for protection. I am not advocating one thing or the other. What I am saying is we all need to make our own informed choices and these will be culturally and contextually different for all of us, at any point in time, and over time. I think that the key thing is for individuals to remain in control of their identities and to understand the value of their identity and of the attributes that others might associate with it, such as their buying power, what their interests are, where they are, what they like to do in their spare time and who they socialise with. This aggregation of attributes to identities not only helps target advertising, it can personalise searches, find you a partner, or, in the law enforcement context, it can track the workings of a criminal gang, a terrorist cell or a paedophile ring. How we feel about each of these uses of data aggregated and associated with our identities is highly personal and highly contextual. Going back to my point on data aggregation versus privacy, once big data analysis enables identity discovery through attributes, can there ever be anonymity or indeed privacy, unless, as individuals, we use multiple identities on the internet to frustrate data aggregation about ourselves? I would suggest that everyone has their own views on this topic. Those views will be different in different circumstances. It depends on our own risk assessments at the time of the transaction. It is almost a norm for younger people all over the world, and internet users in developing countries to be happy to trade their identity data attributes for free or cheaper services or goods. This is not the case for many older, privacy advocates in Europe.
So, another key issue on the Internet is how can an individual control access to their biographic data (and maybe biometric data) after enrolment in an identity scheme of any type that is used on the Internet? It is worth remembering that in the UK under EU and UK Law, no company should give to others or use the personal data associated with personal identity without your consent (except for law enforcement). This means that you must normally be given the choice of opting in to plans to extend access to or share your personal data with third parties beyond what you agreed to at the point of original data capture. However, definitions of consent and sharing are complex and ambiguous, with a lot of secondary legislation and hidden “terms of service” that can erode them.
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