A pseudonym is a “fictitious name.” On the internet, it’s typically a screen name or forum name or identity name that doesn’t match your real name.
But how do you trust that pseudonym? Building trust traditionally relies on real-world identity, credentials, and reputation. When operating pseudonymously (using an identity that’s not linked to your real-world self), these traditional trust signals are unavailable.
The design pricipal of Pseudonymous Trust Building says Give Identities the Tools to Bootstrap Trust. It’s based on our long-time work to “Rebuild the Web of Trust,” particularly as made concrete in the Amira use case, which we created specifically to highlight the requirements of pseudonymous identity.
Core Principles of Pseudonymous Trust
- Work Quality Over Identity: Let the quality of your work speak rather than your credentials.
- Verifiable Contributions: Provide work that can be independently verified.
- Contextual Transparency: Be open about methods, limitations, and biases.
- Progressive Evidence: Build a consistent track record over time.
- Peer Validation: Gather attestations from others in the community.
Core Principles of Pseudonymous Verification
The key to pseudonymous trust is maintaining verification capabilities while preserving privacy:
- Evidence Without Identity: Provide verifiable evidence without connecting to real identity.
- Minimal Disclosure: Only reveal what’s necessary for the specific context.
- Separate Contexts: Use different pseudonyms for different contexts if needed.
- Cryptographic Verification: Use signatures to prove consistent identity.
- Progressive Trust: Reveal more information as relationships develop.
Core Systems of Pseudonymous Trust & Verification
Pseudonymous Trust Building is accomplished through four major systems.
- Verifiable Attestations. These are self-attestations that are provable in some way.
- Peer Endorsements. This is another part of the attestation & endorsement model, where someone else makes a claim about you.
- Evidence Commitment. This is a type of attestation that uses elision cryptography.
- The Progressive Trust Life Cycle. This life cycle can be expanded through constant iteration.
The philosophy of Pseudonymous Trust Building requires architecting digital identity systems that support all four of these systems.
Verifiable Attestations: Proving What You Say
The key to a verifiable attestation is making a claim that can be proven (or at the least that can be supported). This is accomplished in part through fair witness methodology where you improve trust in your attestations by being clear about the context and your biases. But it’s also accomplished through careful creation of claims.
In short, self-attestations shouldn’t be vague and general (“I’m good at security programming”), they should be specific and linked to evidence (“I wrote the Padlock Security Program”, with a link to GitHub and a signature from a GitHub-recognized key). This lays the foundation for Pseudonymous Trust Building.
Peer Endorsements: Building a Network of Trust
As discussed in Attestation & Endorsement Model, peers can make their own attestations of you, to support your self-attestations. This is equally true for a pseudonymous identity and a real-world identity.
In fact, the peer endorsements you get might be pseudonymous too: they then are supported by their own self-attestations, by their own evidence commitments, and by their own network of trust.
These attestations build a web of trust around your pseudonymous identity without requiring you to reveal who you are.
Evidence Commitments: Proving Without Revealing
Some claims may be too personal or too sensitive to publish. Evidence commitments use elision cryptography to commit to evidence without revealing it prematurely. This is done by hashing data that contains evidence.
Evidence commitments can be used to improve the trustworthiness of a pseudonymous identity: you can state what evidence you’ve committed, in case it’s required at some future point without revealing it. This approach lets you prove you made a claim at a certain time when you released the hash (so it’s not coming out of thin air when it’s convenient). Later, you can reveal that evidence as trust progressively develops.
The Progressive Trust Model: Expanding the Life Cycle
Progressive Trust as described in The Progressive Trust Life Cycle may also be more important for a pseudonymous identity than a real-world one, because peers of a pseudonymous identity have nothing to go on except the trust that gradually extends over time.
This goes further than a single life cycle. A single progressive trust life cycle increases the trust between two entities as they interact. That in turn can increase the trust between an entity and the larger community as the life cycle repeats again and again for individual interactions, because those interactions create the record of a longer-term history.
Pseudonymity in XIDs
XIDs were built to support the core systems required to support Pseudonymous Trust Building.
- Verifiable Attestations. Attestations of all sorts can be created as “edges” in XIDs: a self-attestation is a link between the XID and itself. As with all elements of Gordian Envelope, the edges in XIDs can be recursively defined, allowing for the inclusion of verifying data, such as URLs.
- Peer Endorsement. A peer endorsement is simply an edge connecting two XIDs. This allows a verifier to step through to determine a endorser’s trustworthiness, through their own endorsements and self-attestations.
- Evidence Commitments. An edge (or other data in a XID) can be elided before the XID is published. That’s because Elision Cryptography is another fundamental element of Gordian Envelope. Alternatively, an entire envelope could be elided and its hash published on a web site as part of a list of commitments.
- Progressive Trust Model. The elision in a Gordian Envelope can be removed one datum at a time, allowing a perfect model for increasing trust over time.
Specific examples of XID usage can be found in the Learning Pseudonyms from the Command Line article.