One-Click Anonymous Login

https://human-id.org/

by fapi1974 • 5 years ago

76 97 5 years ago

human-id.org

tetrisgm• 5 years ago

Getting a 500 error

fuzzybear3965• 5 years ago

Ditto.

nvartolomei• 5 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20210412193528/https://human-id.o...

d33• 5 years ago

Context if you first read comments then check article: this is here because the site was down right after it made it to the front page.

johnhess• 5 years ago

Are you interested in the technical pros/cons, or the pros/cons for your user community? What's your company do?

fapi19747• 5 years ago

Technical pros and cons. They way it works is that when you use their login you get prompted to register with them, which is done using a phone number. From what I understand they do not keep the phone number, they just send my site a token that says "yep, this person = that phone number"

fapi19747• 5 years ago

Sorry - my company is an audio social network. Because we don't use a camera for our live streaming many of our members tend to be shy and possibly privacy focused.

avipars• 5 years ago

site down

arkitaip• 5 years ago

What are the use cases for anonymous logins from a business POV? Even if you are legit pro customer privacy, this feels like it requires some fundamental changes in how your business perceives and treats its customers, not just their data.

fapi19747• 5 years ago

We would definitely have to make some product changes, but the pitch (which I kind of get) is that we differentiate by using a privacy-focused, non-profit identification method, thereby signaling we value our users' privacy. Given the issues with Clubhouse of late I think this could have value.

f430• 5 years ago

not much business case

ipaddr• 5 years ago

Everything has a use case.

Sharing a document where others can edit it but it's created by your customer would come to mind.

fundamental• 5 years ago

At least looking at the archive.org version of the site it looks like just providing a way of building a username out of hash(phone number, website). I'm not seeing information about passwords or authentication and I wouldn't treat knowledge of someone's phone number to be at the same level of a password.

So, to me it looks like marketing hype without substance. It would be useful for the site to be online and not giving 500 errors though to see if they had anything else.

SparkyMcUnicorn• 5 years ago

This gave me a little more context: https://web-login.human-id.org/demo/

Which has all the same issues as SMS 2FA.

ksm17172• 5 years ago

Every entity I interact with online collects my data. The saving grace is that they don’t often compare notes. I do not want any entity to have all of my data, even if it has my ssn redacted

fapi19747• 5 years ago

My understanding (could be wrong) is that it's all open source and they don't keep any of the users' data themselves.

ksm17172• 5 years ago

Fair enough. I still want to avoid making consolidation any easier.

Groxx• 5 years ago

Prevent abusers, single stable identity per human, but you can't cross-reference the identifiers and they don't store anything.

... color me suspicious. I'd read the technical details, but I can't seem to find any through the wayback archive.

nexuist• 5 years ago

The front page boldly claims "no data leaks, no hacks."

I am immediately suspicious. Nobody in their right mind with sufficient technical background is still claiming that in 2021, for any technical solution.

endisneigh3• 5 years ago

I'd say the main con is that the site isn't reliable. I'm not being facetious. If you're going to use 3rd party sign on, being on the front page of HN shouldn't be enough to bring it down. Imagine if you posted your company's site instead of the underlying technology and your sign-in was negatively affected.

My personal feelings, that aside, is that though many of us are privacy conscious, adding more and more dependencies to your site results in us having to trust more entities. Even if they don't store anything, we have to trust they aren't lying, that redirection is implemented properly, etc.

I think the best thing you can do if you care about the privacy of your users is minimize the amount of information necessary. So if your site doesn't require email, don't take it. If a phone number isn't necessary, don't ask for it. Use usernames, only ask for an email when the user is doing something that would require it (e.g. they need a receipt).

One thing that I love is when a site actually gives you a temporary username the minute you visit the "app" portion and you can use the site as if you created an account without having to do anything. That's usually a sign that the administrators really do care about you not jumping through hoops.

wmichelin• 5 years ago

Do you work on high traffic websites? Surges in traffic such as these often expose underlying bottlenecks. Give the people a break, I'm sure they'll work on fixing it after today.

endisneigh3• 5 years ago

I'm not criticizing the people. Do you not think it's legitimate criticism that using a niche 3rd party login system can be bad precisely because they're still ironing out the kinks?

sebastien_b• 5 years ago

Site still down so couldn’t read it, but from your post, I wonder if SQRL would fit the bill?

https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm

kzrdude2• 5 years ago

How would you use usernames without email? Users won't understand a system where you can't click an "I forgot my password" button and recover.

endisneigh3• 5 years ago

This is a good question, generally you’d only do this in situations where the data itself isn’t too important, like Reddit.

That being said where I seen it used there’s usually a huge disclaimer asking you to put in your email

bastianpurrer3• 5 years ago

Generally up to the website on how to implement the system. Some have done with usernames, some without. Generally, users aren't looking for a 'I forgot my password' button if they aren't asked for a password in the first place.

godelski2• 5 years ago

So if your site doesn't require email, don't take it.

I'd even say "don't ask for it". Landing on the site I get a big banner that takes up a lot of the screen asking for my email. For a service that is talking about data protection and privacy, this sets off alarms. It may be completely honest and genuine, but since it takes so much of my screen it feels like you really want that data from me.

If your target audience is privacy conscious people you gotta know how privacy conscious people think. If you can't think like them, well then I'm also concerned that you don't have our interests in mind.

tootie• 5 years ago

So, this doesn't look like they've actually broken any new ground here that you can't achieve with existing commercial products like Okta or Auth0. They're taking an extra step of asking you to store hashes of their hashes. Which actually feels less secure since if hackers get their hashes, that as good as getting clear passwords to login directly your site? I'm not actually clear on that.

But either way, the diagram says they're hashing phone numbers, so presumably that means they authenticate by typing in their phone number which is a terribly password since you give you phone number out to people so they must also send a TOTP via SMS which is better, but not great. NIST has started recommending not to use SMS for out-of-band authentication. Either way, this whole chain of events just delegates authentication your mobile carrier. Same thing if you send a TOTP to an email address. It feels more seamless, but really you're just delegating auth to their email provider. No different that using OAuth.

fapi19747• 5 years ago

This is solid advice - thanks. One of the things they mentioned is that this would help prevent botnets. Would OAuth also do that? Also - does the opensource, non-profit status change the dynamics?

gmfawcett• 5 years ago

Not sure why either open-source or non-profit would change the dynamics? Non-profits are still incentive-driven, and their goals may not align with yours; and open-source code is entirely independent of how data is collected, shared, etc. People do evil with OSS all the time. :)

Kalium2• 5 years ago

No, nothing about being open-source or a non-profit fixes the technical flaws in a system's design choices. It just makes this a poor design with an ethically pleasing organization behind it.

Kalium2• 5 years ago

Which actually feels less secure since if hackers get their hashes, that as good as getting clear passwords to login directly your site? I'm not actually clear on that.

You're right. This turns hashes into passwords, and is distinctly a step down in security.

wideareanetwork• 5 years ago

Users expect signin to work the way they expect it to work.

I once implemented a non standard signin where all that was needed was an email link which kept you signed in.

Users hated it.

They actually went to the trouble of complaining and no doubt it lost me potential signups.

These days I only ever do normal email and password signup.

fapi19747• 5 years ago

Yeah, I asked myself the "friction question" too.

subpixel• 5 years ago

As a developer I was a big proponent of 'magic link' style authentication when it was new.

As a user who occasionally runs into this now, I hate it.

minitech• 5 years ago

Followed the links to here: https://github.com/bluenumberfoundation/humanid-documentatio...

To make it more difficult to brute force, when generating the humanID Account ID, we will concatenate the phone number with a Salt Key (another string that will be appended before the hash).
sha512hash ( Salt_Key + Phone Number ) = Hash Result

This is a complete joke (a SHA-512 of a phone number can be brute-forced on a typical computer in a fraction of a second). I doubt the rest of the protocols and cryptography are any better.

Also, phone numbers are not unique identifiers for people. Real people, malicious or not, have multiple or no phone numbers (or phone numbers that can’t receive SMS). I haven’t found a clear answer yet as to whether SMS verification is the only proof step but it seems like that’s the case.

TylerE• 5 years ago

That's why there is a salt?

tyingq2• 5 years ago

"The Salt Key is the combination of lowercase letters, uppercase letters and numbers. For SHA512 hash which is 64-bits, the recommended salt key is 64-bits."

And the salt itself appears to be private, and I assume, unique per user.

So, I'm in no position to say whether that's "good enough", but it's at least not something you're going to brute force in a few seconds.

dheera3• 5 years ago

Well if you have 100K users you can still break through it in a day.

kevincox2• 5 years ago

How can it be unique per-user if it is used to calculate the account ID? There is a circular dependency here.

extrapickles2• 5 years ago

If the database leaked, the salt would become known. A truly anonymous system should still be just as effective if the entire DB is known to an attacker.

Assuming there are on the order of 10 billion valid phone-numbers (there could be on the order of 100 billion depending on how far down the rabbit hole of international numbers you go). A GTX 1080 can do SHA512 @ ~1 billion/sec[0]. This means it will take 10 seconds (longer if you have a >11 digit number) to recover each phone number. This is fast enough that you don't need to bother hashing the phone book, you just brute force every possible number.

I would expect the napkin math to come out to years of compute to unmask someone in the face of a DB leak, not seconds or minutes.

[0] https://gist.github.com/epixoip/a83d38f412b4737e99bbef804a27...

hinkley• 5 years ago

sha512 isn't 64 bits. It's 512 bits. That's why it's called sha512.

But then the example salt they give is neither 64 bits nor 64 bytes. More like 26 bytes. I don't know who is more confused. Me, or them.

alisonkisk3• 5 years ago

Salt is not per user, nor is it a cryptographic secret. Salt is only used to make rainbow tables not scale across multiple databases, so each database needs its own rainbow table calculation.

"Pepper" is per user, but widely regarded as unhelpful because, again, it's not cryptographically secure if the database is hacked.

ShakataGaNai• 5 years ago

I was curious about this exact thing when I saw they hashed a phone number (of all the easy to guess things). Yes a Salt makes it improbably to rainbow table... but if their database ever gets leaked then everyone is toast. It'll only take, as you said, seconds per account to brute force once the salt is exposed.

dheera3• 5 years ago

Also, goddamn, please stop using phone numbers as ID numbers.

No, I don't want to give every service my phone number.

humanID blocks automated accounts, cyber-bullies, trolls, and freeloaders

Yeah, stop right there. Please don't block automation. That blocks innovation in accessibility. Go after the bullies and trolls but please don't try to differentiate a human and robot user of your UI, because some humans need a robot to help them.

floatingatoll6• 5 years ago

What externally-verifiable ID verification mechanism are you willing to participate, in order to demonstrate that you are not a sockpuppet? Phone numbers are crossed off the list, so at least we don't have to debate whether they're acceptable or not, and email addresses obviously aren't useful for preventing sockpuppets either. What else is left that is acceptable to you?

1vuio0pswjnm7• 5 years ago

"Anonymous Login"

Is that some sort of oxymoron.

userbinator• 5 years ago

That was my first thought upon seeing the title too. The whole idea of logging in is to show proof of your identity, which is exactly the opposite of being anonymous.

davidmurdoch• 5 years ago

Yup. I didn't log in to a Google account for a while (like a year or two, maybe?). So Google just gave my old Google Voice number to someone else.

inter_netuser3• 5 years ago

Telegram requires verification by phone. Despite that measure, spam from thousands of bots is not uncommon.

Phone numbers barely help.

What really works though, is microtransactions. I have not seen any spam in chats where you are required to pay even a tiny fraction of a cent to join (1/64000th of a cent).

Sleepytime2• 5 years ago

This is the idea behind hashcash[1], but instead of currency it's just a small proof of work. Some nominal PoW (a few seconds?) to bypass the spam filter smells like it would be remarkably effective at cutting down spam.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

rkagerer• 5 years ago

Some of the language on their landing page is awkward or incorrect, eg:

This, user data can never be leaked, stolen, or sold.

humanID’s login is frictionless done in seconds – try yourself!

If they can't even proofread their homepage content, it doesn't surprise me there are holes in their code.

kgeist• 5 years ago

Phone numbers are also recycled.

godelski2• 5 years ago

How's it actually work? How are you actually making the login anonymous? If a website is able to fingerprint us then are we still anonymous?

fapi19747• 5 years ago

To be clear - this is not my product - I was pitched on it as a potential user.

kevincox2• 5 years ago

It seems like SMS-based auth, with the "gimmick" that I trust this website instead of your website.

So already I won't use it because I don't want to authenticate via SMS. It also raises the immediate question of what happens when I change my phone number?

But why should I trust this website more than your website? Unless your website is fully zero-trust it is probably better to trust you to throw away my phone number than handing my phone number to this company and other data to your company.

freeopinion2• 5 years ago

The site is toast, so I can't read how it works, but I will comment in general on 3rd-party auth.

I refuse to use sites that require 3rd-party auth. If I have a problem logging in to your site, I want to reach out to you and get it resolved. I don't want you to say, "We don't have any ability to address auth issues on our own site. Take it up with <completely unrelated site>." I don't want my account with you to be suspended because I had a falling out with Facebook or Google or anybody else that is not you.

ec1096852• 5 years ago

Any site using third party sign in should treat it as just one way of logging in. The verified email these providers return should always be able to login you in as well.

ziml77• 5 years ago

I feel like that should be an option for third party login. I shouldn't have to give out my email address if I don't want to.

dang• 5 years ago

The submitted title was "My company got pitched on anonymous sign in – curious to hear pros and cons". Submitters: please don't do that. If you want to add a question or a gloss on an article, that's fine, but do so by posting a comment to the thread.

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

RileyJames• 5 years ago

Hmm this is something I’d like to implement in some sites. I’ve been considering integrating with something like ActivityPub to enable user accounts without “more user accounts”.

Minimum viable user & social features.

iou• 5 years ago

Why has this been up-voted so much? This is so bad compared to something modern like WebAuthN

kwhitefoot• 5 years ago

Our Vision: One Digital Identity per Human – both Anonymous and Accountable

Why would I want to use something that allowed me only one identity?

And if I have to give away my mobile number it is hardly one-click.

And a lot of the stuff that other comments have mentioned!

aww_dang• 5 years ago

Expect more pushes for a fixed digital identity. Check the id2020 initiative. Gatekeepers are not fans of the pseudonyms we've been using since the early days of the Internet.

Our Vision: One Digital Identity per Human – both Anonymous and Accountable...billions of fake user accounts undermining our societies.

ANEDI• 5 years ago

There is interesting project called Idena.

Prove you are human with validation as public turing test done on blockchain. There is simple one click login and it's used now on Gitcoin.

Website: https://www.idena.io/

supergirl• 5 years ago

a lot of marketing and no substance. is it just like a jwt?

bastianpurrer3• 5 years ago

one of the humanID founders here. Very much appreciate the feedback, and also appreciate those that addressed concerns before we could. Always open to those that want to help fix any technical issues they might find - the team is fully nonprofit & open source, you're more than welcome to help!

Also, to be clear, while the site was down for an hour, the login never was, as we have set that up independently from the site.

ChrisArchitect• 5 years ago

clicked the 'Try' option. Got to the part asking for a phone number. Closed.

One-Click Anonymous Login

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