Why aren't cryptographic ring signatures used as a solution to the "fake news" problem?
More specifically, I'm referring to the recent troubling trend of news stories breaking with some crazy sensational story where there's a key detail that's attributed to an "anonymous source familiar with the matter" or whatever.
I sometimes look up why these journalists insist I should trust an anonymous source and it always boils down to some varation of "trust the journalist to trust the source" Essentially blind faith with all the discretion at the hands of the journalist. How can I be assured that an someone unscruplous isn't just making it up to make a name for themselves? We have no way of verifying that an anonymous source even exists.
Wouldn't cryptographic ring signatures be a more transparent solution to this? Why shouldn't something like this be a completely trustless process?
Say, for political leaks, what if twitter implemented public GPG keys and included it on every teitter profile? You could easily sign a ring signature and verify to the public that yes, it is actually a "high-ranking goverment official" who sad that.
We already have CSPAN. No politician will take time to verify everything he/she has said this way unless they're typing it through computer with some fancy text to speech for everyone they are speaking to.
Henry Mitchell
Well, barring some law that says people who hold office must have an asymmetrical public key pair, just make it integrated with social media already used. Hence, part of standard twitter sign up that you get a private and public PGP key. Politicans like to tweet about stupid shit, right?
Liam Lee
And I'm sorry for being a brainlet, how does in any way certify that the person is actually a high ranking official?
Wouldn't just a good old video statement work better?
Gabriel Ward
Another boner that you've made is assuming they will verify everything they say and not just what they want other people to hear while whistling a different tune behind closed doors. It's completely unenforceable.
Owen Carter
Ring signatures basically work like a one-way mathematical function, similar to normal asymmetric crypto.
But ring signature systems take a list of public keys, combine it with a secret key of one of those public keys to create a message digest. The message digest can be checked against the public keys to verify that it was signed with one of the private keys of those public keys without revealing which one it is.
Hunter Evans
If you're talking about whether or not the leaker is leaking in good faith, that's not really relevant to the problem at hand: how do you credibly leak a secret while remaining anonymous without requiring people to put their trust in a third party actor with nebulous motives? And how can the public verify that these leaks are true and not just the equivent of "my dad works for nintendo"?
Michael Sullivan
>non-repudiation >anonymous practice brainlet
Jacob Foster
>a·non·y·mous >/əˈnänəməs/Submit >adjective >adjective: anonymous >(of a person) not identified by name
Justin Ross
selecting a single word without context is not how communication through a common language works, brainlet
Brayden Sanders
The entire point of ring signatures is that they ARE repudiable you fucking mong. With a ring signature, you can say "that could've been any of the other 500 people in that ring. Not me" That is the exact definition of repudiability
Imagine being this much of a brainlet and thinking you're smart. Yikes.
Zachary Phillips
So you want the leaker to be anonymous, but the group from which he is from to not be anonymous? Sounds like a dangerous way to troll. In the case of a politician ring, you will start seeing politicians deliberately trolling the system and pushing false information. The main problem with fake news isn't implementation, it's people.
Michael Baker
I wasn't speaking of leakers at all. You're getting into a completely different discussion. Do I give a shit if Snowden has a key that I can use to verify something he said? Does the key mean he's telling the truth? It does not.
Joseph James
You misunderstand then. I am not speaking to the veracity of what the leakers are saying, I'm talking about the people who act as intermediaries for leakers and how a member of the public can verify that a person who claimed to have spoke to an "anonymous high-ranking government official" actually did speak to someone without implictly trusting the intermedary's word on it. Nothing about the content of the leaks.
In your Snowden analogy, it's more like: imagine if Snowden chose to remain anonymous (somehow). Glenn Greenwald still reports on it. How do we verify that the person Glenn Greenwald talked to actually was NSA beyond just trusting Glenn Greenwald?
Sebastian Parker
Most sources are just made up to match the narrative. Even if you had a real key you can still just make stuff up. Or you gave your key away. Technology isn't the answer to this issue. Personal credulity is.
Jack Butler
Beyond using this as a rubber stamp given by the person that made the statement, it still would not prevent fake news. You must consider the source as well as the key. A better solution would be to have CSPAN put their entire archive and any future recordings online for everyone to see. This way you get it directly from the horses mouth.
Christopher Sanchez
The US government has a vested interest in not having any of its shit leaked. Why would they adopt a ring signature when they could instead make everyone use an individual GPG key so that they couldn't anonymously leak information?