msc placeholder: something with passport-grade digital identity, DAO voting, ?

[synctext]

Exploring master thesis topic! With Honors bsc, also msc With Honors potential! Only thesis grade needs to be high. Zero courses to be done. 12 months of msc dedicated focus. Honor thesis example. 15 ECTS ahead of schedule, 2 exemptions (ETH-Z exchange). Can you also use Q4 for msc? Friday 27 June defence? Or Monday 30 June 2025. {Friday 29 Aug 2025 might be the lastest defense date (Q5). }

Science by With Honors master student cardinal example: Achieving Sybil-Proofness in Distributed Work Systems
Paid trip to Hawaii conference, Financial Cryptography: Paying the Guard: an Entry-Guard-based Payment System for Tor. Japan

Official embedding at government agency? (AFM,KvK,APG,RvIG,FIN, ???) Focus, bit of hands-on, not just paper stuff, connected to the real world. Has already deep knowledge of digital identity, eIDAS, and ledger stuff around trust. Understands the gap between running code and large-scale usage.

Time-line: due to hard work in bsc phase, 1 quarter ahead of schedule. Start Q1 2024 or any other time desired. Brainstorm of direction:

0. Digital identity and e-voting. Read the foundations from 1938 on this topic: Voting Rights of Capital Stock and Shareholders. As a first step to the re-birth of online democracy we work towards online voting during stockholder meetings. See APG work in this direction. Furthermore, we have an operational system for democratic control of money. Our DAO system for governance of collective Bitcoin-based capital is dependant on a Sybil-tolerance identity solution for voters.

• Trail with stockholder voting. Linkage to theoretical models. Integrating voting theory and roll call analysis: A framework. also Voting tools in group decision support systems: theory and implementation
• Trail with Bitcoin-DAO capital, music investment, EBSI-wallet, and passport-grade eIDAS 1.0 or 2.0 legal identity.

1. Digital identity. You just explore that for 2 weeks, do some reading. Note that picking an exact subject is also part of the thesis process. No problem to take 3-6 weeks to explore exact directions in a learn-by-doing approach! So it's coding with a purpose... Like, reading NFC chips of your ID card within Superapp (has {possibly broken now} support for reading Dutch ID cards).

2. Digital identity for companies. Dutch Chamber of Commerce is active there. Your thesis could be to realise their ID system for legal entities. Please read this thesis from our lab: master thesis - zero trust architecture for legal entities #6786 (comment)
   This is the right time to do prototyping of an EBSI-based solution suitable for a large-scale trail (by others). Only thing we need is identity and signature binding + feature to sign any .PDF file. Nothing more :-)
   Any legal document then becomes irrefutable digitally signed. Accountants then can switch to the digital age, instead of old skool signatures.

3. The offline digital Euro is almost finished. 4th Juli graduation.
   https://github.com/user-attachments/files/15786742/Master_s_Thesis___Leon_Kempen.3.pdf
   Please browse this work and think if you want to consider doing something similar, with more security and/or privacy. Double spending is very hard plus trusted party complication.

4. trusted servers are needed for upcoming EU digital identity. These EBSI servers are the root-of-trust.Dive into SIEM tools for security of these servers. Makes sure attacks get detected, no log wipes possible. Then think of ideas to make 1 tool even better, performance analysis, graphs in thesis, and graduate. https://logz.io/blog/open-source-siem-tools/

5. Distributed Edge-AI. Current student Quinten van Eijs is graduating. AI-based Youtube client alternative: BeyondFederated - truly decentralised learning at the edge #7254

Practical sprint ideas: compile superapp from scratch, with EBSI data vault: #6023 (comment)

[synctext]

Architecting leaderless organisations

This thesis aims to invent a new method for large-scale human organisation, specifically leaderless socio-economic organisations with evolutionary capability. We will use the experimental economists methodology to explore the future of how our global economy may be organised, who will own it, and if taxes will be paid. Starting point is the automated online concept known as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO). We define a DAO as a leaderless organisation for organising any socio-economic activity. This emerging field holds the potential to provide the organisation principle for our upcoming AI-robot economy. We aim to explore primitive self-governance of DAOs, evolutionary principles, and economic activity under direct democratic control. This aims requires advancing the state-of-the-art in digital identity, programmable money, and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAO). DAO science is still an emerging immature field with several open problems such as trusted infrastructure nodes, the founders with most decision making power, and rich-get-richer dynamics in general. The scientific problems to solve are inequality, democratic deficiency, design for evolution, and complex self-organisation. Prior technologies such such as smart contracts provide code execution at high cost without reliance on clouds or trusted third parties. However, a large "reality gap" remains with prior proposed architectures and realities of cybersecurity, complex self-organising systems, and self-evolving systems.
The state-of-the-art within digital identity is insufficient to support online voting at scale. This thesis builds upon prior work from Delft University, such as the root-of-trust for the upcoming passport-grade digital identity called EBSI/EDIC under eIDAS 2.0 legislation. Furthermore, we re-use the learnings from our programmable digital Euro trail with live connectivity to the IBAN banking system. Finally, the operational fully decentralised artist investment and music distribution platform will be re-used to minimize engineering effort of business logic. Central research questions are:

1. devise a digital identity architecture to enable DAO voting
2. devise voting principles for DAO governance and democratic control of programmable money
3. devise a security architecture for upgrades and self-evolution of a DAO

Literature

• Unstoppable DAOs for web3 disruption
• DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) v DINOs (DAO in Name Only or Decentralised in Name Only)
• EBSI overview

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ToDo: find honor level master thesis topic (2sep 2024 - Aug 2025)
Honor track potential (some course grades still pending)
Thesis draft working title: "Realisation of online democracy: DAO e-voting using zero-knowledge constructs"

• Bulletproofs: Short proofs for confidential transactions and more
• A secure end-to-end verifiable e-voting system using zero knowledge based blockchain
• Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge Arguments for Voting
• Marlin: Preprocessing zkSNARKs with universal and updatable SRS
• Security analysis of the Estonian internet voting system
• Chaintegrity: blockchain-enabled large-scale e-voting system with robustness and universal verifiability

Requirement: planetary-scale voting system (few billion users, avoid Sybils, no single eligible voters database)
Theory + systems building balance: real voting, real Bitcoin, real EBSI wallet, real Bitcoin hardware procurement.

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ToDo: make a list of 3 With Honors msc projects. Could spend 3 months on this if Q4 is also available. 80% of bsc thesis project where based upon Machine learning{AI}. Has ML fatigue 🙅

• EBSI data vault: for all ideas below
• Fighting misinformation using passport-grade trust
• Addressing misinformation, fake profiles, and bots using zero-knowledge proofs
• On-device machine learning with collaborative networking
• Byzantine learning with strong identity
  • SSI− FL: Self-sovereign identity based privacy-preserving federated learning
• Reviving digital democracy using passport-grade identity
• Self-sovereign biometrics for fraud-free migrant registries
  • CVPR paper! SelfIs: Self-Sovereign Biometric IDs {concept: Cancelable Bloom Generation}
  • Biometric-Based Password Management
  • DT-SSIM: A decentralized trustworthy self-sovereign identity management framework
  • Revocable fingerprint biotokens: Accuracy and security analysis
  • Robust distance measures for face-recognition supporting revocable biometric tokens
  • An information-theoretic analysis of revocability and reusability in secure biometrics
  • HeartBeatID - heartbeat based biometrics
• Passport-grade identity attribute verification without privacy leakage

First sprint, for next meeting: find & read related work about on-device biometrics and revocable. Why? It is both privacy-respecting and strong security.

update:

• interest goes to voting and strong ID
• thus related work using El Gamal + permisionless DAO
  • Blind signature schemes based on elgamal signature for electronic voting: a survey
  • Efficient cryptographic protocol design based on distributed El Gamal encryption
  • 10k people from WallStreetBets putting in 10k with democratic investment process
  • ToDo: read and understand 10-15 papers in this area. Please put links in your issue

[Eragoneq]

Reviewed papers:

Insight Into Voting in DAOs: Conceptual Analysis and a Proposal for Evaluation Framework

• General proposed framework for evaluation
  • SEED for Security, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Decentralization
• Since the consequences of security issues are serious, security should be the primary consideration when designing a DAO voting mechanism. A secure voting mechanism is the basis of the stability in DAOs.
  • Good fundamentals for the cyber-sec based thesis
• Provides and evaluates some existing voting systems

E-Voting With Blockchain: An E-Voting Protocol with Decentralisation and Voter Privacy

• General one of the first established blockchain based e-voting system
• Uses a Central Authority, thus it's not exactly applicable for DAO
• Promotes permissioned blockchain use
• Might be more applicable to general democratic elections

DAO Decentralization: Voting-Bloc Entropy, Bribery, and Dark DAOs

• Introduced metric for decentralization
  • Could be connected more formally with the SEED framework and also uses some greek letters so overall interesting
  • Still theoretical as we cannot express users utility exactly, but could be used to analyze the security more in-depth
• Provides more examples of security issues related to decentralization
• Nice cited blog post: https://hackingdistributed.com/2018/07/02/on-chain-vote-buying/

From Technology to Society: An Overview of Blockchain-Based DAO

• How blockchain technology may be used by the society
• Talks about problems when trying to incorporate DAOs
  • Consider irl usecases for the voting technology

Blockchain for Electronic Voting System—Review and Open Research Challenges

• Definitions of problems that need to be tackled by the voting systems
  • Detailed descriptions and a lot of properties
• As mentioned in future work, due to public nature of blockchain we cannot fulfill full privacy and secrecy, thus cannot be used in real elections
  • Finding a scheme that allows to mix the votes anonymously would be required

A Liquid Democracy Enabled Blockchain-Based Electronic Voting System

• An example of an implementation of the blockchain electronic vote system
• Uses a permission Hyperledger Blockchain and centralized authorities
• Very basic, but provides a more engineering approach

ElectionBlock: An Electronic Voting System using Blockchain and Fingerprint Authentication

• Another case study which implements an electronic vote system
• Also uses a newly-created permissioned blockchain for the election
• Provides a more detailed process for benchmarking and analysis of the prototype

Internet voting in Estonia 2005–2019: Evidence from eleven elections

• Analysis of the i-voting system implemented in Estonia
• Provides an in-depth look into the effects of electronic voting in the political aspect
  • Seems that since the implementation the trust stays within the same range, thus people don't get more comfortable with the system after longer time
  • The trust problem is being leveraged by the certain parties to dispute the election outcome
  • Legal framework is as important as technical one
• "Creating protocols that would provide better evidence for the i-voter while not enabling vote selling is currently an active area of research."
• i-voting is more convenient and more popular, but the trust and election turnout does not change

E-Voting Meets Blockchain: A Survey

• Literature review of the existing systems that have been proposed and implemented by governments and private sector companies
  • Provides a lot of technological ideas and references to existing solutions

Privacy-Preserving E-Voting System Supporting Score Voting Using Blockchain

• A system using ZKP to create private elections
• Has a good performance results
• Seems like a good idea to implement and create a similar system, as it also has a nice strong theoretical fundamentals

General thoughts:

• Votes have to be bound certain entity, different systems might use 1 token 1 vote, 1 person 1 vote etc. Depends on the requirements. Might be interesting to look into merit/expertise based voting, assign subject to the proposals and allow some votes to have higher weight. Connected with some identity framework and extendable properties
• Analyzing classical voting theory might be a good next step as well, finding a way to bridge the DAOs with the centralized elections and voting would be a great achievement. It would also be an important element in actually defining the "democracy" part of it, since there might be a reasoning in literature that explains some slight paradigm shifts or changes to the standard democratic process
• Often a problem with electronic systems and votes is with a trust. Even when we design a system that secures privacy of users and handles data in a proper way, the users might still not trust it due to lack of transparency. With real life ballots we can see that they are not marked and as such our vote cannot be distinguished, which is a lot harder to prove with electronic system. Analyzing the existing real life systems and the way the trust is distributed there might be interesting to note down.

For cum-laude potential:

• Combining ZKP and generally more advanced cryptography with a design of a distributed system to allow for easy and convenient working
• Add a strong base that takes privacy and security first in the system, while still maintaining high efficiency
• Use tables and evaluation frameworks, graphs for the design structure and equations for the cryptography
• Allow for intercompatibility with EBSI/EIDAS framework
• Have a layer of strong identity to avoid sybils, and still maintain privacy and anonymity

EBSI Node map

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• Awesome topic 🎉 Worked on this in previous century 😁
  • No DAO dream without fixing ID layer
  • No global democracy without Sybil Solution
  • Sybil attack is responsible for fake news, double spending, and death of e-voting 😞
  • unsolved and very hard problem 😭
    • 1 billion people lack a government identity provider
    • Only option is invasive: Show Me Your Passport methodology
    • online voting during stockholder meetings
• Open Information Pools from 24 years ago: The democratic and reputation based policy can be combined into a system where votes of users are weighted with their reputation, and (dis)agreements influence the reputation of the submitter. A problem with the democratic policy is that users cannot always be objective and independant, for example the majority can determine that false popular belief is true.
• All this physical meeting stuff is extremely naive. Impossibility result? see the ancient stuff High-barrier to participation.
  • Sybils are unsolved, our lab has studied this stuff for 25 years 👀
  • What realistic assumptions can we make?
  • Culture things. Parties and key singing parties? Sign the ID of this newborn baby? Look into this orb?
• focus on a single layer with a single purpose: proof-of-personhood ?
  • new name for existing principle
  • re-popularised the hippy PGP tech into the age of the crypto bro
  • Positive framing: proof-of-personhood tries to solve an unsolved problem we forgot about.
    • It assumes people care enough about their digital identity to show up somewhere.
    • Sadly, we know from parliamentary elections that people do not all show up at a controlled physical location at a mandated day.
  • Instead of physical locations you could share encrypted biometrics and identify duplicates in encrypted space 🤯
  • Our experimental work using biometrics
    • Our lab 2017 work: Portable Trust: biometric-based authentication and blockchain storage for self-sovereign identity systems
    • PETS 2023: Detect Your Fingerprint in Your Photographs: Photography-based Multi-Feature Sybil Detection. Not the actual finger, as we used in our work ☝️ Distinct style of online drug-dealers 🤣 vendors’ writing styles have been utilized; while in the latter [27, 28], vendors’ distinct photography style (e.g., the product images that vendors have uploaded) have been utilized to detect the Sybil accounts of the same vendors
    • Our early 2017 work and 2023 PETS idea can be generalised!
• Design of a Sybil-secure identity system
  • Irrefutably show that state-issued IDs or physical parties are not needed for fake ID prevention
  • Proof-of-principle to show that selfie4Sybil is realistic
  • Probably requires global consensus on selfie format: face, right-hand thumb, iris, heartbeat, or DNA
• Digital remote enrolment requirement
  • frictionless requirement ⚡
    • End-to-end verifiable requirement
    • Full accountability requirement
    • Proof that my vote is counted
    • Trust and transparency that there are no sybil votes
      • A systematic approach to study electoral fraud
      • https://ballotpedia.org/Votes_cast_in_the_names_of_deceased_people
      • Deliver the vote! Micromotives and macrobehavior in electoral fraud
  • That leaves biometrics or selfie as the only viable option for trustworthy e-voting (as we saw in 2017)
  • Still very hard to realise and cultural acceptance
  • For example, can take 15 years for majority to adopt Internet voting in Estonia 2005–2019: Evidence from eleven elections
• Zero-Knowledge Proof to the rescue 🚑 🆘 ⛑️
  • Zero-Knowledge Proof of Distinct Identity: a Standard-compatible Sybil-resistant Pseudonym Extension for C-ITS
  • Zero-Knowledge Proof-of-Identity: Sybil-Resistant, Anonymous Authentication on Permissionless Blockchains and Incentive Compatible, Strictly Dominant Cryptocurrencies
  • Cancelable iris biometric
  • Privacy-preserving eID derivation to self-sovereign identity systems with offline revocation
  • Revocable and offline-verifiable self-sovereign identities
  • Privacy preserving multi-factor authentication with biometrics
  • BioZero: An Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Decentralized Biometric Authentication Protocol on Open Blockchain
  • Privacy-preserving similarity evaluation and application to remote biometrics authentication

Thesis ToDo: advise to keep it in the stockholder realm, leave out emotional parliamentary elections. Use selfies as foundation to identify Sybils. Primitive is you take a selfie, has not trust yet, stockholder verify each other, incentive to fight fraud together, strengthened by each physical meeting with another stockholder, build web-of-trust with verifiers, all stockholders need to verify all identities for 100% trust and 100% Sybil proof. For each verification level you can provide a theorical proof of Sybil protection. Since 1983 we know that reaching consensus with n nodes when taking byzantine failures into account takes a certain amount of messages and rounds. Node validation can be translated into a graph problem if we loosing our assumptions. The identities we validated are non-Sybil plus the identities they validated (one-hop trust, k-hop trust).

Deliverable: problem description (for cyber security thesis green light)

[Eragoneq]

Hmm

• Iris detection seems unreliable with smartphone camera
  • Might still be better than some other biometrics
• Spoofing is still a huge problem, a photo could be used to impersonate someone
• Trusted hardware is required, and reliable check of the iris being actually "live"

WorldCoin

Why is it bad?

• Trust is always an issue, how to verify any side-effects and tampering in real life?
  • How do traditional systems solve it, when it comes to government ID?

Main drawbacks:

• It creates a unique way to generate a key, but not to handle it. Users can later transfer the "real" personhood to another entity, thus act upon them
• Question of trust is based on the centrally created hardware to perform the scanning, the general design is open sourced, but there is no easy verification
• Proof of Personhood is not that useful on it's own, all the related credentials make it relevant in use
• How to address direct issues with the iris?

link

EU

• EIDAS is still an interesting angle
  • Use NFC layer from the new IDs
  • Get all the data and create an entry in wallet app
  • PL ID also has photo in NFC chip, thus I can be used with face recognition for local storage
  • No easy/open-source access to the NFC chip data
  • Create hash for both and verify that face from ID and taken now match
    • Seems almost the same as the usual software KYC solutions
    • For now only the higher layer of private wallet differs
  • EUDI Wallet framework

Grand Idea

• Multidimensional trust framework
• We cannot easily decide what trust/identity provider would we choose
• Each one has advantages and disadvanteges
• We can piggyback on top of all the ideas and create a single framework to allow for use of any
  • Gov ID / EUDI
  • Worldcoin
  • Real-life meetings
  • Biometric framework (?)
  • Reputation system
• Each of the providers would have certain properties, that could be voted on and updated based on the real capabilities
• Similar to cipher suite in TLS, we could choose Identity provider suite
  • Different identities would allow be given different levels of integrity etc.
  • Direct inclusion of ZKP would allow users to directly control, which data would be provided to the asking entities
    • A framework of questions that the sites could ask based on permission levels
    • eg. Do you have gov ID? What is the UID of your gov ID? Are you older than 18? Do you have ? (Verifiable Credential)
    • Exact list of questions should be restricted, but extendable with some credentials
• A verification within the actual wallet could see whether the same ID has been used in multiple wallets
  • A system to disallow creating multiple wallets with the same kind of identity
  • This could in turn counter the issue of sybils in different systems
  • The problem becomes how can we verify the existance of the same ID in different wallets?
  • Synchronize/share the contents and check for their integrity without actually compormising on the privacy
• That would allow for easy integration of existing standards, while creating a new one that combines the ideas of the different ones
• Structure of the protocol/framework could be DAO/community based, which would allow for introduction of new providers based on the popular vote
• If integrated with some crypto network it could be made into a bounty system, where implementation of the given feature would have its bounty and then after the implementation the developer would receive the payout

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still struggling to see a simple With Honors idea

• meta wallet is complex
• Sybil is complex
• DAO is probably best ZKP context

Brainstorm:

• all forms of biometrics are too toxic to tough...?!?
• So, align with Rowdy on the DAO he is building
• add an identity solution for democratic voting, use EUwallet
• ZKP for privacy of vote.
  https://medium.com/@horizenlabs-tech/protecting-voter-privacy-in-daos-5fbddb295ae5