Crossposted from Lesswrong. Written entirely by me, not by LLMs.
Previous: A Quick Intro to Ring Signatures
Once again, if you take nothing else from this post, try to understand that ring signatures require no cooperation between alleged signers other than sharing a public key in advance.
The only real ring signature usage that you can see in the wild is the cryptocurrency Monero. Ring signatures make it very difficult to trace Monero transactions, unlike Bitcoin. That’s not very helpful to whistleblowers though, what they need is an existing network of persistent keypairs tied to identities of real people.
A couple years ago I started a small project to produce a Mac app called ZebraSign that lets users create and verify ring signatures. The keys it generates aren’t usable for anything else, which means that any network based on that app would be running largely on altruism and magnanimity, which is less reliable than self-interest. I considered making the keys compatible with PGP which might have helped a bit since then any PGP user would be available for adding to rings, but either way, I foresaw a long and uphill battle in getting people to use it.[1] Fortunately, that may all be unnecessary.
Recently I found out about the open protocol NOSTR (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relay). I initially thought Nostr was just another decentralized Twitter competitor like Mastodon, but then I read that Nostr users generate and control their own private/public keypairs! That's an absolute game changer, it means there are thousands of active online accounts just waiting to be implicated in a ring signature. I did some searching and found that someone else had the same idea, and they created a basic command line interface for computing ring signatures using Nostr keys. It’s called Nostringer. Be warned that it has not yet received a formal security audit, so it’s not currently safe for real use.
I want there to be a graphical user interface for Nostringer so that people can use it without the command line. I’m talking to some rust developers and drafting small grant proposals. Contact me if you’re interested.
I don't expect a bunch of Anthropic and OpenAI employees to join Nostr and open themselves up to ring signatures. But if somehow they did decide to do that, it would probably only happen after a bunch of other people (perhaps like you) did it first. Also, AI development is not the only setting that could use more transparency and fewer Spirals of Silence. Maybe the jet manufacturer you work for is cutting corners, maybe your CEO is committing billions of dollars of fraud, maybe your weekly meetup or dance class has some creeps, and so on[2].
Here is a ring-signed message provably written by either me or famous whistleblower Edward Snowden, posted from a pseudonymous account. Below is a screenshot. Given the circumstances, you will readily guess that this one was me, but you cannot prove it cryptographically. Needless to day, in real scenarios there won't always be such an obvious interpretation--indeed, that's the whole point.
...Okay, but should you in particular wade into these waters? If you are thinking about it, I recommend first spending a few minutes learning about the Nostr protocol, the relays, clients, remote signers, and so on. After that, here are some additional things to consider:
None of these things involve ring signatures, but they involve letting users be more flexible with their credibility and anonymity.
I also never got around to getting the Apple certification, so you have to override the standard Mac security settings to use it.
These are not my best examples. My best examples are situations I've encountered in real life, but I don't want to include those in this post for various reasons.
This is similar to how websites can see which traffic comes from which accounts or IP addresses. It’s essential for preventing abuse, but it’s a concern for those who have valid reasons to read or write pseudonymously. This isn't a hypothetical consideration: I have pseudonymously posted some highly controversial writing online, and I made sure to use a different sign-up email and route the traffic through a proxy, just so that I wouldn’t have to worry about hostile or gossipy moderators.
For more discussion about Nostr's surveillance concerns and what could be done about it, see: Proving You Belong Without Saying Who You Are and Private Relay Connections: ZK Solutions for Nostr.
Paid relays are already a normal part of the ecosystem.
