Video by The Linux Foundation via YouTube
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Proofs of Personhood: Managing Identity in the Age of AI – Drummond Reed, First Person Cooperative, Hart Montgomery, LFDT, Linux Foundation & Glenn Gore, Affinidi
“On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” the famous New Yorker comic goes, and that aphorism couldn’t ring truer today. In a world of AI agents, how can we be sure that we (or our agents) are interacting with other trusted, reputable systems and agents rather than impersonators or scammers? As open source maintainers, how can we be sure that new contributors are responsible, trustworthy individuals rather than adversarial state actors, helping to thwart compromises like the XZUtils attack? More generally, how do we deal with digital identity in the age of AI?
Our proposal is to use cryptographic proofs of personhood. These can be built from a decentralized, privacy-preserving reputation system, which we can build with tools and standards we have developed in several projects in LFDT. The session will cover some background on how proofs of personhood work, including privacy guarantees from cryptography (at a beginner level). Then, we will explain some applications in agentic AI and open source software maintenance. Finally, we will give an end-to-end demo of how our systems work in practice which will include audience participation in a “verifiable trust graph”.