[cap-talk] Can webkeys solve the MySpace problem?

[Karp, Alan H]

MySpace is in trouble.  In a recent test, fake accounts for supposed 12 and 13 year olds drew over 100 contacts from sexual predators.  Legislators are in an uproar, demanding that something be done.  Texas refused to join other states in a recent agreement with MySpace because it did not include an age verificiation mechanism.

Clearly, verifying the age of millions of kids is impractical unless the verification is distributed.  Fortunately, we have what we need, the schools.  Here's a poorly thought out approach.  Each state board of education is granted a webkey to yurl.net (Where else?) that returns a webkey for each schoold district in the state.  That webkey allows the district to obtain a webkey for each school in the district.  Each school uses that webkey to get a webkey for each student.  We could stop there, but people seem to like logins, so the student's webkey authorizes setting up a MySpace account.

Special rules will be needed for home schooled students, but they can present themselves physically to any school to get a webkey.  Tracking the set of keys from the state to district to school to student will allow revoking any keys that are found out to have been used by adults.  Should a school's or a district's webkey be compromised, the kids who derived their accounts from it may have to be recertified via a new webkey.

________________________
Alan Karp
Principal Scientist
Virus Safe Computing Initiative
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
1501 Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(650) 857-3967, fax (650) 857-7029
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Alan_Karp