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this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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Programming
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Its possible to implement something that hides your actual age from a website, but the tricky part is hiding what website you're visiting from an identity provider.
Let's walk through a wrong solution to get some fundamentals. If you're familiar with SSO login, a website makes a request token to login the user and makes claims (these request pieces of user information.) One could simply request "is the user older than 18?" And that hides the actual age and user identity.
The problem is how do you hide what website you're going to from the identity provider? In most SSO style logins, you need to know the web page to redirect back to the original site. Thus leaking information about websites you probably don't want to share.
The problem with proposals that focus on the crypto is that they actually have to be implemented using today's browser and HTTP standards to get people to use them.
Could it be maybe a token signed by the verifying party living permanently on your computer (like cookie), and websites can request permission to query it to verify the age?
The hard part is browsers. Cookies and local storage are limited by the origin URL. You need it explicitly set on the domains you intend to visit, but those domains don't know your age. The one that knows the age is the identity provider, but it can't set it for all domains. There are other techniques that you could use, like a smart card combined with a browser extension to do local based user info attestation, but those are difficult to manage at a nation scale and I suspect people will struggle with them, though there are some countries that do have national smart cards (e.g. Estonia.)