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Fraudsters of Lemmy, how would you commit fraud if governments embrace cryptography (programming.dev)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I saw this tiktok where this guy was talking about how he'd get his hands on real social security numbers.. this was a clip from a whole story he told about some criminal shit, I was too distracted by my thoughts on how to fix the exploits he used.

Block chains and cryptographic signatures would solve basically every one of his exploits. But regardless of the myriad of reasons as to why we won't adopt cryptography into American laws and bureaucracy, imagine if we did do everything involving government and policy in a cryptographically secure environment.

Imagine if everyone who is born gets assigned a gpg secret key signed by the government and that is your government ID for everything from opening a bank account to paying your taxes to claiming benefits. IMPO I think this is a perfect solution (iif you ignore the human element).

So my question is why wouldn't it be perfect, and what kind of exploits could bad actors use in a cryptographic bureaucracy?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

SSNs aren't tricky by design.

3 digit area number, 2 digit group number, 4 digit serial number.

https://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/geocard.html

So 1,000 combinations x 99 combinations (00 is not a choice) x 10,000 combinations.

990,000,000 potential SSNs. The only trick would be determining which ones are valid and which are not.

(0... 0... 0... - 0... 0... - 0... 0... 0... 2 - DAMN YOU ROOSEVELT!)

In any given area and group there are only 10,000 SSNs.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Shit you could probably just ask an AI chatbot for one and get a valid one it scrapped off the (dark)web. CC#s, too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

This is no longer the case. Any SSN issued after 2011 is fully randomized

Additionally, the following SSNs are always invalid:

Any SSN with "000", "666", or "900"-"999" in the former area number
Any SSN with "00" as the former group number
Any SSN with "0000" in the former serial number.