[Cryptography] Using the NFC chip of the Passport to do Proof-of-Work

[Jan Lindemann]

I came up with a funny idea on how to create an egalitarian POW mechanism
that would let everyone have the same or a very similar "hashing rate".
To keep it short, it uses the active authentication feature of the NFC chip
contained within passports.
This feature consists in having a private key contained within the chip
signing a challenge to prove that it hasn't been cloned.
So my proposal is to use this signing functionality instead of using the
typical SHA256 or Scrypt hashing algorithms.
Passports have likely a similar singing rate, and people are likely to only
have one passport.

More details can be found here if you are interested:
https://medium.com/@janmoritz_48488/using-the-nfc-chip-of-the-passport-to-do-proof-of-work-b77e1a5343a1
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20200503/542c28c0/attachment.htm>