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

[Ángel]

On 2020-05-03 at 20:46 +0200, Jan Lindemann wrote:
> 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


Solar Lottery, with your employer making you surrender your passport to
them so they can benefit from it?


Ultimately, while your scheme should work for [normal] people, it fails
where governments may be involved, as they could mine using 'fake
passports' given they handle the passport master keys, ultimately moving
the key to a physical passport if needed.


[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Lottery