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[–]raven9 6 insightful - 4 fun6 insightful - 3 fun7 insightful - 4 fun -  (3 children)

It's not really very awesome. It just means you have to sign into your email instead to receive the link... Steve Gibson invented a good solution but I have yet to see anyone implement it.

When you sign up, your app would generate an encryption key pair and send the public key to the host site. They store that key. In future, whenever you log in, you just enter your username. The site responds by using your public key to encrypt some random text which it sends to your app. Your app uses your private key to decrypt it and sends the plain text back to the site, encrypted with your private key. The host site decrypts it with the public key. If it matches the random text they encrypted and sent, you are logged in. No need to remember any passwords.

[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 4 fun4 insightful - 3 fun5 insightful - 4 fun -  (2 children)

Schmidts email approach has an advantage in that everyone already uses email and can understand it. I believe he's making a larger pitch that some casual accounts just don't need to be very secure.

[–]JasonCarswell 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Is there any interest in setting up a public/private key generating thing on SaidIt that could be used to log in on other platforms carrying our identities forward? Not sure it would matter too much with anons other than to verify you're the same "d3rr" on other platforms as on here, without getting direct communicated validation in comments or chat.

[–]raven9 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

You could create a key pair and publish the public key so then when you make a post anywhere else you could make a SHA1 hash of it and encrypt that and post it along with your post. Anyone with your public key could decrypt the hash and verify it matches their own hash of your post. That proves you are the one who encrypted it hence proof of the same identity. That would also mean other people could encrypt messages to you with your public key.