I heard a security researcher say something like that a couple decades ago I think. The solution isn’t to “safeguard SSN’s”, it’s to make them pointless to have. Make it so you can’t do anything with them.
Like you point out: this one breach alone could be 1/4 of the us population.
For serious, emergency recovery, what I’d kind of like is some kind of service that performs physical validation of identity. Like, okay, say I lose my credentials to get into a bank account. So the bank gives me a recovery number, and I go down to the police station or something like that, and they do an identity check as part of that and sign off that you’re who you say you are. Then if you’re an identity thief, you’re liable to get arrested right there. Charge a fee to cover the costs. Have a federal government server have to cryptographically sign that they’re doing an identity validation so that the local cops can’t silently sign off on someone else as being you. That should only come up if you’ve lost your credentials to something serious and need to get access again.
As an intermediate form of access, I suppose 2FA, though I’m not totally thrilled about having my keystore on a device that’s network-connected, like a phone or computer, and has software getting put on it. Would rather have a physical USB-C dongle acting as a keystore with a small screen to identify the contents of a transaction being performed, and a physical “approve” button on the dongle. Plug that into a computer or smartphone or whatever. Maybe have different dongles for more- and less-sensitive stuff – one for credit card payments that you carry around, one for insurance or something that you don’t. Use pubkey authentication, not this shared-secret SSN stuff, so that if someone gets a company’s database, it’s useless in terms of letting them authenticate as you.
I heard a security researcher say something like that a couple decades ago I think. The solution isn’t to “safeguard SSN’s”, it’s to make them pointless to have. Make it so you can’t do anything with them.
Like you point out: this one breach alone could be 1/4 of the us population.
For serious, emergency recovery, what I’d kind of like is some kind of service that performs physical validation of identity. Like, okay, say I lose my credentials to get into a bank account. So the bank gives me a recovery number, and I go down to the police station or something like that, and they do an identity check as part of that and sign off that you’re who you say you are. Then if you’re an identity thief, you’re liable to get arrested right there. Charge a fee to cover the costs. Have a federal government server have to cryptographically sign that they’re doing an identity validation so that the local cops can’t silently sign off on someone else as being you. That should only come up if you’ve lost your credentials to something serious and need to get access again.
As an intermediate form of access, I suppose 2FA, though I’m not totally thrilled about having my keystore on a device that’s network-connected, like a phone or computer, and has software getting put on it. Would rather have a physical USB-C dongle acting as a keystore with a small screen to identify the contents of a transaction being performed, and a physical “approve” button on the dongle. Plug that into a computer or smartphone or whatever. Maybe have different dongles for more- and less-sensitive stuff – one for credit card payments that you carry around, one for insurance or something that you don’t. Use pubkey authentication, not this shared-secret SSN stuff, so that if someone gets a company’s database, it’s useless in terms of letting them authenticate as you.