Christian Doppler Laboratory for Private Digital Authentication in the Physical World - Digidow

n the proposed Christian Doppler Laboratory for Private Digital Authentication in the Physical World Digidow, we will associate each individual in the physical world with a personal agent in the digital world, facilitating their interactions with purely digital or digitally mediated services in both worlds. This proposal has two major issues to overcome. The first is a problem of massive scale, moving from current users of digital identity to the whole global population as the potential target group. The second is even more fundamental: by moving from trusted physical devices and centralized databases to a fully decentralized and infrastructure-based approach, we remove the currently essential elements of trust. We will solve these issues based on a fundamental model for private tracking of user location and behavior, implement it in personal agents with a complete chain of trust over multiple parties, and build yearly prototypes for benchmark use cases like border control. One main contribution is to take a holistic system-level perspective and to focus on the complexity of combining known methods from different sub-areas. Digidow is a laboratory rooted in ubiquitous computing, but has cross-cutting concerns with cryptography, networking, distributed systems, biometric authentication, machine learning, and code security, as well as social, legal, and ethical aspects.