Can Attribute Based Encryption improve account recovery procedures on Steemit?
- Suppose instead of the owner designating a specific account recover agent, the owner instead defines a set of attributes which any account recovery agent from a pool of agents must have? So instead of "Steemit" the organization, it would be any organization which fits a specified criteria in terms of attributes.
- Suppose reputation could be an attribute. If an entity has a very good reputation, then they have access?
- Could any Steemit user encrypt their private key (owner key) in such a way that only an entity with the correct attributes can decrypt it? This way in the case where a password is lost, there is always a backup encrypted somewhere on the blockchain or in some private cloud which can be decrypted only by an entity with an exact set of attributes.
Attribute based encryption is interesting, but does it solve the problem of allowing accounts and account passwords to be recovered from a backup hosted in the cloud or in the Steemit blockchain itself? Can it allow for a recovery pool consisting of pseudo-anonymous entities to be selected for access based only on having the matching attributes chosen by the owner of the account?
References
Goyal, V., Pandey, O., Sahai, A., & Waters, B. (2006, October). Attribute-based encryption for fine-grained access control of encrypted data. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on Computer and communications security (pp. 89-98). Acm.