Disclosure: I’m one of the developers. SOV Network is open source (Apache-2.0), live and working today, and I’d love this community to try it and give honest feedback.
Proof of personhood usually means a company scanning your eyes with custom hardware and keeping the result. SOV Network takes a different route. Here is exactly what happens.
On your phone: you enrol with a palm scan and a live face check using your own phone’s camera. No photo of your palm or face is stored or sent anywhere. The app turns each scan into a set of numbers describing it (a feature vector, not a picture) and sends that over an encrypted link.
On the network: the node turns those numbers into a protected (cancelable) template and stores only that. Nodes compare templates for one purpose: making sure one human has exactly one account. There is no picture of anyone on the network.
Messages: end-to-end encrypted. Joining needs no phone number and no email. Nodes refuse plaintext and keep no message content; if the recipient is offline, the message waits on the sender’s own device. For delivery receipts a node keeps a small record (message ID, two pseudonymous IDs, type, time) that deletes itself after 90 days by default, and citizens can vote that down to 7.
Proven on the live network: enrolment across nodes, wallet restore, signed payments, a simultaneous double-spend refused by the nodes, cross-node messaging, the built-in exchange, the inheritance Vault and citizen votes.
Next on the roadmap: liveness verified by the nodes as well as the app, the template key split across independent operators, and more operators joining the founding servers. The whitepaper covers the full design and threat model.
Try it (Android, Windows, macOS, Linux): https://sov-network.github.io/ Whitepaper: https://sov-network.github.io/whitepaper.html Source: https://github.com/sov-network-dev/sov-build-source Questions of any kind are welcome here or in our public Q&A: https://github.com/sov-network-dev/sov-build-source/discussions
I don’t know but I would use a keep alive property such that the data can be tossed when for example: – the true person makes 2-3 additional data points with an “alert” time t_alert to deprecate all potential nodes with t > t_alert. Potentially affected transaction/interaction partners need be warned/informed (or not, if suspected culprit). – all potential nodes “die” after a delay of x hours after the last generated data.
Now my critique: palm scan can be 3D printed accurately. IMHO the only viable scan in terms of trust/confidence is from the eye as video with a bunch of samples watching some kind of a moving dot on the phone or whatever. The lens need be good enough and the min amount of samples need to be in relation to potential image quality right? Potato camera infinite…
Thanks, this is a useful critique.
On the keep-alive idea: SOV has something close to it. Every citizen appoints guardians, and if a key is lost or stolen, two guardians approving within 72 hours make the nodes re-key the account, so the old key can no longer spend. Your extra step, warning the people who dealt with the old key after the alert time, is a good idea and I’ll take it to the roadmap discussion.
On spoofing: enrolment is a palm scan plus a live face check, both on your own phone, and the nodes refuse any palm or face that matches someone already enrolled. So a printed copy of an enrolled person’s palm cannot open a second account. What you describe, a fabricated capture at enrolment, is the real attack, and the whitepaper says so plainly: liveness is checked in the app today, not by the nodes. Server-verifiable liveness is next on the roadmap (section 10).
Eye-movement video with a moving target is a good liveness idea, and your point about camera quality is exactly the trade-off: the live face check today runs on an ordinary phone front camera. Either way, no photo or video of your palm or face is ever stored or sent; the app turns each scan into a set of numbers and the nodes keep only protected templates.
Whitepaper: https://sov-network.github.io/whitepaper.html (I’m one of the developers.)