P2P Mobile Carriers
Abstract
A peer-to-peer marketplace for mobile plans would allow mobile service to be provided with minimal friction and lead to new innovations in the mobile system. In this post, I introduce a new protocol for sharing access to mobile plans with untrusted third-parties.
The protocol uses secret contracts to share U/e/SIM credentials without revealing secrets to a third-party. Due to the way authentication is handled in the mobile system, a third-party is able to authenticate without a secret key, and end-to-end encryption can be applied to prevent owners from reading messages- even with full knowledge of a secret key pair.
To prevent duplicate logins, I introduce a novel method based on fuzzing the state of temporary identity allocation in the visitor location registry. The technique results in cryptographic proofs that can be used to penalize a bad actor if they breach the terms...