The SSN study manuscript is now available

Posted on July 6th, 2009 by alessandro

We created this blog to make information available about the SSN study, and to clarify what the study is about, and what is not.

The manuscript can be downloaded from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science website.

Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross

Filed under: Uncategorized

« Coming soon FAQ about the study »

5 Responses to “The SSN study manuscript is now available”

  1. SungJu Cho, on July 7th, 2009 at 12:02 am Said:

    Hi, my wife worked with this work and I also participate in her scripting. I would like to see the paper!

  2. Doyle Dodge, on July 7th, 2009 at 10:47 am Said:

    I look forward to reviewing, and staying involved, with this study.

  3. Doyle Dodge, on July 7th, 2009 at 10:52 am Said:

    I look forward to reviewing “The SSN study manuscript”, and over a period of time, determining how potential changes in the SSN program will affect our work.

  4. Myronrobert Rushlow, on July 7th, 2009 at 9:44 pm Said:

    I was most unhappy when “Our Legally Elect Congress of Bribetakers’ chose to use SSN numbers as Identification. Medicare; Medicaid; Military ID; Drivers licenses; Etc.; Etc.! Now that the SSN numbers are in such wide use: A think tank has developed a method to work them up from other data. Published study also! Dumb, dumb, double dumb!!!
    This will put the Hackers into overdrive (They are very smart, educated too), I wonder how long it will take for Them to come up with a simple procedure for John Q. Citizen to work them out. This will of course be taken over by the Bad Guys, used to steal everything they can.
    Then “Our rather Dumb, Legally elected Congress of Bribetakers, will organize (too late) a committee to study problem”! In a year or two they will decide something has to be done. They will then do whatever seems most politically, correct, least damaging to their Reelection chances.
    This will really screw up the country, because most everything now works off, or is keyed to the Damned Social Security Numbers!!

    AA: Among other things, we have omitted sensitive details about the prediction strategy from the published article (making it much harder to replicate the predictions), and we have shared our results with government agencies prior to publication. In their current form, SSNs are compromised as passwords. However, ignorance is no protection. Instead, we need to alert not just policy-makers, but also businesses and consumers of the threats to individual identities deriving from the use (and abuse) of SSNs as means of authentication - and transition to more efficient, secure, and privacy-preserving means of verifying identities in our society.

  5. Giusy, on July 10th, 2009 at 3:13 pm Said:

    tutto il mio apprezzamento per il vostro lavoro.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.