Personhood Credentials: Human-Centered Design Recommendation Balancing Security, Usability, and Trust

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Hauptverfasser: Ide, Ayae, Sharma, Tanusree
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ide, Ayae
Sharma, Tanusree
author_facet Ide, Ayae
Sharma, Tanusree
contents Building on related concepts, like, decentralized identifiers (DIDs), proof of personhood, anonymous credentials, personhood credentials (PHCs) emerged as an alternative approach, enabling individuals to verify to digital service providers that they are a person without disclosing additional information. However, new technologies might introduce some friction due to users misunderstandings and mismatched expectations. Despite their growing importance, limited research has been done on users perceptions and preferences regarding PHCs. To address this gap, we conducted competitive analysis, and semi-structured online user interviews with 23 participants from US and EU to provide concrete design recommendations for PHCs that incorporate user needs, adoption rules, and preferences. Our study -- (a)surfaces how people reason about unknown privacy and security guarantees of PHCs compared to current verification methods -- (b) presents the impact of several factors on how people would like to onboard and manage PHCs, including, trusted issuers (e.g. gov), ground truth data to issue PHC (e.g biometrics, physical id), and issuance system (e.g. centralized vs decentralized). In a think-aloud conceptual design session, participants recommended -- conceptualized design, such as periodic biometrics verification, time-bound credentials, visually interactive human-check, and supervision of government for issuance system. We propose actionable designs reflecting users preferences.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_16375
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Personhood Credentials: Human-Centered Design Recommendation Balancing Security, Usability, and Trust
Ide, Ayae
Sharma, Tanusree
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
Building on related concepts, like, decentralized identifiers (DIDs), proof of personhood, anonymous credentials, personhood credentials (PHCs) emerged as an alternative approach, enabling individuals to verify to digital service providers that they are a person without disclosing additional information. However, new technologies might introduce some friction due to users misunderstandings and mismatched expectations. Despite their growing importance, limited research has been done on users perceptions and preferences regarding PHCs. To address this gap, we conducted competitive analysis, and semi-structured online user interviews with 23 participants from US and EU to provide concrete design recommendations for PHCs that incorporate user needs, adoption rules, and preferences. Our study -- (a)surfaces how people reason about unknown privacy and security guarantees of PHCs compared to current verification methods -- (b) presents the impact of several factors on how people would like to onboard and manage PHCs, including, trusted issuers (e.g. gov), ground truth data to issue PHC (e.g biometrics, physical id), and issuance system (e.g. centralized vs decentralized). In a think-aloud conceptual design session, participants recommended -- conceptualized design, such as periodic biometrics verification, time-bound credentials, visually interactive human-check, and supervision of government for issuance system. We propose actionable designs reflecting users preferences.
title Personhood Credentials: Human-Centered Design Recommendation Balancing Security, Usability, and Trust
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16375