Interview
a16z Podcast | Establishing Online Identity is Hard -- It Shouldn't Be
- Keybase was founded over a year ago by Max Krohn and Chris Dixon (previous co-founders of OkCupid and SparkNotes) to solve the problem of mapping human identities to computer-understandable cryptographic keys.
- The founders leverage their nine-year experience at OkCupid to apply social networking and user recruitment strategies to cryptography, aiming to overcome the historical difficulty of convincing non-technical users to adopt secure tools.
- Keybase's primary technical goal is to verify that a user's public key is genuinely associated with their real-world identity (e.g., via Twitter handles or Reddit profiles), eliminating the risk of malicious actors intercepting messages.
- The company contrasts its approach with historical "key signing parties" from the 1990s, which required physical presence and driver's license verification, noting these failed to reach critical mass compared to modern social graph verification.
- Keybase utilizes an architecture where data is encrypted on the user's device before reaching servers; consequently, if servers are breached, the attackers only access unreadable encrypted data, as decryption keys remain solely on user devices (phones/desktops).
- The founders criticize the traditional "perimeter defense" model used by major social networks and cloud providers, arguing that it fails against modern, customized attacks like spear phishing and insider threats.
- Keybase plans to replace passwords with public key cryptography, allowing users to log in by digitally signing a statement with a private key, a method already common among programmers but rarely available to general users.
- The application will be released as open source to ensure transparency and allow the community to audit the code, a prerequisite for building trust in security software.
- Keybase aims to serve as "basic plumbing" for developers, providing libraries to handle encryption and identity verification so other applications do not have to reinvent complex cryptographic infrastructure.
- To drive adoption, Keybase focuses on usability and "growth hacking" similar to OkCupid, ensuring the software works effectively even when the recipient has not yet signed up, thereby reducing friction in the onboarding process.
- Initial users are expected to be programmers, security professionals, and crypto enthusiasts, with a long-term vision to lower the barrier to entry for tens of millions of technically savvy users who currently find tools like GPG unusable.