Tanusree Sharma, Pennsylvania State University
With the rise of AI-powered deception, identity verification systems are increasingly important to distinguish between AI and humans. 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 that they are a unique person without disclosing additional information. However, new technologies might introduce some friction due to users' misunderstandings and mismatched expectations. This talk will discuss how people reason about unknown privacy and security guarantees of PHCs compared to current methods; and factors that influence how people would like to manage PHCs. Specifically, it will address critical design considerations, including the role of trusted issuers (e.g., government, private entities), the reliability of data attributes used for credential issuance (e.g., biometrics, physical IDs, selfies), and the trade-offs between centralized and decentralized issuance systems.
Tanusree Sharma is an Assistant Professor at Penn State University and directs the Governance, Privacy, and Security (GPS) Research Lab. Her work, at the intersection of Security, HCI, and blockchain is oriented around answering the question: How can we design secure systems that improve the quality of human interaction and human data authenticity in critical systems? She has received the John Karat Usable Privacy and Security Award at Usenix SOUPS 2024, for her contributions to the field. She has been PI and Co-PI of funded grants from Meta and OpenAI. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2024.
author = {Tanusree Sharma},
title = {Verifying Humanness: Personhood Credentials for the Digital Identity Crisis},
year = {2025},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jun
}
