This is something tangential I’ve developed for my science-fantasy world with intelligent animals. For context: In this world, different taxonomic governments represent groups of related species. You have the Felines, Vulpines, Rodents, Avians, etc. Each of them technically belong to a different State but frequently intermingle and live in the same area, and taxonomic governments tend to also have territory/land associated with them where they primarily control the area, but other animals can and very much do still live there. Taxonomic governments have jurisdiction of the species within their scope no matter where they live, and are the ones responsible for having an ID system that works both within their own taxon and with other taxonomic governments and other official organizations.
Instead of making everyone carry ID cards or passports, which would be cumbersome for four-legged or winged animals to use, I envisioned a DNA-based ID system. The tech for this is definitely in the Star Trek levels of sci-fi, but it’s basically a flat surface that you press your paw, wing, or other body part firmly onto, and a mechanism below produces a mild energy beam through your fur and skin which interacts with DNA in your cells and gives returns based on the specific sequence, and it’s a safe, non-invasive DNA sequencer that can get a full read of your genetic code in seconds. The DNA scanner also checks for things like active metabolism and DNA synthesis and are generally configured to not even attempt to scan non-living cells, so you can’t do something like use someone else’s severed paw to make the system think you’re them.
But since your full DNA sequences can be, for one, several gigabytes long and not conducive to things like printing onto certificates and migration papers or even just sending over the network to other agencies, and also contain actual information about things like your species, sex, family history and a bunch of sensitive stuff that you wouldn’t want just anyone having access to, they typically take a cryptographic hash of the DNA and use that as an identifier for an individual animal. Kind of like how humans might have something like a social security number, animals in this world have a DNA Hash that governments use to identify them. Whenever a government agency in our world asks you to show some kind of ID like a driver’s license, passport, health card, etc, they just have to scan their DNA and their information is automatically pulled from the right agency, using the hash to look it up. Even things like crossing international borders (of friendly nations) can be done with just a single biometric scan with no passport or ID card required. Basically, if you’re animal in this world, the various government agencies around you refer to you as something like “8ed254569e8ddccea1784f569609aa32ced2691e2d22e99583ebd426cac76bd8” which is derived from your DNA sequence, and since you can’t change your DNA, the same hash algorithm will always produce the same identifier, but better for privacy since it’s impossible to reverse the algorithm and derive the original DNA sequence from the hash, and in theory only your own taxonomic government would have your full DNA sequence stored away on a server somewhere. Also extremely hard to falsify since it’s literally identifying your body and not a card or anything that can be replaced.
What do you think? Does a system like this make sense? Are there glaring logistical or security issues that I’m not seeing? (Beyond just having a non-invasive and rapid DNA sequencing system in the first place, but that’s what sci-fi handwaving is for.) Do you think a system like this is actually superior compared to physical ID media?
DNA is not immutable. Small changes happen intentionally and unintentionally. You’d have to take this into account.
Also, currently DNA can’t be used in court to uniquely identity a person, but exclude others for the above reason.
Good point. I didn’t know that DNA can’t be used in court that way either, TIL. Thanks!
If you have a non-invasive, rapid DNA sequencing system like this, chances are you’re going to have very advanced genetics research in general, because that kind of tech is going to be used in research fields first before anything else. As a result, gene editing using a retrovirus to propagate a harmless change to one’s DNA would actually be a potentially available technology at least to some degree, although it would be tricky and expensive unless further developments are made.
The risk for security wouldn’t necessarily be falsification or spoofing so much as making someone impossible to identify or allowing them to forge a new fake identity. A career criminal could use this to escape justice, a spy could use this to hide their real identity, and it could also be used as a sort of bio-cyber attack by using an airborne pathogen to lock people out of any services, areas or technologies that require ID.
It’s still definitely a technically superior option to physical ID media on its own, it just comes with its own vulnerabilities.
Very interesting scenario which I will definitely have to think about! Thank you!
That’s to say nothing of random harmless mutations that occur naturally just as a result of background radiation or just your cells transcribing it wrong. Your cells can easily correct a one-off error in DNA, but if you feed your entire DNA sequence through sha256, if even one base pair is off, the hash is going to be completely different. that’s kind of the point of a cryptographic hash
So at my workplace (in bioinformatics) we use a tool called somalier to identify sample swaps.
Essentially, in non-coding regions of the genome there are certain random sites where the allele frequency in a population is close to half, maximising the likelihood that site is different between individuals. If you look for those sites, say 300 of them, you can start to form a barcode that you can use to reliably identify individuals.
This is also why in research, variants in non-coding regions are typically omitted as it’s considered personally identifiable information - random variants in these regions are typically conserved as they have little effect on fitness, whereas variants in coding regions tend to be more common in the population.
Another gold standard is STR profiling, the concept is similar. Just sprinkle in some Sci Fi magic where there’s some form of instantaneous sequencing and the logic holds up.
Very interesting! Thank your for your perspective from a background in this!
