Personas

When you boot up your commlink, the first thing you do is sign into it, via some combination of biometrics. This creates your persona, your digital mirror-image in the Matrix. The persona runs for as long as your commlink does.

Only certain devices can form your persona, and thus let you use the Matrix. These include commlinks, cyberdecks, and RCCs. These may be external devices or implanted ones.

DNI-auth

Like any newborn, your persona comes into the world naked and powerless. So the next thing that happens is your commlink reaches out through the local mesh and up to various cloud hosts that live on the Matrix backbone.

Each of these hosts in turn establishes that the person using your persona matches their fingerprint. For users with direct neural interfaces, this is carried out as a brainwave challenge/response in a process called DNI-auth. The host reaches down through your interface and… pokes… your brain a little, inducing certain patterns. It measures how your brain responds to the poking, and compares it to patterns stored in very secure cloud hosts that were recorded as part of a cryptokey exchange when you created the account. If they match, the host is satisfied you are who you claim to be.

Think of it as being like tossing a rock into a lake, and carefully examining the patterns in the ripples.

The corps are very insistent that this process is completely safe. Any resemblance between the transient brainwave states triggered and those recorded in epileptics is purely coincidental. Apparently.

This process is extremely difficult to fool, particularly for lots of hosts at once; although there are urban legends of particularly wily deckers pulling off successful man-in-the-middle attacks against people using trodes rather than datajacks.

Unfortunately, users without DNI-auth suffer much lower security. They have to rely on crude biometrics such as fingerprints and retina scans, all of which are much more vulnerable to fakery, even if they use very expensive and high-end scanners.

Once a given host is happy the persona is under your control, it issues your persona with access permissions over whatever it is in charge of. (Deckers call these Access Control Lists, or ACLs - pronounced “ackles”.) One host might belong to Ford, and grant your persona access to drive your Americar. A Horizon host would give you access to your P2.1 social media account. An Ares host, after particularly thorough examination, would enable you to fire your Predator. And so on and so forth - even a low-key user will have hundreds of these permissions.

This all happens in a few seconds.

Personas are ephemeral things. They only last as long as the commlink is running and you are attached to it. (This is particularly irritating for trode users; if the trodes get jostled too much, they can disconnect entirely, and you have to sign in all over again.) Furthermore, to guard against shenanigans, the more secure hosts will re-run DNI-auth spot checks periodically.

Note also you can never have two personas. The cloud hosts will immediately detect if you attempt to sign in with a second device while the first is still running, and – depending on its paranoia level – either insist one persona is shut down first or completely lock the account down until you contact customer services to get it unlocked. This also works to prevent anyone stealing your persona.

Going off the grid

Only being able to unlock and start your car via a cloud host is fine for a boxed-in ground-down wageslave driving to another 14 hour shift, but it’s not going to work so well for a Knight Errant HTR squad heading into a Barrens deadzone or a long-distance trucking convoy delivering supplies through wildlands. People like these need a fallback for when the signal fails.

Matrix protocols include the ability to offload cryptographic keys directly to your commlink for just such an emergency. For most people, this is nothing but an accident waiting to happen - anyone who hacks their commlink can now steal their stuff with impunity. But if you need to be able to work outside of reliable wireless Matrix access, it’s just what you need. Remember to buy a good commlink and all the security upgrades… and remember to back those keys up to a second device too, just in case.

Organised criminals like shadowrunners make use of these protocols so they leave less of a datatrail behind them in the Matrix, and so they can still start their cars regardless of which fake SIN they happen to be using right now. Yes, this means a wageslave’s car is a lot harder to steal than a shadowrunner’s, at least based on just the cryptographic security… ain’t irony grand? (Of course, many shadowrunners compensate for this with interesting booby traps, so don’t consider this a declaration of open season on their stuff.)

Persona AROs

Most people are broadcasting a few AROs from their commlink at all times. A basic informational ARO contains their SIN and some basic biographic information: their name, gender representation and pronouns, age, and so on. Anything you’d find on a driving licence. Some people might redact all or part of this, for whatever reason; but not broadcasting at least a SIN will attract attention from the authorities in the better parts of town.

Some people also broadcast their persona’s icon at all times, typically scaled to a few inches high and floating over their head or sitting on their shoulder. Customising and sculpting the persona’s icon is a big business, with every kind of lifestyle brand imaginable making virtual accessories for you to play dress-up with on your digital twin, and that’s before you get to the expert artists and modellers who make all sorts of more outre icons than the basic metahuman figures your commlink came with.