wonderful to be here with all of you at
another Def Con again and this time I'm
delighted to be able to speak and I
thought I would take you back to
[Music]
Berkeley 1982 when I was a graduate
student they are reading science
magazine and it said that the director
of the United States National Security
Agency had it was revealed written
letters to the heads of I Triple E and
ACM and so on threatening them with
draconian the full force of the federal
government if they were to even have a
session on cryptography let alone a
whole conference on it so what do you
think I did yeah organize the conference
on cryptography and I invited everyone I
did it sort of covertly and then I was
like on stage announced you know
welcoming everyone as the general
chairman of the event and and the front
row was occupied by people who refused
to give their organizational affiliation
but all mysteriously happened to live in
Laurel Maryland and so when I announced
that as an extra benefit of having paid
their hundred dollars to attend
they were now members of a new thing the
International Association for
Cryptologic research and it was a great
pleasure to see them all turn green
because everyone knew that it was over
there was the the UN protects
international scientific associations
and so I ACR has had about several
conferences every year now it says three
per year
a bunch of workshops and publishes a
journal with springer-verlag so it was
over cryptography was set free however
we are now at a very different and more
fundamental critical juncture it's less
reversible and much more important and
that is evidenced by the fact that most
of the public is starting to become
aware of metadata and the dangers of
metadata and how it's being used to
steal our meta Liberty from us which
includes then all the subsidiary
liberties right it's the big one lose
that and it's game over so turns out in
Berkeley in 82 I was actually working on
cryptography for the purpose of finding
metadata shredding techniques so the
first thing I did was create a like a
toy example where some privacy would be
needed so I used voting let me just try
to explain roughly how this works just
to give you a sense that let's say
there's a hundred voters each would take
their ballot and multiple 'i encrypt it
and publish it let's say associated with
their IP address okay and then they
would those who all those encrypted
ballots would be sent to the first node
which would have the unique ability
through its private key to decrypt the
outer layer on all those ballots and
then it would shuffle them secretly in a
random order that only it knew and send
them on to the next node and that node
would do the same thing decrypt the
layer that only it could decrypt
randomly permute and send on and so the
final batch that comes out and is
published includes all the clear text
ballots but I say that we have vertical
metadata protection because no one knows
which IP address is associated with
which
ballot unless they can compromise all of
the nodes because each node uses a
totally independent uniform randomly
chosen permutation so this became known
as mixing and there's thousands of
papers about it and it's generally
thought of as being used to send
messages it destroys the social graph
the who talks to who and when that's
what we used to call traffic analysis
now it's been rebranded as metadata so
then I thought well we need some kind of
way to pay and stuff like that and if I
look at regular like the kind of say
account based payments we have like I'm
blockchain today from Walt I need a
wallet ID a wallet ID what that does is
it publishes improves the whole method
the whole the whole graph right it's all
it reveals improves all the metadata so
that's not a suitable type of of payment
technology so it turns out that what I
proposed is is actually good enough not
perfect but it can be perfected so
essentially it's a simple notion that
instead of accounts use digital bearer
instruments that are let's say binary
denominated so one sent to send four
sent eight sent 16 and so on so each
denomination has its own corresponding
signature that validates it and that way
as the the these digital tokens migrate
through different transactions they're
regrouped and the metadata kind of fades
away now we can perfect this by actually
washing a whole bus like all the one
cent coins through a special mix that
then makes every one cent coin unlink
able to the ones that existed previously
so we can do that overnight for all
coins and then perfect privacy because
we have the vertical unlinking but
through the mixing of the CIP mac or
your location or whatever to
the transactions or the messages to
being delivered and then we have the
horizontal and link ability or metadata
shredding between the say the
transactions themselves so the the
payment system actually was a built in
that you've probably heard of it
famously in the mid-90s and I
air-dropped to anyone who wanted a who
would open up a digital shop on the web
and receive payments a 100 cyber box and
you can see the whole dish the Museum of
this up on my website charm comm bunch
of the shops and and so forth and then
later some banks wanted to issue a cash
so we let Deutsche Bank do it and some
other banks in other countries so we had
the Deutsche marks and Australian
dollars u.s. dollars as one and here in
Japan Nomura research recently was
revealed secretly they licensee cash
from us but they wouldn't tell us what
they were doing with it all their
employees were allowed to use it and
access their bank accounts and buy like
numerous swag and get reimbursed for
travel and all this stuff so it was
actually actually used here in Japan but
secretly and so that was pretty neat but
now we are in a world where everyone has
smartphones and the killer app it's kind
of a sick joke but it's like is is
WeChat right so they don't see the humor
in that no okay some people get it
anyways have to live there to really
appreciate it so this is sort of
indisputable because all the major
social media messaging systems are
moving towards payments integrated with
messaging because that's what consumers
want they want those two in the same
namespace and then they want some mini
apps
or DAPs in that same namespace the
popular ones this is this has proven to
be what like billions of people actually
want so what we need to do here is to
get rid of this giant you know metadata
capture engine is create a replacement
product something that people can the
ordinary users can easily just switch to
that does the same stuff for them on
their phone as say a WeChat or another
messaging platform with payments
integrated apps and but that is based on
the metadata shredding technology so
it'll be just as easy to use and work in
a similar way but the metadata will
never even be constituted it will be
shredded in real time in its distributed
form before it's actually able to be
abuse in any way however the the
technologies that I showed you that I
developed the ATS and we implemented in
the 90s aren't really suitable for like
smartphone to smartphone transactions
there's their performance and other
issues and especially when it's used in
a mass scale and because of the kind of
speed of transaction Layton sees that
consumers are familiar with the
messaging today something some real
breakthroughs are needed and so I was
not really working on this stuff when
the Snowden revelations came out and and
then I was so shocked and I went back to
the you know those crypto conferences
that I founded and talked to a lot of
people there and I was really quite
became quite concerned because it was
surprising that they were much more
interested in their jobs and in
publications and all this and even
though they said they were there to
protect you know people from whatever
abuse of cryptography they if no one was
really that
influenced by the stone revelations and
up but I was and so I took it upon
myself to speed up the mixing because
it's pretty cumbersome and slow and I
found a way to speed it up by over by a
factor of a thousand
I took some real work and no one since I
published it in 79 is a type of reported
with CAC m82 no one actually ever found
a way to speed it up even though there's
thousands of references and bunches as a
conference every year that's mainly used
to be mainly about it and so the only
speed-up that occurred was when someone
substitute el-gamal for which came out
four years after I published it for the
RSA kind of crypto but I had defined it
in a way that the RSA was just an
example so anyway so let me show you
some of these breakthroughs now that are
enabling us to do exactly what I'm
saying if we pull together as a
community we can create a replacement
product for all of these messaging and
and combined with payment systems so we
actually I have to say some of you may
have heard of a lick sir that's the are
the high speed mixing technology which
is is actually running in an open alpha
and we'll see that something about that
shortly and then we have praxis which is
our new very different quantum resistant
consensus and payments technology and
these are sister companies and when you
combine them you get this kind of app
that I'm talking about so let me just
now show you a little bit about the the
new approach in a in a simplified kind
of amusing manner suppose Alice wants to
send a message to Bob but she doesn't
want anyone to know that the two of them
are communicating message content can
easily be protected by so-called
end-to-end encryption but this does not
protect
information about who's talking to whom
and when the metadata which is
increasingly recognized as far more
revealing and more challenging to
protect each member of a team of nodes
in order to protect the metadata
successively shuffles the batch of
encrypted messages using its container
of secretly arranged tubes and sending
the messages without delay through to
the next team member even just a single
node can keep senders from being linked
to recipients Alice also gets a receipt
informing her confidentially that her
message was provided to bomb team
members that destroy their secret
pattern of tubes making way for a new
team ready for a new batch earlier each
node is chosen independently as a kind
of random secret gene which input tube
to connect to which output tube elixirs
break through over the type of messaging
and I open sourced in the ATS is a way
that enables almost all the work to be
done well in advance yielding the only
known way to provide real-time metadata
protection smartphone to smartphone lead
can also pay you me by sending what
appears to be an ordinary message but
that actually contains numbers that
serve like dental coins and paper money
I've called such denominated unforgeable
numbers digital cash first issued by
digit cash in 90s illiteracy rate
through improvement on the original
digital cash now makes it fully
distributed and quantum resistant elixir
thus is able to uniquely provide a new
ultimate metadata level protection of
confidentiality in all your online
communications and payments for the
first time giving you a protected sphere
protecting your digital world today and
your digital future
ya think so let me just give you an
update we we announced our little effort
like a year ago in Singapore and it's
been kind of a wild ride since then been
traveling all over and you know
connecting with the community learning
what people want learning how to
understand all the issues and how people
think about them and we've built up
actually several really great teams and
that's why they're two different
entities we have a R&D lab in the in the
Cayman Islands and no one else seems to
have that but we can bring people from
anywhere in the world there as long as
they're not like they don't have lung
disease or something and so we were
building up the consensus and the
payment work there with our plan to
release the white paper this year and I
assure you that when you see it it will
be unlike anything you've seen before
and I hope you'll be as enthusiastic
about it as we are we have received a
ton of support from the broader
community we've got over like 680 node
operators that have participated in our
open selection process now what do I
mean by that we had a survey first to
find out what people wanted from the
process then we built the process
according to what the community wanted
we ran the process then we had a spute
resolution procedure and everything in
it and at the end we got 680 notes
people that want to support us by
running notes for free in our beta
system and we have divided them into
three teams so we can face them in so
that's really great and they're well
distributed around the planet everything
that was one of the criteria we have
also been building out our community so
we've got several thousand I don't know
what the number is exactly now people
who have signed up
I've received our app downloaded our app
on Android and iOS which is kind of like
a waiting list to be the first users of
the messaging system and to be able to
participate in other ways so I would
urge you to get it as soon as you can if
you have the opportunity to do that
which I will give you and we are also
live in the public alpha as I mentioned
and when you download the app you can
see the dashboard of the Alpha Network
and watch it all the performance and
stuff so the main purpose of the Alpha
is really to perfect the the performance
but we've exposed the api's and the
libraries to our RF SDK partners because
we're not in the band with the support
the whole community yet so we're kind of
rolling that out and trying to get
everything really nice to need before we
enlarge the the sphere of people have
access to it so I've been traveling
around Asia on this last few weeks
announcing mostly it meetups and at
conferences not no conference as big as
this one that our our Cayman lab has
come has come out of stealth and that we
will have the white paper and that the
payment system it has is quantum
resistant and it will be able to do the
kind of when you mix that when you
combine that with the elixir you'll have
a tap say it but the world's best money
no question hands down so that's kind of
what we've been up to over the last year
and here's a sort of preview of the app
there's a lot of things in it and if you
look at those those scroll the menu bar
horizontally you'll see I can keep track
of all the things we're doing and
there's gonna be a lot more interesting
stuff there so I let me put up this
barcode or QR code if will and urge you
to all test do you think that what QR
code will work
why don't you see if your QR code reader
is capable of reading that code and then
decide if you want to download the the
app of your choice and then you'll have
a position in line and be able to see
what we're doing and watch the dashboard
and join our community so thank you very
very much for your attention as a
pleasure and I'll be around so look
forward to having a chance to chat with
you and thanks again
[Applause]
you