Blind signing - DeFi mass adoption blocker / Radek Svarz

Transcript

one two one two can you hear okay uh can I start it's nice that I see it over there but I don't see it on the TV I will not so what okay it was too fast I just wanted wanted to be on time you know so so I was like rushing with that oh

yeah so that's the introduction ready you know okay okay we move on to Blind signing the five mass adoption blocker with Radix yeah enjoy hi thanks for the intro and now I don't see anything yeah that's little blind signing I see here like like a white TV now anyway um and I don't even see the people over here yeah um hello my name is Rex first please can you put up the presentation now um and I I've been working for quite a long time in in the traditional Finance uh banking

industry basically then I switched to to crypto and to defy a couple of years ago um and one of my tasks is this what we call the office Finance that's the approach to make the decentralized finance uh accessible and usable for the regular people so non-encryptonatives I would call and we do have a problem with that um so I wanted to present you some of the problems uh which we are dealing with and what are really crucial problems to uh to improve the adoption towards the next wave of of the users are the blind signing um whichever of this phenomenon or the brain signing please raise your hands so a few people over here uh okay so I do run a few more things

besides that um then you can read it afterwards so there's like smart contracts development Meetup over here and so on and the check stable coin preparation or implementation but let's talk about the blinds uh the the blind signing now um let's assume we'll do Hardware wallets um who is this treasure that's a question over here are a couple of forks uh Ledger many more uh who uses a ledger even after the when they shot the interior uh leg no still feel uh Keystone no one anything else like paper wallet

or something else yeah the beer wallet okay um so the what do you think about the user and let's say the regular Fork that user she has the intention right to do something so basically she interacts with the uh with a decentralized application she interrances the wallet and it's the interaction is used in order to fulfill some intention and when she signs the hardware wallet when she literally clicks on on a button it means the commitment it means the commitment by signature by basically clicking um um I do remember from the 90s at that time there was a nice uh nice application which was called

visiting uh are there any followers who remember that what it means yeah a few uh for those who do not mean I refresh it a little bit and what we could say is what you sign is what you get right um and if we translate it into some like legal wording when we are interacting with the smart contracts we can say by signing the transaction user Express acknowledges and agrees that she understands what she's signing it's like legal blah blah what do you typically have in some contracts like League contracts and it's applicable for those smart and successful uh so assigning acknowledges that understands

understands you know that's what you see on the threshold device so what you see on the devices when you are interacting with the with the smart contracts and it's not a pure like transfer function but you do like lending whatever else and you see the white codes or or some bytes there um so if we a little bit elaborate that because we are quite expressed over here um there is the intention do you have like laser no okay on the left there is the intention the the user interacts typically with some web application uh so it has so she has to go into some domain basically of the application then there is some front end of the application then there is the interface like metamask or some other awesome bullets which are represented

over here which is like a signing interface and and typically if the user is a little bit more like secure wise smart and then she has the hardware wallet where actually there is that commitment by signature and then it is being propagated to the contract so yeah we are quite aware of that but there are those different parts and pieces where something can go wrong or misused the question is can I trust this as the user all those pieces and and the experience is that there are many many attack vectors on the part on these particle pieces I have listed them over here uh we will not talk we don't have the time now to talk about those but those

are regular attackers which happens already towards those particular pieces which we need to have in order to have uh user experience on top of the file um uh in fact when I talk the attack vectors then there is the attacker and the attacker his ultimate goal is to steal some assets it can be some I don't know erc20 tokens it can be nfts whatever um the effects typically of the blind signature meaning that the user doesn't know what she's signing it just clicks yes I agree uh means that there could be like Fortress a recipient it's quite common and instead of sending it towards

friends over there it's being sent and wrote it somewhere else then there could be a forge contract which is also happening so instead of interacting with the uni swap contracts I would be rather interested in some clone of that but a little bit modified adjusted in order to have something better for the for the attacker or which is very commonly typical Forge approvals or elements is to steal something later typically some campaign over uh there are the nice new nfts do you agree to claim the nft and and and and uh including in that there is the approval on actually retrieve whatever you have there in usdcc um we're going to do some examples just

like critical one in the past Kerber swap that was 265k and that was the malicious JavaScript injection into the front-end uh application they misused the basically the marketing part of that because they needed to use the Google tag manager uh to do some you know marketing stuff and the script in that was was actually adjusted for the misuser the result is the forged allowance so they were then able to retrieve some of the assets from the user a curve 612k uh this was a little bit more complicated but it was like um strange situation when the attacker called on the support of the GoDaddy or someone or name chip

or something so I don't know now exactly but basically using some sort of the social engineering they were able to get over the administration rights on the DNS so they then created the different applications somewhere else targeted with the same domain and created a look-alike site created a phishing contract and the result was the forged contract and forged allowance resulting in 612k of the users lost amounts the clay swap that was almost one one and a half million uh it was even more uh technically or engineeringly difficult because they used a specific technique of the network reloading using the bgp

hijacking but the result is the same Forge contract and Forge allowance okay the question is what can users do and what videos the industry can do with that um the first thing the first thing is to understand what me as the user well I am signing right so if I would rephrase that that abbreviation we could say the visit means what you sign is is what you get right that's what we discussed and one of the way on how to understand is that I do have a support in the bullets either in software was but also in the hardware wallets so on those devices that I do literally know that the Practical transaction does something which I intended to do

um the Keystone is a good example that it does something regarding that so comparing in contrast to Ledger or treasure or the other devices we know uh but uh there could be also the other approach which started to be used now and that to predict the future up front so basically to know up front the outcome of the of the transaction um where I literally know what what I sign is what I get as the outcome um yeah we as the developers we use something like this the tenderly who uses tenderly over here yeah a couple of people yeah you know it works right so we did a simulation and

we know exactly what will happen it's like 100 sure what's the outcome we know it can we ask the user to use that you know I doubt that you know it's it's it's for the tax service we could teach a few people to just run the simulation yeah so there are some better approaches one is the fire extension which controls the transactions initiation towards the metamask so aside aside of the metamask the fire will pop up and say okay you're fine if you're on Opus Finance then then you are transferring some or exchanging from me to usdc these are the outcomes or warning besides these outcomes you

will also lose something else so that's fire then some of the wallets finally are getting that and trying to protect the user or give him the inside so the rapping a lot is a good example which like Sim does the simulation and it makes it clear that the user will receive the 400 uh liquidity USD uh uh I do know and I talked to to the bullet provider over you know in the in the sponsor area and they are also doing some simulation um so those are these approaches and then we have a third approach that's the account obstruction this this gives the

promise that that we will be able to to make the usage of the smartphone not safer uh easier and safer for the users so basically what what metamask is promising okay there will be a fraud monitoring service we will use those um I forgot those plugins or those extensions right um and if there is something if there is any intention then there will be like checks and based on that the metamask pop-up warning look this is wrong uh be careful [Music] um but my question is whether we rather we essentially like postpone that signing that commitment the user still

has to do some commitment somewhere right so uh even with the account obstruction me as the user I I will have to sign something somewhere I potentially I will not do the I will not do the signing with the hardware wallet I could do it with uh some Social account or you know single sign-on of the Google and so on but I I will have to commit myself into that intention so I believe that there will be a new and also old web two ways to attack the user for these interactions uh I I I guess an estimate that in the future we will see some of those situations which will happen never

mostly happen like outside of what you are creating for the account obstruction but these are still valid if I go to some applications so on so so we as the industry will need to deal with that this is the intro into the blind signing thank you for your uh thank you for attention and yeah if you have questions and if there is a time let's do that so this is an amazing talk and thank you

very much the the array of the attack vectors is daunting right and this is a technical audience you're a technical person that that's not an unbelievably wide attack surface that keeps on getting wider what do you think is the trend for the next two or three years just more scams more thefts and how effective do you think your Solutions and these approaches to fight this can be us so can you repeat that but the question is do you think the situation is getting worse are they going to be more attacks even more sophisticated attacks and how effective do you think you will be and your solution in in preventing these attacks I think um I

I'm not able to show the slide now anymore but um if you remember the parts I think we'll be able to like um make it safer for some of the parts so some of the attack vectors we will be able to to address with what we are preparing what we are doing uh but there will be new attack vectors which we are not used used to deal with yet so it will like shift uh I have like a little bit feeling that it will like broaden there will be more attack vectors as such than what we know but quite a lot of those attack vectors are written like the web 2 based you know that we we as as we are trying to prepare and doing like the decentralized

solutions basically there are still the the most most projects are actually doing the doing in the way of the web 2 approach so all those attacks of the web 2 approaches are valid there basically for the social engineering for you know the hijacking and so on so um yeah it will shift and it will potentially broaden somewhere and it will be up to us we also discussed during the East Belinda privacy and security uh hackathon we discussed the options to enable the volats to like um cross-check the the uh the calling intention of you know what what the user is interactive and and having like a using DNS to have like signed

some Fingerprints of what contracts we have want to deal with so so there are a little bit more ways on how to elaborate this but I literally believe when you see the whole Space of those Vector attack vectors that we need to address one by one and to try to address them okay any any other question yeah no so thank you for your attention and I'll be walking around here and also during the Xbox so if you want to discuss it more then you are welcome for

any of those topics which are presented there the the development of the smart contracts whatever the oppos finance the blind signing the trying to give the adoption towards the regular folks thank you [Music]