DAPPCON 2018: Remember the Rubber Hose - Ricardo J. Mendez (Samsung NEXT)

Transcript

so hi as I mentioned I'm Ricardo Mendes and we're going to be talking about privacy here actually I'm the technical director for Europe at Samsung next in Berlin where we partner with and invest in forward-looking deep tech companies and innovators now we're gonna be talking about privacy so I'm not going to go into the whole venture capital thing but if you're working to something cool and you want to talk about it feel free to grab me right after speaking of which I noticed this thing on the registration desk and that's you know kudos to you organizer this is pretty cool we really need more conferences taking people's desire for privacy into account even if just a few end up even if just a few of the attendees end up using it now we're here to talk about

privacy so I'm curious have you ever had have you ever tried to ask the average people out there what do they know about the centralized platforms in general and I'm even talking about decentralization at large you even just average users on the street I mean I'm talking even tech people say asking just asking a tech person who's not in the space what do they know about even Ledger's say bit compresses aetherium and turns out that most of them have no idea like some of them might know if they're intact that if the room has to in complete virtual machine maybe they've heard about smart contracts but that's pretty much it and

people do know a few things though so show of hands let's make this a little bit interactive let me know if you have heard one of this before the crypto comes from all the data out there being encrypted anyone heard this then how about blockchain sir private because they are decentralized and this makes them anonymous and completely untraceable and yeah these are misconceptions and yes users should know where the tool is for before they use it but I think that this is partly your fault we talk a lot to users about you know giving them back their privacy

and putting them in control of their data but we don't really tell them what this means and then they go online and this they read some misconceptions on some article and this all conflates together to make this things look like some great protein - that can do anything that they want and with no trade-offs whatsoever on top of it and some things we need to keep in mind is that for most people we are dealing with a lot of new concepts I mean we're talking about Ledger's and we're talking about consensus and governance models and what else is narc even for somebody who's coming in from just a regular

centralized model or banking this are new things that they need to start absorbing so even you know I'm on the amount of space and actively working on this and I good chunk of the time that went into this talk was into figuring out that you know if everything that I had in my mind was still current for instance it was encouraging to see that vitalik butene is changing his stance on privacy and he wrote on a reddit thread that he saw privacy as a way to prevent signaling concerns from encompassing all of our activity and well he's not wrong but the thing is I suspect that the signaling he has in mind is very much a first world problem because everything

we do in public generates signals whether we like it or not however for us here in the first world the signal signaling concerns are basically just a social mechanics issue there going to be something that we need to keep in mind or workaround or completely ignore you know worst case scenario we're going to have to fend off an internet mobile tube but that's pretty much it however periodically you hear someone in somebody describe what they're doing as we're putting X whatever X s on the blockchain which is nice but the thing is this misses the point that doc genes are effectively

logs and locks have a use but it's not something that you necessarily want to use for every case and all too often they consider that this often very personal data that they plan to put on the blockchain is safe because it's going to be encrypted with a key that only the user has so let's talk a bit about this usage assumption you know the the key safety and again early morning so you know let's let's try ever to get everybody involved here raise your hand if you believe in being control of your private Keys okay figures now who expects that public key cryptography is going to keep our data

safe from attackers at least until somebody figures out quantum computing issue okay now who here has ever had a gun to their heads yeah that last one that's where signaling concerns me actually in a lot of places sending the wrong signal can very easily get you in trouble or quickly become an issue of life and death and something that one here is regularly about the justification of what we do what we of why we do what we do is because it's making the world a better place it's going to improve people's lives and I think that to really make the world a

better place for the majority of people pseudonymity is not enough I mean it's nice it has a use but pseudonymity has the problem that it only needs to be broken once and if you're only a pseudonymous then you're trusting the operational security of every individual and system that you actually interact with and in the places that could really use help that could really use a leg up the most having pseudonymity broken could have serious implications for them I mean suppose that you live in a safe and stable country like Germany and for some reason somebody breaks you pseudonymity and you get out it as a crypto millionaire what's the worst that's gonna happen I mean you get put

in the wrong tax bracket maybe your Maybourne figures out that you have all this crypto and considers you one of the bourgeois you know these are things that we can deal with but if these are our main concerns then censorship resistance the lack of reliance and also institutions the pseudonymity they start sliding away slowly from being requirements and more into really nice to haves those who could benefit from these tools from this extremely empowering tools the most i think are those people who are the most vulnerable and i think that for those people we actually need to move closer to privacy and anonymity because something that

those of us with libertarian tendencies tend to think of as of the rogue state you know we tend to see the attacker as this oppressive regime coming from people and sure that happens i mean it's happened recently even we've had situations where people's equipment is confiscated because it's state agents figured out that they had it and they figured out that they had it because of metadata power consumption now in this scenario when i discuss it with people a lot of them say well you know they're gonna get my equipment but since i have my keys then they don't get my crypt or my data which at first blush sounds about right but if you really think that

well you probably didn't raise your hand when i asked if you had ever had a gun to your head who here has heard of rubber hog script analysis nope okay then robber who script analysis is an easy cheap and effective to break pretty much any ciphertext and it's almost always effective it only has two steps the first step is that you find somebody who knows the password and the second is that you beat them with a rubber hose until they give it to you that's it and in the majority of cases this is the type of attack that we should be worried about you know we're not talking about a massive government coming in to take your crypto we're talking about

criminals like this going after your users when they they have something and beating them onto they give it to them so we need to make it harder for this type of criminal to find the victims we need to make it easier for people to be private in general because here in the first of all this efforts that we're doing are definitely making our our world a better place you know but we need to be realistic we need to keep in mind that we are in a rather select group we speak multiple languages we're technologically literate we can afford to take a few days off to just attend the conference and isn't

listen to random strangers talk about a rather obscure topic but you know we if we lose sight of the fact that we are effectively very privileged and if we just conform to the will you're just happy to have this then we don't really get to talk about making the world a better place for the majority and look I'm not gonna be a hypocrite for here I happen to be in this very privileged demographic right now if there's things that we're building make our world a better place we'll take it but we're going to be leaving behind a whole bunch of people around the world who could really use help now question then is how can we help them and I think that the

key thing here is looking at having more private defaults for users because yes users can change the defaults if the average user figures out there's a setting and researches it and tweaks it and is not afraid to lose their data when they change this thing there was this article from The Guardian a few years ago which collected several reserved several studies of how often people actually do this and I'm going to spoil it for you actually it didn't matter if it was about changing the defaults Maps application or just configuring word like Microsoft Word a little bit 95 percent of users never changed a single

default under system if you're the folds are private they're going to stain on private next thing that we can keep in mind is can we help with the metadata you know how can we transfer things we have running applications as network access can we access thing transfer things in a peer-to-peer manner instead of just sending it to the net at large can we if we talk about the case of proof of power consumption that I mentioned earlier for instance in a place keep in mind how opera other places operate in a place like Germany power consumption for your par consumption to out in the amount of equipment you have in your house basically the power company and the government will need to collude against

you which is fairly rare however in most places out there that are visited power consumption is easily available it's still manually collected so basically there's a power meter facing the street for anybody to walk out and take notes if they want now maybe we can completely remove the metadata but if so can we give you can we give users a possible deniability aspect for instance the hidden volumes that veracrypt supports and TrueCrypt before in this scenario if a kidnapper or robber attacks one of your users then they get to enter a particular password which shows the attacker a fake almost empty wallet instead of giving them access to the

entire system and this was probably gonna satisfy the attacker but mostly we need to start speaking plainly to users because all too often we just seem to want to talk about the features that we have and know the trade-offs and our systems and we need to help them build a mental model of what we're doing because once they built a mental model they're very unlikely to change it because we're really close to this thing hitting the mainstream and I know how this most of this is coming across right I mean I I'm coming from an age where you know if you were lucky enough to have a computer everything was stored locally on your floppies and all we had to do was cache

what we have to use was cache was the only option but it feels like we're at the cusp of something here it it feels to me like any day now someone is going to feel we are enough usability issues and the centralization is going to pour into the mainstream once it does users will start pouring in and will start poking around and tinkering with what you have given them most of them will keep going with the first system that they get used to and then 95% of them are not going to change the defaults so we need to make use mean to make sure that those defaulters private as we can make them and when designing something keep in mind that

the major threat once this become mainstream for the majority of your users it's not going to be this guys it's going to be this thank you [Applause]