How We Solved Anonymous Credibility for Whistleblowers

Transcript

Um hi everyone. Um hope everyone's doing well. Um I want to start this presentation with a statistic. Um only 52% of employees who witness any misconduct in the organizations that they're part of. They choose um over 50% actually choose silence. Um that is not because people lack courage. That's actually because every ch channel that's available um has an architectural flaw. We it was either designed to be anonymous or it was designed to be credible. However, today that changes.

Um I'm Donna and I'm here today to talk to you about ZK whistleblower which um solves anonymous credibility for whistleblowers. Um before I go into um what we actually built, I wanted to talk a little bit about whistleblowing and why is it important. Till this day there is a lot of stigma around whistleblowing. However, if we look back in time, we see that mo um a lot of big changes around legislation or around um workers rights or taxation happened due to big um cases um that um left us with big changes. Um some of them I want to go through today.

So, we have the week leaks. In 2010, um Chelsea Manning actually leaked over 250,000 diplomatic cables. The result um well there was a revolution in the Middle East that erupted and was partially catalyzed by corruption but Manning ended up having to serve over seven years in military prison. 2013 Snowden. Well, I'm guessing everyone in this room knows Snowden. Um and I'm guessing everyone globally knows Snowden, even my parents um who don't really know what whistleblowing is. But um Edward Snowden proved that the NSA was conducting mass surveillance on American citizens. And what was the result? Well, that's when the frea

freedom act was passed which was the first legislative roll back um on um surveillance powers since the 911. And what was the result of that? Well, Stoden had to live in exile and um his whole life was turned upside down. Then we have 2016, the Panama Papers, which I'm guessing a lot of people also heard about. Um, so an anonymous source leaked 11.5 million documents, which proves that over$1.3 billion US um by a lot of heads of state and political figures were were not paid. Um, and also a lot of them were involved with um different illegal activities. Um, a

lot of them were very well-known political figures in Europe especially, which ended up in them having to resign. Um, and the journalist that actually published the Panama Papers, um, Galit Galitzia, Yadafne Galitzia, she ended up being, um, she ended up being, um, killed in, um, Malta. Um, and her son actually saw the car blow up while Daphne was in the car driving to work. And that was because she decided to speak up against this.

Um, and the sad part is that till today, uh, once once the journalist was out of the picture, nothing really has changed since then, even though her son tried desperately to move the case forward. Something that we have even more recent was the 2025 Boeing airplane crash, um, which took the lives of a lot of innocent people. And even though it was widely known that there was um critical um security faults in the plane, people were sharing information online from anonymous accounts. And let's be honest, who here reads something from an anonymous account on Twitter and actually believes that. And it's like, okay, I'm not going to board this plane because this account at 2121 said that the plane is faulty.

So the point is that every one of these disclosures reshaped policy, reshaped how um uh billions of dollars were uh recovered. It saved lives and every one of them every one of these lives was destroyed um for the person that came forward. So that is not a bug in whistleblowing. It's the actual architecture. Um let's go through some of the options of what would be the way to whistleblow today. Well, the first one would be anonymous disclosures. Um, and I mean in this room I'm guessing people are more technical and they actually know what Tron is and uh the fact that your IP is getting tracked and what metadata is.

But for someone that works in a web two organization, do they really have the knowledge or really the time to do their due diligence to understand how do I actually um submit any disclosures um and ensure that my life is not put at risk or my family's life is not put at risk and a lot of people don't really have the luxury in life to be able to lose their jobs and be known as the whistleblower from their company. So if you would want to actually go the anonymous route, you'd have to know what browser to download, what application to download within that browser. Um then you'd have to know how to delete the metadata. So it's a whole process that you know takes quite a lot of time and

even if you go through the whole hassle of it. Um only 18% of all anonymous disclosures are substantiated because if there's no credibility I mean who really would because the journalist also is their job. Why would they put their time into something that might come out to not be um true? Um the second option well that would be a very traditional option. um to basically talk to someone, talk, find a journalist uh that you trust. Um and I personally don't know any journalist myself to just call up and be like, "Hey, um please trust me. Don't use me as a source, please." Uh cuz I don't want anyone to know that it came from

me. So, I have to trust you that you won't tell anyone. Um but I have this critical information that I can only share some information about. Um so, please take this and do something with it. It really even sounds ridiculous me saying it right now, but that would be one of the other ways. So, you would have to spend the time to find a journalist. You would have to trust that journalist. You would then have to obviously um disclose who you are. And therefore, there would be a singular point of failure. um if it ends up that the journalist does disclose your identity or um doesn't have the proper security ops in place um it might end up bad for you in the end anyway. So it's

it's a riskier path but it's still one um that is available to the public. So with that's where ZK Whistleblower actually comes in. We eliminate that choice. You stay anonymous. Um your report carries cryptographic proof of organizational access. However, no um no journalist needs to know who you are and there is no information and there's no way of tracking um who you are um well what your identity is. Um and I just want to talk a little bit about the four pillars of our innovative um solution. First of all, we have anonymity. Zero knowledge proofs keep your identity private.

All proof generation happens client side. basically nothing ever leaves your device. Um what that means is that no data at any point um leaves outside of your computer. Um which means that there is no way to track who you are and there is no way uh for us to architecturally know or find out what your identity is. The second pillar is verifiability. So here is actually the core innovation of the product. Every corporate email ID carries a DKM signature. Um, in basic terms, what that means, it's a cryptographic stamp from the sending organization's mail server.

We extract that signature um and generate a ZK proof that you actually own that organization's domain um email. The proof just says that this person is in in in fact uh part of at ethereumfoundation.com um or atgmail.com. So uh this happen in in this process. We just reveal um the the fact that the DKM matches the public DNS record and that's absolutely it. There is no we don't see your email. We don't see um your name um or the content or the sender. It might it can be as simple as a Google invite.

Um the next pillar is immutability. So um every um every information that the whistleblower dis uh decides to disclose to the public um and send to the public server, it's actually um encrypted and stored in IPFS, meaning that it is decentralized, it is permanent and is tamperproof. there is no single entity and there's no single uh person that can delete or tamper that information which usually happens um when um centralized organizations want to tamper evidence.

Fourth but not least, something that we're still working on. Um well, whenever you're part of an organization, which is um and something happens, there is not only one person that actually knows what's wrong, right? There's people that can see, there's people that talk behind the scenes. Um therefore, there's always others that can corroborate to uh the story. So what we want to do is want to ensure that members of that same organization can actually attest on chain to the information that has been submitted.

Therefore creating um a u group credibility layer. So here is um I want to do a very short demo of the application but it's a very um simple application and we're oops uh it's a very simple application um with a very streamlined user journey. It's very simple and very straightforward. The first step um would be to download an EML file and then upload it over here. an EML file. Um, anyone can download an anyone everyone has an EML file. It's basically something that you can download from any email that you

get, even a Google invite, as I mentioned. Um, and it doesn't matter if you're the sender or the receiver. Um, as long as that's in your um, server, you can download that and you upload it to the application. Um, once that is done, what we're doing over here is the verification process. So um as you see over there we extracted the DKM signature and then once we have the proof of that uh we can ensure that it matches the public DNS record um therefore proving that you are part of said organization.

Now once this has been proven um what you see is this result that organization was verified and then you are um you have the submission um the submission form the submission form is very straightforward you have a titled uh a title you can add the description uh for now is just text that you can add and you can also choose the disclosure type whether it's government NGO financial and then the identified organization actually the when once we verify the domain through the DKM it cannot be changed afterwards. So um people can actually like put whatever email and then change like you know

Google or meta um and therefore then this can be submitted to the feed. Um as you can see over here um what will be public is just a disclosed text the verified domain and the um time stamp and once um once the file is submitted there will be a public feed um and every disclosure will be available to the public. Um and that's as simple as that where we can verify that you're part of an organization. the journalists scrolling through the through the public feed can actually assess whether they want to investigate this further or not.

Um and they will be able to um also ensure that their time might not be entirely wasted because this has been verified at least by the organization. Um and just a quick kind of uh technical back what's happening technically in the background. Um the user journey flow is that the user uploads the EML file. Um we extract the DKM signature and that happens um on uh your own device. Once we can prove that you are part of that set organization um then you can submit your files and your files go into the IPFS um and it's anonymous um there is no

leaks um apart from your disclosure obviously um and with that I want to say um thank you very much um and my closing thought I want it to be that the next Pentagon papers or Panama papers shouldn't require source sources who sacrificed their lives. That's why I think that we should build the future of this together and ensure um um a safe space for everyone uh whatever level of their technicality is. Um and also this is just another great example of what we can do with the technology that has been worked upon. Thank you very much.

>> Do you want to take some questions? Um I'm sure >> hi thank you so much for the presentation. It's super interesting and and a great example of what we as you mentioned can do with with the technology for the good of the human race. Um my question is u maybe maybe related to the next step that you're building another the station. So uh the ID is verified if the person is still in this company by their email right but often investigative uh journalist the moment they have for example whistleblower or a hint one way or another uh they would search for people

related one way or another. So they might not be be part of this company or were part for example and hence that the station won't be able to go through their email. Have you thought of that? And and what would be the the like solution here? And and secondly here also you mentioned uh it's also related because if if someone poses as an investigative journalist, it might be also the company trying to figure out who the whistleblowers out are. Can can this be reversed? So basically checking the the uh journalists whether this is really them or they're credible and not actually the company hiring you know someone even building the whole you know

profile and everything so they look credible just to to you know to surf surface up the rats. >> Uh well first of all thanks for the questions great questions. Um second of all I wish we had the budget to work on all of those. Um but yes we we did think about those things. So um for the attestation um actually one way that we thought to solve it is that okay sometimes you have the organization but if it's an NGO it can also be contractors. So it can't always just be we can't rely on the fact that this person will have information and still own that domain. Um, and one way that we thought about is like maybe thinking of is there a way to work on a whitelisting

sort of mechanism where you would just find and identify all the contractors or all the companies they've worked with um and maybe allow only those to attest to the information because obviously if you just would allow anyone from any organization that doesn't make sense um and at the same time if you constrain it just to one organization um a lot of NOS's they do work mostly with contractors So also wouldn't make sense. Um so that's one way that we've had about it. But obviously if anyone here has any other thoughts of how we can solve that um I'm all ears. Um and then for the journalists themselves what we um also were thinking of is that yes a lot of the times obviously if if it's an

organization that doesn't really want to have internal disputes um and wants to clean up house very quickly and quietly um you would obviously have ways of okay what do we do with this um and one way that we thought was also kind of uh reaching out finding out the domains of investigative journalists or journalist fighting for freedom. Um, anyone that really cares about p the public having a voice and the public being saved behind that voice and working on a very similar structure as I mentioned before, but it would be sort of a closed forum where um, as long as you own that domain, you can access that forum and then have visibility to that information because um, for right now

it's just a public feed. If we really think about um in cases where information goes to the public, you really want sometimes to be able to create um a case based on what you know. Uh because very often information gets tampered with very very quickly when things are about to blow up. Um and we were thinking that it's it there should be cases where the environment is closed and gated only to people that would take the right steps towards that. Um, but of course this this requires a lot more research and a lot more time and this is a bootstrap project um where it's two people with other full-time jobs trying to make whistleblowing more safe and credible for people. So yeah, that's

that's my that's my answers. Um, any more questions? Oh okay. >> Hi, you mentioned the meta data. I'm just wondering, you know, if if a whistleblower goes to your website, that metadata of their IP address going to your website exists. I'm just wondering, are you encouraging the whistleblowers to also use things like tour browser or other ways to reduce their metadata? Is that something you're focused on? >> Um, yeah, we we obviously do want to um educate the users around that. We're also thinking about what can we do in order to just um ensure that we minimize the possibility of um anyone breaking

and finding any any IP addresses um as well. So that's also something that is being discussed but it's it's right as of right now um there isn't a possibility Congrats on the talk. It was very interesting topic and I think the mechanism is great. Uh my question is DI DIM for email signatures is a great way to prove uh that you own an email without revealing your identity. Have you thought about similar concept with passports? I know that most of the

passports now have bio biometric data and maybe if related to the first question the employee no longer has access to the email. Maybe by proving his uh identity with his passport can uh relate to that he was a part of the company by the time he submitted the >> request. Um yeah, obviously that's something we thought about, but I think in in this specific case, um when a person actually thinks about whistleblowing, it's a very sensitive topic. And personally, if I was I probably would be more I I wouldn't be as open to scanning my passport because we barely understand how ZK works. Imagine someone in web 2

and you tell them like, "Hey, just go scan your passport." And trust me, bro, it's very safe. We're not going to do anything. Um we were thinking though about um maybe a way of introducing ZKPDF where people can actually um u upload supporting um abstracts from also signed documents. Um but with a passport I think that um actually would it would work better with the use case for journalists or investigative journalists or lawyers because then we can actually cross check against um their past experience and what they're what they've done and the work that they do. um and allowed them to have access to more private um like a more private server, a private feed, not server. Um so yeah, that's that's why we

didn't really go towards um passports. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much everyone.