Privacy and Security

Transcript

um so Sebastian from Hopper is going to talk to us about privacy and security um so I think that will be the last Talk of the day which is a really interesting topic and important topic at this stage of where we are in the industry cool so uh yeah thanks for the intro and uh thanks for having me here for the last five minutes of this wonderful venue here um before I talk about Hopper I want to talk about an issue that I find increasingly bothersome who here is running a validator and a staking on eth2 some test net and also speak and

chain everything goes we have a few good okay um so what actually happens when you run a validator on um on any of these Networks you're basically doing fundamentally two things it's a bit more about in the core of it it's two things you are signing attestations so basically you provide this check mark under a block that somebody else produced and it happens pretty frequently right so once per Epoch you get to be um in a tester and the second thing you do is that you get to produce blocks right so you are actually creating this block and you get

to um yeah make some larger rewards for that and it includes the transaction fees yeah so that's like in a in a nutshell what happens on on eth2 and one interesting issue that we see um in these two but actually this issue is not just limited to E2 is that there's no privacy on a transport level so what does that mean we always talk about blockchains and Pub keys and and transactions and stuff but actually it's a peer-to-peer Network that means your IP address can be linked to a public key and we've actually shown unfortunately and didn't have time to prepare the slides here but if you check out our media mu see the the full report there

um we've been successfully able to demonstrate that you can practically link your Pub Key to an IP address so we had a modified Lighthouse node that was collecting at the station seeing from which IP that came from and even though we had a pretty trivial implementation it was possible to reliably link a Pub Key to an IP address you might ask okay so what right well here's a Twist after the merge I can identify any of you who run validators at home and I can do so ahead of time because I know who's going to be the next validator and by doing so I could run a highly targeted DDOS attack against your validator because maybe I'm the one

right after and that means there's economic incentives to take down a validator node and that's known for a long time right that you can take down notes and people focus on single secret leader election to make that better um but unfortunately there is no solution right now that works for homesteakers and that's something that I would like to raise awareness for that either we need ethereum space Embrace homesteakers and we really think about Solutions or we say you know there's Solutions such as the ones that have been proposed which are only accessible to professional stakers we can't kind of like you know take this Middle Ground

between the two as we currently do because we put this infrastructure at risk especially for the homesteakers Among Us and so the last topic that I would like to propose is to talk seriously about transport level privacy Solutions and surprisingly that's what we work on at Hopper so what is hopper Hopper is a mixnet which is something that is more private than your VPN or even tor how does it achieve stronger privacy guarantees by not just relaying packets that you entrust to a VPN but just like shown here a node in this network is caching packets mixing them up in other packets in a network before sending it

on and that it's economically sustainable because node operators get rewarded for doing so so they earn some tokens if they can provide a proof that they've actually forwarded the packet so we incentivize the most fundamental Atomic operation of the network and I'll leave it at that and take some more questions if there are any thank you so much Sebastian any questions one question in the back [Applause] um just really quickly could you expand a bit more on the advantages over like onion writing and VPN routing as opposed to this yeah so basically what is the trust Assumption of a VPN the trust

Assumption of a VPN is that the person running the server is not going to dox all your connection metadata all your browsing history everything what is the trust Assumption of Tor the trust Assumption of Tor is there's this multi-hop routes right so in tour you have three nodes similar to the picture shown here and the trust assumption is that the first and the last note do not collude which is not very strong actually you can you know run probably 100 nodes and every now and then I can de-anonymize you the trust Assumption of a mixed net like Hopper is that there is one honest mixed node along your path so we can cycle paths much faster than Tor and due to this package looking indistinguishable from one another you

have these very strong privacy guarantees [Music] all right one more question and then the last question before you wrap up hey can you explain a little bit about like the economics like who is paying like who is the other side of the yeah so on the protocol layer which we implement the sender is paying um on the application layer that would kind of suck right let's imagine you would build like a messaging app or whatever on top of Hopper um so you could map the traditional business models that were used in the web 2 world for example pay per ads and then you know the operator is is paying for the underlying tokens just like you know is a WhatsApp user don't pay for

AWS or whatever they're using under the hood so yeah I'm kind of curious to see where that goes I'm personally curious about seeing brave-like models where you know I don't need to be onboarded to the web 3 maybe ads pay for the underlying service infrastructure all right well thank you so much we're wrapping up this day um I want to thank the organizers and maybe invite them to the stage Molly to close the uh close the day this amazing conference that you guys organized thank you so much great well let's uh it's been a long day after a long day so

let's make this quick so it's been a great program because of all of you and all of the rest of you who left but were here and made it fun all the great speakers great participants I think mooley the other members of the program committee who made a great program I think what you can all do is thank Kai and Lori on your way out to the right because they put in a huge amount of time and effort making this work and let's thank the AV guys back there who have been here like all weekend I think we bought them a few beers yesterday but otherwise you know we owe you something for for hanging out here

anybody else I should thank it's been a great meeting let's do it again someplace else all right see ya have a [Applause]