1TS: 1 Trillion Security on Ethereum

Transcript

Hello. Hello. Hello. Check. Can I Can everybody hear me? Can everybody listen? No. Am I on yet? Hello. Nothing. One, two, three. Oh, this seems You're on. Uh, I'm not perhaps. Uh, I can hear myself now. Okay. Well, uh, thanks everyone for, uh, being here. I hope everyone actually had time to get lunch and welcome to Safecon as well. If you're just joining us, we're here all day uh talking about all things uh self- custody, security, privacy, and all all the other good stuff. Uh but for now, uh we're going to talk to Frederick

Suvantes. Uh thanks for joining us and we have a very big topic uh we want to share to the world uh mainly coming from the Ethereum Foundation. So let's start with that. Like we you all just launched something called a one trillion security initiative. So should we just start with it's a huge label. What does that actually uh stand for? Yeah. So the idea behind trillion dollar security is to do one of two things or both combined I guess. Uh, one is to either have the faith to place $1 trillion of value in a single smart contract or

to have a billion users who each have $1,000 each onchain. That's the current objective. And uh what how did you all arrive at that vision? What what inspired you to uh get there actually? Uh It's kind of a cool name I think. So that's that's kind of part of it. No, but the uh like one of the core things is that I feel that there's quite a lot of like everyone here is probably quite um interested and hyped about the blockchain and what's going to happen with it. But there's also quite a bit of quite a few people who are quite

skeptical towards blockchain. And the idea with this kind of initiative is to kind of reduce the amount of skeptical people by showing that you know blockchain is not only scams and hacks and stuff like that. But it's actually something much better which can you know enrich everyone's lives. not just financially but from a privacy and um you know censorship resistance point of view etc. So that's kind of the objective. Great. Yeah. Uh I remember the time when uh we were still talking about the billions and that was not so long ago and uh we've gone to the trillions and you know as Lucas says here when quadrillion you

know uh yeah yeah yeah we'll see when we've got to the uh quadrillions I guess that's the so uh before we dive into the meteor parts of the topics a little bit uh maybe about you I think the curiosity is like uh uh what's your background like how did you end up in Ethereum Foundation and how do you all work within the foundation for example on this? Yeah, so uh I joined five years ago. Um before that I was working more traditional security. um primarily doing things like doing red teaming and forensics on critical infrastructure such as national

healthcare systems, national banks, um airports, transportation entities, payment providers, etc. Um I think the one thing about working with national banks and national healthcare systems is that they're not bleeding edge. They're very very slow at doing things. So I um I felt like there must be something more interesting to do. Uh so I started looking into blockchains I guess back in 2017 and it was like a whole new world opened up. Uh awesome community, awesome ideas, awesome mindset

um that really aligned with me. So yeah, I just ended up joining and now I joined the uh the EF and uh leads the protocol security team at the EF. Gotcha. And this project so you are the co-chair with Josh Stark who's the Yeah, there are a few people who are working on this. Uh Josh Stark is working on this. Uh we have Jason, I think he's sitting there who's helping out with it. Uh we have Tyler from the protocol security team who is uh also now starting to help out with this um as we're going into this kind of second phase. Uh cuz we have been spending quite a few months now talking to

like hundreds of people uh getting a lot of awesome feedback from anything from like it can be founders, it can be developers, it can be institutions, it can be like just traders etc. um or just general users and we kind of collected all this feedback of what are the current concerns with with um Ethereum or actually as blockchain as a whole like I I would say that the vast vast majority of the things mentioned are actually things that affects the entire blockchain system. I think we're just

the ones who are currently looking into this but I also think that this effort will actually benefit the entire blockchain ecosystem in the end. Yeah. So you just recently published that report lots of findings we had a workshop yesterday for example. Yeah. Uh I think in the report you you mentioned like there are like you take a three-phased approach right like uh uh mapping execution and communication right and as a I guess being an Ethereum foundation or so horizontal right in the ecosystem how do you how do you actually approach that what is that what does this look like in practice um yeah so a lot of the findings that we had was that

people generally have quite a lot of faith in the protocol itself. Uh they know that you know there's not been any major incident on mainet for the past 10 years. We've had you know 100% uptime through that. Um but what people are concerned about primarily is the layer above that. Um, and that's generally not something that the EF itself can solve because the layer above is not like there are so many different entities in the space that are working to to build awesome tools, awesome apps, great protocols, etc.

And in order to kind of improve the current status quo, we will have to collaborate with the entire ecosystem to get this done. Um so a lot of this effort now will be to first figure out okay now we know what the problems are but how do we solve them that's the current step uh so we're looking for feedback on that and then after that we will try to start executing and how that the execution phase will look will be quite different like some some cases or I would say the majority of cases are probably going to be a lot of coordination or facilitation where maybe the EF can

gather all the wallet providers together and try to facilitate a discussion to figure out like what is what do we need to do in order to onboard like non- tech people into this space. Um because a lot of the wallets are quite technical today. I quite often use the like analogy of today we're so early and most people are so technical or at least willing to beat like use very technical tools that we're kind of like in an arch Linux phase.

Well, I think to get like the next billion of people to use this, I think we need to also have some kind of iOS experience if that makes sense. Mhm. Yeah. Like uh I can't imagine that orchestration especially us being a 24/7 switched on uh network global. I feel like that's going to be a big challenge. Uh or is that how you'll see it as well? Just like coordinating. Yeah. Yeah, there's been a lot of coordination uh just getting up to this report. The working days has been like 8 to 11 p.m. most of the days because obviously we want to speak with as many

people as possible from all across the world. And I think this next phase is going to probably be even more uh challenging in that case. So we are going to be having some specific people. We haven't really decided who yet, but there will be people working as I don't know I don't know if project manager is the right word but we need people to kind of ensure that you know there's progress on each of these tracks and that we actually see action and hopefully results quite quickly. Yeah.

And it's uh just my personal opinion is just like it's uh it's very cool to make a a very intentional effort by the foundation with a focus on security at scale. Uh and I read the report and the insights were very familiar but also very refreshing and I think it really uh showed some broad strokes at at the extent of the challenge that we have. uh for the folks that maybe that have not read the report, could you like give us a little summary of the key insights and what's really sticking out perhaps?

Yeah, sure. Um I would say that the key thing that sticks out is that maybe not sticks out, but something that's always being mentioned in all these calls and form submissions, etc., is the UX experience as a whole. Um, and maybe primarily or like specifically being mentioned are wallet UX. Um, how people would like to see that being improved. It's not really clear yet exactly how that should be improved, but that's something that many people are seeing as areas of improvements. Uh, which could range from, you know, people having concern about being going to malicious websites, ending up

losing all their funds. It could be um signing transactions like on a DEX or something like that without fully understanding exactly what they're signing. Um to basic stuff like having a public key as your address, not being really intuitive for beginners. Um so I think there's quite a bit there. Um there's also been a lot of other things mentioned like especially institutions for example have um mentioned things like decentralization being a very important aspect for them. um they're

concerned about you know the reason that they're migrating many of them towards web three are concerns about censorship uh where a central entity could decide that we're going to block transactions to a country in South America for example. So that's an area that I don't feel we should like we need to improve even further on that. But also privacy uh is something that many institutions are mentioning as a key importance. Um being able to transact without competitors seeing what they're doing etc.

And and uh how much of your uh focus would be for example with the enterprises or the institutions? That's an interesting uh topic because I think they're starting to pay more attention I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Um they're definitely doing that and uh I I do definitely see that we need to like to me it kind of goes hand in hand. I think many people who are not institutions they are likely to want the same thing but maybe they can't articulate that specific thing being important. Um, for example, someone in South America

might not see a concern about a centralized RPC provider, for example. A institution might see that, but a retail user probably don't want to use a RPC provider that ends up censoring them for some reason. But they might not really have that as an idea or concept yet while the institutions might have that. And the institutions actually care a lot about the non-institutions because they they also understand that in order for the institutions to succeed, retail also has to be on board basically. Um and for retail to succeed, there has to be institutions. So in my view, they very

much go together. Gotcha. Yeah. And uh obviously there was a lot of uh highlights recently on the etherealize team right is that now uh do you all also work with them internally or are they participating for example in maybe making some of the bridges happen yeah yeah so we have uh we have a few people who are acting as uh advisors to the project uh so we have Zack from Etherealize and uh they're doing awesome work with institutions s giving feedback back feedback uh returning feedback to us about what they're wanting etc. Um we also have uh Samson who is helping out

and uh Medi from Sigma Prime as well who is helping to um to work on this project. Right. And and so so now you all are in a very um uh interesting position with a repository of insights, right? You you have a lot of different insights, a lot of different perspectives, lot of different stakeholders, some invisible biases for example. So how u I can't imagine like how do you all remain opinionated or how does your opinions form? what is like your northstar in general in kind of shephering all of this together before you'll act upon it?

Yeah, I think uh what's going to be important is to look at the ROI of these efforts. I I think there is definitely space for like long-term efforts but I think we should also try to focus on the near future things that we can do that is will have like high impact. Um, like I said, there's going to be efforts that might require potentially protocol changes and that might take a few hard forks to do like the EIP process can take quite a long time. But there might also be aspects which uh you know we can get done in three months for example. So I think we need to figure out which are

the short-term objectives, which are the long-term objectives and then try to execute. But I think I mean we will try to do that in parallel basically. Um I would guess the northstar is to to try accelerate this by shipping faster. Uh like from a security point of view so that we can so that we don't say okay we release the report come back in five years and we'll have an update like we will try to accelerate this quite a lot so that people will start seeing improvements quite soon. So, so uh so say like two years from now um if we uh look back Yeah. Uh retrospectively,

what do you feel has to u signal or materialize for you to feel what the initiatives that we're doing here for example like the $1 trillion initiative is successful like what is what gives you that uh insight perhaps? So what I would like to see is uh a like I guess KPI would be that the amount of uh users losing funds has gone down significantly. Um I think that's a I mean it can't just be the amount because hopefully we will have many many many more users but like the percentage of users losing funds and the amounts lost should be

decreasing. Um to me that would be like one of the main things that we should ensure uh is fixed. So um with all of these now at your helm uh what is next three months look like for example you are just getting into the execution phase right like uh what are your next priorities or what are you all working on essentially? Yeah. So, right now we're we're still collecting a bit of feedback, but we shifted the focus into being more feedback around how how can we solve these issues to see do the ecosystem

have some ideas on how to solve it or like do we need to start thinking about potential solutions already or like new new solutions to these problems. I'm guessing that the ecosystem after reading this report might be thinking like hey this is something that I've been working on uh or this is something I have a great idea on and at that point we can be looking into you know potentially providing grants or other things to help accelerate the process of uh of improving the current status. Um so like I mentioned the amount of people losing funds that's a very very broad thing. Um you know it encompasses everything from

you know it can be a wallet UX it can be ways to detect scams. It can be things like moving from web to hosted frontends to more decentralized verifiable frontends. Um there are a lot of things that can be done and I think we need to also start thinking more outside the box. Um you know not perhaps like how can we what feature can we add to a wallet existing wallet to fix this but rather maybe rethink the entire wallet experience. How can we make a wallet experience that works for nontechnical users or users who prefer

to uh not run a risk of uh losing a lot of money basically like some people will see that or have the mindset like I accept that risk because I want to do these kind of risky things. Um but some people or probably most people are not super interested in that. they want this kind of streamlined experience. Uh but we still definitely need to continue catering to this more I would say technical crowd that um that exists today and will also increase in uh in users as more and more people

end up using the chain. Uh it's my uh personal opinion that uh over the years I found it very challenging when I talk to people in crypto. Uh we're all very opinionated. Yeah. Uh and everyone has a lot of opinions, very strong opinions. Uh sometimes very polarizing and uh when it comes to security, there is this uh uh polarizing opinion. This is the the the area of responsibility or accountability of self- custody. example, is it on the individual or is it on the DAP or is it on the protocol or and I think uh with the cipher punk approach uh perhaps it shifts a little bit more towards the individual rather

than the uh the product for example and now at with scale with one trillion uh you're you're building bridges to enterprises and and I feel like the more traditional set uh accepted model has been more towards hey uh it's more towards the enterprise or the company or the product and is this something like we can expect EF to take a more opinionated approach on how that should look like for example well I I can speak for myself here and I think that you should be responsible like personally for what you're doing at least if you're like if you're not being abstracted away so

to speak Um but if you have control of let's say your wallet then in the end in my opinion you should be verifying things etc. But I do think that the experience has to improve so that you can actually verify in an easier way. Like I speak with very top tier security people in this ecosystem quite frequently and even they have trouble decoding what kind of stuff they're doing on chain because it's just a bunch of call data and it takes time to like if you're doing 40 transactions a day or something

like that or even more it gets quite time consuming to be decoding that. So we need to move to a we need to move to a world where we can we can actually understand what we're doing because at that point like if you know that okay I'm actually giving all my ETH to this website that is most likely a scam website and you press approve then you made an active choice in a way.

But if you end up if you don't even know what you're doing like if you can't understand what you're doing then it's kind of hard to make that call. Uh so I think we need to make we need to improve in that. That's that's one of the key. Yeah. Bringing clarity to the user is exactly it's almost as a a responsibility that we collectively have. Yeah. For sure. So you know the blind signing issues that we're having today uh in my view that would be one of the key things that we as an ecosystem need to uh solve in in some way that works for majority of people. Uh earlier there was a panel uh when someone said

uh we should just uh uh who who would like to kill blind signing and everyone's hands went up and you know we just kill blind signing from the foundations of how we build things I so so I like to just like uh ask this uh very general question like if you had a magic wand and you with the flick of the wand you could change one thing just tomorrow for example that would uh uh change the face of the industry for example in terms of security. Is there something that you wish for? Well to be honest I think the blind saying is the most obvious one like that that will unlock a lot of things. Um it will make things a lot more easy.

Obviously just removing that will not solve all these problems but it will be a massive step in the right direction. So if I could remove something today that would that would be it. Do do you already have some ideas on uh what that could look like? Um, probably a few, but maybe we should maybe we should keep that for uh for the next report to see. I don't want to leave them. I don't want to opinionate too many people who might be submitting things like as feedback. Um because we

do want that's kind of the concern that the EF will say something like this is how we envision things being solved and like in my experience historically that's kind of been what people then started to at least think about and pivot from. But we want there to be kind of a blank paper that people just start from to just get as wide ideas as possible. Okay. Uh last question for you. Uh when it comes to security, how has your perspective changed uh over time?

Um I think that things have improved. Um like if you look at if you look at things how things were I guess 5 years ago there were lots of uh smart contract hacks etc. This was something that and there weren't that many auditors back then I would say there weren't I don't think there were any bug bounty competition platforms or you know the space was kind of uh not in a very good state at that time. Uh I know I was thinking about like how can we get more uh security people from web two to move into web three. Should we be

like creating these kind of courses that people can take to make us quick move or jump over? What should we be doing? But this is something that the ecosystem actually saw themselves which is super super awesome. And between then and now I think this area like the smart contract space has just improved significantly. Um there are so many I would say expectations by people now with regards to securing the smart contracts uh be it audits having run competitions um the tooling is a lot better like it has built-in uh security checks you can do fussing and I guess

that's that is what I hope will happen with this as well like we can make a push to kind of make the user experience more secure now Now previously we ensure that like as an ecosystem we secure the uh the smart contract part. Hopefully we can now move into securing the user experience part making UX secure. Yeah. And say it to the audience. Hold that thought for the rest of the day as well. Uh we're at time but is there uh anything that you feel like you'd like to cover or what the audience should know that we haven't chatted? Um no just if you have any thoughts or uh ideas or anything related to this project like we

are super happy to hear about it. Um you can email us at trilliondoll securitycurity.org and uh we would love to hear from you hear from your ideas work together with you. Uh so just reach out. All right great. So, Frederick Svantes, everyone, we have some time for uh Q&A. Uh we take a few questions.

There's one hand up there. Two. Hello. Uh I'm wondering what's your personal security model for interacting with blockchain? Uh I don't know how much has to say about my object but uh I uh I mean actually you can you can very much see how I kind of interact. Um we have made this website called how to multisig.com which goes through kind of best practices on on how you should be interacting. Um this depends of course

like what you're interacting with, what types of wallets you're interacting with. Um, I think one of the key things to consider is like how much value are you actually at risk of losing when you're thinking about how you interact? Like if you have obviously $50 in a wallet on your mobile phone, like it's not the end of the world if that is lost. Um, but if you're doing something where you have $5,000 on your wallet, like I would personally be more concerned than verifying more about what

I'm doing. Um, you know, it's things like verifying your what you're going to is actually the correct website. Are the contracts actually being used? Um like if you're interacting with a contract on a website, make sure that it wasn't deployed like one day ago. Um if you're going to unis swap for example and you see that this contract was just deployed or any other decks and um you know there's a risk then that there's been a um front end hijack or something like that. um using various tools to to decode the transactions are obviously also uh

useful but yeah it it kind of feels like this would be a half to one hour presentation on its own so I think we're at time uh but thanks for the question yeah thanks