Privacy in Cosmos Live: Nadim Kobeiss (Nym)- Winning the Crypto Wars.

Transcript

hello everyone thank you very much for having me here my name is Nadeem and today I'm going to be talking about winning the crypto Wars I didn't come up with this title it's a bit it's a bit extra but uh yes we are going to be talking about interesting new technologies for enhancing the state of privacy on the internet in ways that are relevant for cryptographic and blockchain applications as well as hopefully general purpose user applications my job at Nim which I started recently is head of software integration and my mission is to integrate Nim the Privacy technology that I'm going to be talking about into as many different softwares as it makes sense stuff like telegram I

don't know signal secure wallets and so on um also I am the author of a critically acclaimed puzzle Adventure game called Dr kabushi's labyrinthin laboratory I brought a few copies with me please take a copy I will leave them here it's a very nice puzzle game it's got over 100 Levels an original soundtrack pixel art stuff like that I really care a lot about this game I spent like a year and a half working on it so I genuinely hope that you'll take a copy and try it out it's available on Steam Windows Mac Linux and Nintendo switch but Nintendo would murder me if I tried to give a copy for free so I won't this is only for the steam version they're very they're very strict Nintendo their legal team is like the

Yakuza it's actually really insane you should look it up uh anyway so uh before I get fired for segoing into my video game um let's talk more about Nim so the purpose of nim is to deal more with the issue of Internet surveillance the thesis that we have here is that no existing solution can defend against the NSA and private companies and cyber criminals well like Google meta and so on differentiating which one of those two go into companies and which goes into cyber criminals is an exercise left to the reader um you know we have some technologies like for example

uh this clicker that doesn't work I'm trying to click the button but nothing is happening it's not it's not very effective as Pokemon would say uh there no still can someone skip whoa nope that's too many skipped slides okay could someone please go back to the previous slide okay next slide please I'm just going to put this aside for now all right so there's a strong demand for privacy which is why we're here Tor uh itself keeps growing especially when things happen around the world like you know the Ukraine war or protests in

Iran and other things also signal keeps growing but the thing with the torrent signal is that they lack what nasiv Nicola taleb would call an anti-fragil funding model namely they don't really they're not resilient rather or they could be more resilient signal which is an excellent contribution to online privacy nevertheless had to be supported by an independent donation from Brian Acton which is you know of one one in a million sort of thing and Tor has suffered from stagnating growth next slide please so our plan is to sort of offer a more

decentralized and more incentivized mixed net that can provide better privacy than Tor but also at the same time solving the resiliency sustainability and incentivization problems that uh may be faced by Torah or some other privacy enhancing Technologies we do this with a token and we also have some other technologies that I'll talk about in a bit but first I would like to show you next slide please this comparison of how Nim is different from other similar technology so let's start at the bottom when you're using a VPN you're connected to the VPN and your traffic just goes through the VPN and onto the website whatever

Netflix that you're using or whatever it is and there's no real anonymity Happening Here the you'll notice that these little dots they're ordering is the same these are packets their size is the same everything is the same and the VPN itself the VPN provider can see all your traffic vpns don't really offer any anonymity in my opinion Taurus of course much better Torah is a very nice technology that has actual onion routing packets are routed through a bunch of different Tor nodes operated by volunteers and Tor has been very successful at helping activists and journalists and privacy interested individuals over decades I think but nevertheless packets can still be

de-anonymized via their size and timing patterns this is what we try to improve upon by using Mixed Nut technology in Nim which is an area of research that has existed for a while as well it's better because it anonymizes the size and the timing of the packets it mixes The Ordering of the packets as well to be fair this leads to a slower service than something like tour but something a lot more secure actually in terms of anonymity it can resist a much more capable Global active attacker thank you for forwarding to the next slide no that was the good call actually so in our case we have multiple hops we have covered traffic we have timing obfuscation like I said these are just

you know some of the technical ways in which we differentiate ourselves from existing privacy technology and hope to offer a better product to our consumers next slide please if you look at it from the perspective of the user basically you're running the Nim client on your machine we're using the Sphinx encrypted packet format to forward those packets through the mixed Network and then the mixed networker connect is throws the packets through the other side to the application Services friends Etc and the service provides the service provider itself is free to like run a service provider node which interfaces with Nim for the user and you know there's there's ways to get Nim running on the user's side there's a

waste for there's a way for service providers like telegram or signal to run Nim on their site as well and so there's a diversity in the ways that Nim can be integrated across uh you know a stack a product stack or a network stack next slide please um the nem token is what handles the incentivization mechanism here so when you run a Tor node you just run a torn node and you're contributing to online privacy but you're paying money to run the node and there's no um resilient incentivization mechanism that's happening there but when you're running a Nim token sorry a mix Network you're benefiting from the tokenomics uh

present there which are built on Cosmos incidentally because you are um being rewarded uh via a proof of mixing so like there's a proof of mixing mechanism that looks at how much your mixed network node has actually oh thank you how much your mixed network node has actually mixed and based on that you get a token reward so the more you mix the more you contribute to online privacy the more tokens you earn and this hopefully will incentivize people to uh you know and also establish a more resilient ecosystem for online privacy uh the Nim token benefits the user because they can use it to access them it benefits mixed nodes because they are rewarded for contributing to the name

infrastructure and ecosystem validators of course exist to do what validators always do you guys know about that stuff and service providers you know signal any other service providers they can also purchase the token and provide it on behalf of their users so that their users can use their product with them for free uh my job like I said earlier is the software integration aspect and so I'm responsible for looking at how developers can integrate them into their products uh one cool way that we're doing that is by offering a very nice uh set of sdks so we have a rust SDK for Nim that allows to integrate them natively into any rust application get

The Cutting Edge performance associated with rust Stacks we also have a typescript SDK which allows you to interface with a webassembly version of the Nim client in the browser and that's also very nice because it means that you can deploy them in browser extensions and any atom or Towery or electron app no atoms the editor electron app and in the browser as well and we also recently started working on a well finished actually and published uh in collaboration with chainsafe a lit P2P native transport for Nim so you know how in lib P2P you can specify the transport and it has it comes with a bunch of transports like webrtc websocket and quick well nem is the only lip P2P

transport that provides full privacy mixed net guarantees it's the first privacy preserving native transport for lip P2P implemented in Rust and you can check it out on GitHub today that's one of the ways in which we're bringing them integration to the general public in in more and more ways so it has a simple well-specified rust API it's very nice it does all the things that you would expect are done when you have you know good software engineering taking place and all of that is there um when it comes to the users we also want to make them more accessible to users themselves like normal people who just want better privacy not necessarily developers or anything like that right now we have this app it's more of a

proof of concept called Nim connect and it basically allows you to open up a proxy on your computer and you can use that proxy to Route telegram through Nim and so on but the idea is that we were going to expand Nim connect to become the Nim app so you just download Nim connect on your computer and then nemconnect can detect like oh you have signal installed you have whatever installed and it'll automatically try to connect to these apps and Route them through them for you that's my goal personally to I think it's a nice idea um and we also have the Nim wallet which is really nice not only because it works on all desktops and it's you know nice user interface and so on but it also has a good UI and ux for managing mixed nodes so you can manage your mix node

from the wallet via a nice graphical user interface you don't need to use the command line even though your mix node is running on a server somewhere Isn't that cool um I personally this feature was implemented before I joined them and when I discovered that I was really excited about it because it means that you know not only trading them tokens but also like just running a mixed node managing the mix node all happens from one place and that's very nice and allows a more integrated user experience for anyone who wants to contribute to the network you can even monitor like the rewards that you're earning from your mix node and so on uh we also have this thing which I don't really understand how it works quite yet so I'll skip it all right so just honestly like then

um and so basically this is what I just described you know you have the mixed node rewards that are being determined via a cosmos smart contract um and uh that's being validated by a bunch of validators the way that many services on Cosmos work instead of um you know cryptocurrency mining we have mixed net based proof of mixing Mining and you can stake your Nim in mixed nodes to uh basically give a vote of confidence to them allowing them to Route more traffic and earn more rewards so there's a staking element in the Nim token and the mixed node economics as well

and yeah everyone is happy we I think this establishes an economic system where it works well for everyone this year an integration we have upcoming work in terms of integrating native nym support into applications I had an encouraging discussion with someone here today who was looking at integrating them natively into a technology that you heard about earlier and that's very nice there's also going to be sdks and layers for independent developers that just want to use Nim and those exist already and are quite functional and we also want to give users control themselves to just go ahead and download the Nim app and use it right without needing to deal with code bases and so on because how will we reach the end user otherwise that is

going to be the ultimate test of the real world viability of the technology and the product thank you very much for your attention today Nim is a cool thing that you should check out this is our website please feel free to send me an email make sure to hit like And subscribe and stay tuned for more videos thank you very much maybe there are some questions [Applause] any questions there are some questions wonderful yes yes please thank you do mixnet node operators also be do they also have to be validators or are those two separate roles and if so how do they sort of work together Nim mixed nodes and then validators are two completely separate

roles they run two completely separate rust binaries there's Nim Dash mix node and Nim Dash validator uh and uh anyone can run a mixed node right now in order to run a validator well you can run one but to be listed as a validator you have to basically contact Nim not me someone more politically involved uh to to be listed um and uh the rewards for uh validators are also slightly different I think and I'm not really sure how they work uh but it's it's a it's a significantly very different role I think there's no there's no overlap sure you have a gentleman over here yeah quick question kind of related who did

your token economics they're pretty good and that's kind of rare for infrastructure projects uh the token economics were done uh many years before I joined the company which is about six weeks ago to be honest I don't know uh a good person to ask would be Harry Halpin and I this is my personal uh thinking I'm not I'm this might be totally false but I think that someone from a16z helped but I'm not sure okay uh what are your thoughts on other maybe more established projects like iCloud private relay and they're sort of like you know

techniques do you think being Mass Market is better than what you're doing perhaps well I think that iCloud private relay is a very successful project specifically because it has um it out it out competes us and basically everyone else in terms of being able to give a strong user experience to integrate with the user stack and that is something that in general uh cool crypto Anarchist whatever technology fails at so far hence why they hired me six weeks ago as head of software integration right so in that sense yes we need to catch up to them however strictly speaking our technology is superior when it comes to the Privacy guarantees that it can offer

and that's just how it is right like if you study it if you live do statistical modeling if you look at the cryptography it's just better however can we make it as performant and as seamless for the user that's something that the field has always struggled to do and recently um it's been taking these questions more seriously and hopefully it will continue to do so