You have nothing to hide! Vol.2

Transcript

here uh and Stage is yours go for it thank you very much um I guess I'll give people 15 seconds to to come in uh and enjoy the slide um okay last person and then we just close the door just we just close the door and we don't let anyone in no I'm just kidding anyway welcome uh I hope you are enjoying eth prag uh it's a it's a huge honor to be able to speak here uh it's uh also very terrifying to speak basically right after vitalik and and Kavin um talking over there and I'm like well what am I going to say now

um but anyway uh what I want to tell you is that you have nothing to hide uh you have to worry about your privacy and everything is okay and everyone loves you your government loves you and again you have nothing to hide um which well it's not true uh there's always something to add and I'll talk about that so um yeah uh this is my talk uh my name is vas pavin if you can if you want to find me somewhere online it's usually as V pavin so you can you can try that um so I will talk about why and how we are all hiding something and uh why that's okay and then also I want to talk about a project I'm working on uh very briefly and how that helps on the INF

infrastructure level on of web threee and and generally decentralized projects uh since we are in Czech Republic I will start with a tweet of our ministry of interior uh this is from last year and V rushan tweeted that um a phone with uh encrypted communication app does not make you a mafiosa your connections and actions make you a mafiosa and then in this video he explains how it's okay to have applications for encryp communication uh in your phone and the reason this post exit is because some of his friends uh got convicted by taking bribes or something and they were communicating over some encrypted communication application and then he

had to explain why it's okay for politicians to not leak their information and their privacy um so he is right it's okay to communicate using encryption uh or us encrypted communication uh it was also funny well funny uh interesting to to read the comments below the PO post uh so the first one says normal and decent person does not need encryption because they have nothing to hide obviously um and he should stop playing this game of like telling everyone that it's normal a decent person does not uh does not have any need to encrypt anything obviously you your intentions are not clear and then the last one is uh once again why

the hell do you need an application for encrypted communication uh because if you use encrypted communication police cannot investigate you is that because that's why you don't why you need that you don't trust the police um so the main message is that we all have something to hide and that's okay and we hide stuff from our loved ones for example when I forgot that my wife has a birthday um I was trying to hide that very well um we we we hide stuff from our enemies and I don't mean like Immortal Enemies who was trying to kill you because from them you will definitely try to hide um but I mean enemies as in competitors in the space you're working in for example right you don't want to

tell all your secrets to your competitors before you are ready to reveal them and some people have to hide from their governments uh and we are seeing that with uh various whistleblowers or uh people running away from war and and things like that right so you have we all have something to hide and it's perfectly fine and then also privacy where privacy is normal I hate when people say that privacy is not a crime uh because that's very defensive uh in my brain uh so um privacy is very normal thing so if you feel like you need privacy it's it's very normal but there is they whoever that is

um there is different day um but they are trying to prevent the Privacy that you have in the cyers space on online on the internet so this is one of the examples the European Union uh child secularist child child sexual damn it child sexual abuse regulation um the goal of this is to protect children good cause love it makes perfect sense but how they are trying to do it is they are trying to make your ENT encrypted communication uh pable so basically be able to read whatever you send to anyone on any messaging platform or any form of

of communication that you use now this is not great because if you are a a law obeying citizen you don't really want anyone to spy on your communication um and if you are not if you are actually someone doing bad stuff you will probably figure out a way how to get around these official applications that will implement this feature of being able to break the encryption uh now the second thing of of uh where this is problematic is that everybody who is an expert in the space says this won't work this won't work from the perspective of Technology because we don't have a way how to open ENT and communication uh as long as it's actually end to end encrypted um so you

would have to not encrypt the communication basically um and then also that it's dangerous for children because if they cannot freely Express themselves they will not be able to develop uh properly um and the only place where they can now freely Express themselves is online right uh e even though this is like being pushed back EU EU was still pushing this law up until earlier this year they basically said okay we're going to stop uh because it's probably not going to work um this article from last year uh is uh interesting and explains how this is tie back to some uh security corporations in Us and how they were BAS basically potentially bribing

or um trying to convince EU to actually push this so that they can sell EU all the technology they needed um in other words this sounds to me as if they were saying um privacy is dangerous and and and we we have to do something about the Privacy actually today I saw a tweet I'm just going to pull out my phone sorry about that um uh from one of the EU commissioner people I think I think is uh and it says beware the Chet control proposal that's a part of the regulation which has been stalling could be adopted by EU governments after all France is uh considering to give up the resistance

the compromise is either you agree to have your chat scanned or you can no longer share or receive pictures videos and links so uh it's a it's an interesting uh development of like although people are saying this is nonsense um there are still trying to find a way how to spy on ordinary people now this is a this is a tweet part of the tweet from uh Rose from U lunar mining Conex uh from dark fi saying encryption is a mathematical expression of a second law of Thermodynamics it is the Inver irreversible Arrow of time Made Concrete I have no clue what that means but I think it's beautiful

um I think it means that if you encrypt something math and physics makes sure that nobody can actually read the content right so that's what the EU and other governments UK government and US Government are fighting against they're fighting against math and and thermodynamics uh well okay good luck guys um I tweeted that uh laws cannot break math similar I think similar context now what is the risk of us not having a privacy like what is why is it a big big deal so I mentioned the psychologist saying that uh kids cannot uh evolve properly and and like flourish

in in an environment where they can cannot express themselves freely so that's one thing and it's directly connected to the first line lack of privacy leads to self-censorship so why this is bad uh I came to conclusion and it's just my personal opinion that self-censorship is kind of the worst kind of censorship uh might be the reason for that thought might be that I've never been at least to my knowledge actually censored by someone else so I can't compare but uh I feel like if if someone sensors you you can actually you can at least fight against it uh and you can find different ways how to express yourself but if you sens self censor so you decide in your head that you will not do something or not say something just because you are worried about

someone maybe looking down on you or uh or or find it uh bad if a government changes and suddenly something you did is Criminal even though it wasn't before um you may self-censor and not do stuff and that hinders Innovation we are here at epr for Innovation for ideation to find new solutions to existing problems or find problems that nobody thought about um so self self-censorship is bad for this environment um and then second thing is more of a warning to you if you're building something if you are doing something and you consider it privacy is part of that which should you should always consider that but if you consider privacy as part of what you are doing and your users might need privacy you

need to realize that privacy cannot be eded retrospectively right so if you build a system ethereum uh where everything is public which it is um you can't say and now it's private now nobody can see the transactions and now nobody can know whether you interacted with some wallet that is now ofaction right so if you're building something you have to think about privacy from the get-go because you can never go back and add privacy retrospectively um okay let's let's expand uh I hope it makes sense so far um so who does not agree that privacy is important who does think that we should not have privacy okay good you're in agreement

now from the perspective of privacy uh we talked about encryption so far um who thinks I mean I just say it here but before you saw the slide who thought uh that if you have encrypted stuff online it's enough for your privacy or who still thinks that if I encrypt my communication and I send you an encrypted file it's enough for our communication to be private nobody okay you saw the answer so my bad um but you are right encryption is not enough for privacy because encryption just just prevents others

to access the content to see the content of the messages but that's just one part of what makes the communication potentially dangerous for they for them whatever that is um because we have some other properties uh for privacy preserving technology or originally approaches to things so linkability as long as I can link sender and recipient of some message or of some content uh I can potentially retrospectively see that if some if one of them leaks some information that leads to some potential I don't know uh uh illegal stuff I can link it back to someone else and say

okay maybe you are involved as well and we see that very clearly again in ethereum we are in ethereum uh event uh because if I wanted to get get you into trouble with your wallets I can just uh I can just push some money through tornado cach and then those tainted coins I just drop some dust in your wallet and suddenly your wallet is connected to an Offa sanctioned uh wallet hence you are also Offa sanctioned right uh if if I if it's not true I think this is this is how it happened to some people if it's not true please correct me I'm happy to be corrected but this is how I understood it uh when when these things happened so we need unlinkability between Center and

recipient so if we want to have a a private communication or private transaction systems we need to make sure that we cannot we can prove that something happened if someone has a legitimate claim on knowing that but then also it's not completely obvious uh and public and non private that you communicated with someone else um and then we need anonymity so we need to make sure that uh my communication my personal stuff that is going through the wires is not is indistinguishable from other users or other entities communicating on the same network so you can think about it like if I go to Prague with pink Lamborghini um you'll probably be able

to spot me very easily if I go to Prague with red scod it's going to be way harder right so you need H some good anonymity set to be able to not see immediately that someone is doing something regardless of what they are doing and an ownership uh we give up ownership of our data very easily uh whenever we use things like Instagram Facebook uh even GitHub basically says that whatever you upload to GitHub is now U the data is owned by GitHub I think so um ownership of data um helps us to to keep control of the private data so now we're getting to the project that I wanted to like show these

properties of privacy how we Implement them in waku which is an infrastructure project um for communication um and what so I I need to tell you what waku is to be able to show you on practical examples where these properties are actually used and how they are implemented so uh waku is a communication uh set of communication privacy preserving decentralized modular uh protocols for this for generalized messaging U what does it mean originally in uh ethereum white paper there were three pillars storage consensus and communication uh we have consensus that is very well known ethereum we have storage uh from that still it's called

swarm it's not that much known uh and then the last one pillar was um uh communication that was whisper and that's completely unknown because it doesn't really exist anymore uh waku came out of whisper and it's kind of a a a followup a a reimplementation of someone the concepts and and specs of whisper and so what does it mean to be privacy preserving we talked about all these properties and we are trying to um follow them or Implement them so uh I will talk more about that decentralized there is a network of nodes right now something like 450 notes that are running uh novaku client and they are broadcasting messages around the world it's modul so it's good for running

somewhere in the data center on a high bandwidth uh High compute uh powered uh machine uh but then also it runs in browser and it can run on your phone so you can use it anywhere and it's for generalized messaging so um the standard quote is it's not just chat um for us um uh so although we talked about communication and chat applications up until now this is not a chat application this is a general messaging so if you can think of uh message buses message cues like Kafka sqs or just general pops up pattern when you are implementing something that's basically what waku is and what waku uses now we have some um interesting and some of them well-known projects using waku so status that's

actually where waku originally came from uh is a is a a chat application if I simplified very much so they are using waku and they are chat application privacy preserving decentralized rail gun um you may have heard people like viic talking about a rail gun and privacy pool so rail gun is rail gun is implementing privacy pools on various uh blockchains and allow you to uh privately operate with your funds on ethereum and I think polygon and a bunch of other um and they use vaku under the hood as an infrastructure to exchange messages between Rel layers and wallets xmt you may have heard last year they integrate it into coinbase wallet they use waku under the hood uh the graph is

they have a component called graph cast which is helping indexers to communicate and exchange information about indexing subgraphs so they use Ma for that as well uh the new editions recently we portrait uh which is an interesting project for to allows you to like create a single page profile uh that is then stored in a decentralized network um and and queried from there when you want to V see it or or load it uh I'm not sure if they are fully live I think they have some kind of beta version out and daa is uh we need to mention AI everyone talks about AI so Dria is an AI uh project uh where they are trying to basically come up with a decentralized network to

generate synthetic data for training llms um very interesting white paper if you are into uh Ai and synthetic data generation cool stuff uh definitely go search them and they use waku for that decentralized Network so um vaku and privacy and I have this disclaimer here so we're talking about the base layer so waku is the the base layer for your applications that need to communicate between some entities and that can be human to human or it can be machine to machine or machine to human but if you are using any application that claims privacy and maybe they mentioned like oh we use waku um even though you use you use something like waku or waku specifically it does not mean that you are private with that

application because the application can still leak metadata can still leak information about yourself so you still need to be vigilant and and this is very hard privacy is hard being a user of private uh tools is hard and then also so you never know whether the Privacy is actually there so we talked about encryption uh preventing people from seeing the content of your applications waku does not encrypt anything by default but we help people so for example we Define this RFC uh with the noise protocol which allows you to exchange some key material so that you can establish a secure Channel between two participants basically [Music] um linkability so we we don't want to

link sender and recipients uh waku is a broadcasting network uh as as was 5 minutes yeah I know I see the time here um it's a broadcasting network so you publish a message and all the noes relay the message to all the other noes basically well not all of them but some of them some of them but basically the idea is that the message will travel through the network and by that it will reach its destination without actually specifying the destination there are some Fields like content topic that allow you to help you to filter messages that you care about or don't care about uh anonymity again the the the messages are basically very similar and uh for that if you publish a message on a particle topic all those messages will look similar hence you get anonymity and

we don't have any any identity Rel um um tied back to to to whoever is publishing the message so that helps as well um I promised in my abstract uh talk to talk about ZK a bit so um in my last three minutes of a presentation I will talk about DK magic um so rate limiting wifiers is something we use for rate limiting in the network problem of peer-to-peer networks is often that they can be easily spammed and then taken down by that spam uh so um in collaboration with uh privacy and scaling exploration group uh funded by EF we have came up with this rate limiting mulier technology uh and this is basically spec circuit smart contracts and client libraries that allow you to uh rate limit a

decentralized network and how it works is that user obtains a membership in a contract how they obtain it is up to whoever controls that contract I can pay for your membership or you can pay for your membership doesn't really matter uh it's just about obtaining some uh being part of the memberships your Hesh of some secret that you know has to be part of the membership group um then user generates appr proof so it uses zero knowledge proes you generate a proof that you are part of the member without revealing which member you are and you attach it to the message and then all the notes validated proofs they uh they they check that the message and the proof is valid and that they can relay it and if not then they drop it so you cannot spam the whole network you may

spam one node but then then node will eventually disconnect from you and that's how we protect the network with ZK magic okay this is my last slide summary so privacy is normal whoever I hear to say privacy is a crime is not a crime I'm going to not do anything but I'll be angry at you um encryption is not enough when you are building a privacy solution encryption is not enough and even if you are not building a specifically privacy solution encryption is not enough they you still leaking a lot of metadata web3 is not just a blockchain I just talked about a web web3 project called vaku it's not a blockchain we use blockchain but we are not a blockchain and we are not strictly dependent on blockchain so vetre is not just blockchain we have storage we have

communication we have other things ZK is Magic um it's also math but I think at this level of math it's a magic it's magic for me and while Cypher is not that um we are all cyer punks at logos and vaku and and Institute of free technology these are the QR codes related to waku uh if you website Twitter Discord if you want to join us um help or just use or just hang out whatever um I don't think you can see my name there but again V pavin on uh on Twitter or wherever if you want to find me or connect with me and that's it I have one minute for questions Round of Applause thank you thank you you have more minutes at least five minutes or

more I think the next speaker it's still missing in action so I we might extend it any questions any questions it was either too good or too bad thank you very much again thank you [Music] 3