Revolutionising Identity with Client-SIde ZKMI

I'm on, right? Yeah. Perfect. Morning, everyone. Basically, what I'm going to talk about today, I call it magic because it's definitely an experience and the capabilities done through cryptography that is closer to magic in terms of what we can do and what it unlocks.

So first part, I'm going to talk about what we unlocked in advance from a cryptographic perspective. And the second part, how are we productizing it? Let me go into this kind of how we came to this and why this is important. When we talk about the crypto, I think one of the fundamental and most important aspects of it is the ability for you to own the assets and so to say, to make it work on an individual level. So the ultimate unit of decentralization, in my opinion, are us, the humans, and the closest that are the devices that we own and we can put into our own pockets.

So in a way, our challenge started by questioning, can we make our smartphones really smart? And what do I mean by that? So can we take the code base, the logics, the proving mechanism, and use our smartphones to recognize us, to generate the verified proofs without sharing this data to a third party services, to a corporation, but being this kind of an ally, our own allies into this decentralized world? So if you look at this architecture that works on an individual device level, I think these are the most robust and censorship resistant systems we can ever build. And why it's important?

Because if not, this censorship resistance done on this huge scale of decentralization would not be sitting here. And I'm pretty sure you all agree with that. And actually, they mixed up my slides as well. But basically, what happened? So we started using cryptography to generate the zero-knowledge proofs based on what your camera sees.

So our model actually runs using your device camera and is able to recognize faces, recognize objects, recognize landscapes, and generate the proof of it locally. We put out in public an open-source model. We're calling it Biometa. What it enables you to do is basically take any object, train the neural network with the framework, and then being able to generate this optimized proof from your device depending on what device it's trained to do. So you can recognize faces.

You can generate the proximity of likeness between two faces. You can generate the proof that the camera saw a certain number of objects, et cetera, and et cetera. It's a very, very powerful primitive in the cryptography. What it enables you to do? So these are basically the very basic use cases that could be enabled by your phone and by the Biometa framework.

So suddenly, you can generate the proof of likeness or so-called like proof of human because your camera is able to recognize that there's a human behind it and is able to generate proof without disclosing your face features or sharing this data to anyone else. Apart from this technical breakthrough, it lifts away a lot of hardware from the regulatory perspective because no GDPR laws, no data collection things can apply to this model because all you're using is a device in your pocket. Another interesting aspect that basically gets unlocked is something you can call it this kind of AI vision and image recognition. You can take any object and generate the cryptographic proof that this is the object that it was trained to do. But sometimes when we think about productizing things, we just go into fundamentals.

So sometimes the best use case for the new technologies is to go back and start questioning the certain things that exist around us or within this crypto, but we never kind of like understand why you can't improve it. One of those aspects that we're super excited about are actually the seed phrases. Do any of you know when seed phrases became a kind of a default standard of the industry? Any guesses what year was it? You can be close in crypto to everything because we're like a 15 year industry, but that's kind of close.

But actually, when Bitcoin started off, the seed phrases, the words like 12 to 24 words that we use to memorize the access and derive the keys out of it did not exist until 2013. It was part of an improvement proposed on the BIT39, and it took about like eight months to implement it. So the industry standard of using seed phrases as our recovery method is something we have from 2014. And since then, we have not really advanced in terms of like improving it. So I think what we're introducing with this new magic working directly on your phone is a kind of, I call it a no compromise between two worlds.

The world that started off on the promise of you are in control, so you controlling the key without the banks, there's no Satoshi, no regulator can like interfere with that notion versus the world where people think that, okay, now password reset buttons are more convenient than storing your private keys. And somehow those two worlds in today are as if like this two sides of the coin where you have to sacrifice UX to a better like experience for the wallet and sacrifice this kind of ownership of the private key. So what we can do with this new technology and how we productize in it, we call it this unforgettable app. What it is? So it's an ability to use any wallet in crypto and being able to add this improved recovery methods that you can bind to anything you like without using any custodians, without doing KYC, without sharing the data or engaging with any corporation to get back your keys and be kind of a state.

How it works? It will work like an ENS service. We're all familiar with that, right? So all you need is an existing wallet that you can connect and directly subscribe to a smart contract, defining the different recovery methods that will ease your UX. So you can, you can, it's like a kind of a playground.

So you can add different objects, like you have a favorite mug or you have like a book that you can like take the book page out or even make a kind of signature. And while using the client side, by net model, you will be able to derive your private keys without disclosing or sharing this data. You can add geolocation as kind of an additional salt where you can define this is the only location I can recover this from it. You can use time logs. They're amazing kind of additional factor of disincentivizing the brute forcing of such things.

You can use the mix of the passwords, faces, objects, geolocations, all together directly on your existing wallet. And the good part about it, to make it happen, we don't need permission. So you can work with any wallet, with any case, in every provider that offers a non-custodial services to the users. As I mentioned, it's fully decentralized. So there's no special setup, NPCs, trusted execution environment, like no point where anyone can go or retrieve data or censor it from happening.

It directly works on your phone using the magic of cryptography and the smart contract you're subscribing to. Like I said, it's a seedless recovery. So any object acts as a kind of a security and class, rather in combination, that you're able to derive keys from, and there are no rules. There are no kind of like common practice of KYCs, face plus email plus SMS or whatever. You define how many factors you want as an authentication and how do you want it to work, including with time logs, et cetera, and et cetera.

We basically be launching it as a product that anybody can use with any type of wallet, but we will be providing as well an SDK for the non-custodial wallet and all the solutions. They are now competing with this kind of a growing world of institutionalization of crypto, where they have this kind of ease of use, recovery methods, KYC, all these identity aspects built in, providing this easy UX. We are thinking that these technologies will empower the non-custodial solutions, but never compromise on the primary value that is the self-custody, ownership, and censorship of the crypto. So, yeah, if you go to Unforgettable.app, you'll be basically able to waitlist yourself and be an early beta tester of this technology.

And lastly, I'm just going to highlight that this was my old slide. I had a much more rich content to be displayed here. And the last one on that slide was that the biggest unlock by this technology is that it works natively and will work natively on Bitcoin as well. So, TarPuT wallets that support TarPuT wallets, you'll be able to define an alternate spending path and generate the keys, the spending keys, out of these different objects or combinations. And you'll be able to apply the time-lapse and this key derivation directly from the objects, and it will work natively from Bitcoin.

So, we will be rolling out for everything EVM, but as well a Bitcoin version of it, and basically delivering the very fundamental value, once again, I'll repeat, of the crypto that is ownership at a large scale. Thank you. That's it. Thank you. Any questions?

Do we have any questions? I think there's a question. Yeah. Super cool. For the location, GPS, how does it work?

I have to be somewhere for the... Geolocations, from a technical perspective, it's super easy to brute-force, because you just need to take all this different stuff. But consider it as this kind of additional salt, as a factor to these different components. And in that case, it just grows the ability for the brute-forcer to have an additional barrier like that in the form of that. But if I want to use it myself, like I said...

Yeah, you can go to that location or a life hack. If you know the exact coordinates, you can just input it and do that way. So, it's just a preference choice. I just showed the variety of different things that you can bring in into a single proof. Thanks.

There's another question. You said that I train the model on my phone. How transferable is it if I lose my phone? Totally. So, it's not something you store on your mobile phone.

It's basically a circuit that you download that is pre-trained and is able to derive the same keys based on that. So, while if the code is available in any other instance, and it's an open source and the circuit exists, you can just throw away everything. Wherever you'd be, you'd be able to download, generate the circuit, generate the proof, and recover it. So, this solution, why I call it this ultimate decentralization of identity, is not bound to anything, nor your device. It's just bound to math.

And that's what I like it about. Sorry. We support you. Hi. Yeah.

Thanks for the talk. I'm not sure I understood why you need the zero-knowledge proof. So, you said now that you can derive some deterministic entropy out of a book cover or a paper and so on. Yeah. Why can't you just hash that and put it on train and that's it?

That's a very good question. So, first one is there's like two methods. One is this kind of ZKML framework where you need to derive, for example, these biometrics and stuff. You need to derive the facial vectors and like hash it and then provide this kind of proximity of likeness. There is an alternative method we're using for Bitcoin, which is like deriving from a fuzzy extractor, but the problem there is that like current fuzzy extractors only give you out of about like 40 to 50 bits of security, which is not enough.

So, we're still like working on that technology to be able to provide the kind of robust solution and then, yes, we will be like completely switching to the fuzzy extractor way and you'll be able to derive directly into an object and you will ease the UX as well because you won't need this kind of combination of multiple factors, but it could be a single object and this kind of robust password derived out of it. Hi. So, I think I understood that you're deriving the facial recognition and likeness also with your own AI models, right? Yes. So, that's homemade.

Okay. And the question is like if you're training the model to recognize faces and create it, what keeps it from being spoofed by having AI be trained to sidestep it? You mean in terms of the faces, right? Yeah. Yes.

So... Like the creation of the facial vector. Straight away, facial recognition and using faces as a kind of single factor of keys is not going to work because face is the easiest thing that you can now spoof. So, it will be in combination. That's why we're more into like face is one of the factors that you can use, but if you want a kind of a bigger entropy of like having you should go into objects, you should mix it up with like passwords and being able to deal with the systems that are hard to brute that way.

But yes, I completely agree. Just the face in an AI age, it's the easiest thing to spoof. Another question. I'm out of the time, but basically, I'll be around. So, happy to continue the conversation.

Thank you. Thank you.