# Randamu | dcipher: a new protocol for decryption - Patrick McClurg | ETHDam III - 2025 - Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal) - Date: 2025-10-07 - Duration: 09:56 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-V4A_hZ0Lx2I - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4A_hZ0Lx2I ## Description Welcome to the 3rd Edition of ETHDam, hosted May 9–11, 2025 in Amsterdam. This year, we brought together the brightest minds in privacy, security, and AI for a unique 48-hour hackathon + conference combo. 🌷 https://www.ethdam.com// 🌷 ------------------ Randamu | dcipher: a new protocol for decryption only when real-world conditions are met - Patrick McClurg | ETHDam III - 2025 𝕏 Follow: https://x.com/CluEleSsUK_eth https://randa.mu/ https://x.com/randamuinc ------------------ About ETHDam & CryptoCanal ETHDam is powered by CryptoCanal, an education and events platform rooted in Amsterdam, expanding into Rotterdam and ZΓΌrich. Keep up with us to see updates on future events: https://www.cryptocanal.org/ Follow CryptoCanal on X: https://twitter.com/CryptoCanal Join CryptoCanal TG Community: https://t.me/CryptoCanalCommunity Join CryptoCanal Discord: https://discord.com/invite/XJVjpCqQBz CryptoCanal unites crypto enthusiasts committed to making a positive impact. Unapologetically political, we prioritize education, events, and services while championing cypherpunk values like privacy, sovereignty, and censorship resistance. ------------------ πŸŽ₯ Credits: Intro / outro by babyPRO - https://babypro.art/ ETHDam Photography by Paulus – https://concretestate.eu/ MC of ETHDam - Collins Ejiofor - developer working at the intersection of Web3 and AI. Check out his LinkedIn for more about his work and upcoming projects! https://www.linkedin.com/in/collins-ejiofor/ ------------------ Special thanks to our partners who made ETHDam possible: 🌹 Hackathon – Bouquet: Oasis Network https://oasisprotocol.org/ 🌷 Hackathon – Petal: Circles https://aboutcircles.com πŸ’› Conference – Gold: Zano https://zano.org/ Dash https://www.dash.org/ Bitvavo https://bitvavo.com/en 🩢 Conference – Silver: Igra Labs https://igralabs.com/hero πŸ’› Conference – Copper: Lido https://lido.fi/ DeTrip https://detrip.travel/ Cake Wallet https://cakewallet.com/ The Grid https://thegrid.id/ Calimero Network https://calimero.network/ 0xbow https://0xbow.io/ Mina https://minaprotocol.com/ JobStash https://jobstash.xyz/ Cyber Capital https://www.cyber.capital/ POAP https://poap.xyz/ Acronym Foundation (Supported our Top 10 Hackers) https://acronymfoundation.org/ 🌱 Sponsor: EF Ecosystem Support Program https://esp.ethereum.foundation ------------------ 0:00 Intro – Stay safe, stay free 0:28 Wikileaks and leaks 1:32 Assange and insurance files 2:51 Dead whistleblowers 3:44 Snowden's switch 4:33 What is DAND 5:32 Time-lock encryption 6:52 Why it’s not enough 7:51 New idea: condition-based 8:45 Decipher launch ## Transcript Welcome to East to [Music] Eg. Well, last slot of the day. Is this working? Yeah. Okay, excellent. I'm sure everyone's getting the beers, so I will zip through it. Fear not. Um, you might want to listen to this though because it might stop you getting whacked or put in prison. So, big claims. Um our story begins in 2006 uh with Wikileaks. Um initially they focus on leaks mainly on authoritarian regimes in Asia, ex USSR countries, Middle East and subsaharan Africa. And in fact in the early days they were accused of being a CIA mouthpiece. But sometime around 20 2010 that changed slightly. Uh they in April of 2010 they published classified footage of Apache gunship shooting some Rogers journalists in Iraq. And later on that year they as a result released some insurance files uh encrypted so that in the case that their operation got compromised uh they could release the keys for the insurance files and it would act as a deterrent to the authorities uh compromising Wikileaks. Later that year, they released the Afghanistan war files and then an arrest warrant was issued for Julian Assange, who was at the time the leader of Wikileaks. In October of that year, they released the Iraq war files um showing that civilian casualties actually outweighed enemy combatant casualties in Iraq. And in November they released the diplomatic cables from the US which uh was cables from over uh 300 different uh institutions throughout the world. Um in December then an arrest warrant was issued for Julian Assange and he was put in house arrest in the UK and later on he then uh was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy for years and finally uh in 2019 he was put in Belm Marsh prison in the UK. Uh before that a whole bunch of other insurance files, hundreds of gigabytes were um leaked to the public uh encrypted with as but the keys were never released even when Julian Assange got put into prison. Uh to this day we don't really know why. Uh perhaps people at Wikileaks had second thoughts. They thought maybe this uh nuclear bomb was just too intense. Uh perhaps the people who had the uh keys got compromised themselves or got taken out covertly uh by uh some naughty governments. I guess ultimately we'll never know. And although Julian was eventually uh released well after pleading guilty to espionage, uh not everyone was quite so lucky. Uh some other parties here who may or may not have had dead man switches. Uh on the left hand side we've got Dr. David Kelly. uh he was a biological weapons expert um in the British government who famously blew the whistle that the Iraq war was started on somewhat tenuous intelligence. Um it was leaked to the press that he was a guy who um who blew the whistle and uh he was taken into court into a secret court uh and very soon after was found dead and some of the the details that he was blowing the whistle on were never released. fortunately didn't have a dead man switch so we'll never know what he knew. Uh the middle guy is Demetriusclarov. Uh he was a security researcher who um found a DRM bypass in Adobe software and Adobe being nice and close and paying the right uh lobbying fees in the US. Uh was able to get uh Dimmitri brought into court. Charges were eventually dropped and he went free again. Didn't have a dead man switch. So, if he got whacked by the secret Adobe service, we might never know the details. The man on the far right, that's uh I think everyone probably knows that's Edward Snowden. Famously leaked uh troves of information about the NSA spying on Americans and people abroad. He actually did have a D man switch um that he presumably developed himself and he gave encrypted files to a bunch of journalists and presumably if he had been captured or killed, the encryption keys would have been released. Uh but fundamentally here the point to note is that there are no widely available open-source tools for whistleblowers which would be nice to have. So fast forward a little bit to 2002 I started working uh in a company called Protocol Labs on a team called Dand. Uh Dand is uh a global threshold network um operated by the League of Entropy uh providing randomness as a public good. Uh so basically a whole bunch of institutions work together um doing multi-party computation to provide random numbers that can't be biased by any of those institutions and also can't be predicted and you never have to trust a single organization to know that your numbers are truly random. um been to explain a little bit about how this works which will be interesting later. Um Dan's basically like a cryptographic clock. So every 3 seconds the League of Entropy work together to sign a message. Those messages can't be predicted until they're emitted and they're verifiable after the fact because they're derived from signatures. So we consider them randomist beacons. Um in 20 uh 2023 uh the team built the world's first practical time lock encryption scheme on top of DAND. So basically you can encrypt some message now that can't be decrypted until some future time has come. Uh we reflected on how this could be useful for a dead man switch. You could encrypt some trove of data now and ensure that it will be decrypted even if Adobe send their assassins after you um in the future. uh just a little bit about how it works. Um it's based on a principle called identity based encryption uh which works with some magic math that I'm not going to go into the details of but in principle as I said before the DR network emits a signature um at given epochs. So we've got epoch 1237 in the bottom. Those epoch numbers are predictable in advance. So we know that you know tomorrow at midday the epoch number is going to be this and therefore we know what message is going to be signed and as a result we can use uh that message as kind of like a public key and the signature that is emitted at that time is a private key. So we can encrypt message with the round number we can decrypt it with the signature at that epoch. So a little bit like traditional asymmetric encryption but with a twist. So on top of that we built a dead man switch using time encryption. The focus there was actually for vulnerability reports. Uh so that's live. You can you can use that now. Uh we presented it at Defcon, MCH, uh a whole host of other things and that was very cool even if the UI is a little bit ugly. Um but there are a few problems with uh with this solution. Firstly, Dan only tracks time. So for example, um if you wanted to release your big trove of information on some other uh details such as going to prison or getting killed, not going to work very well. Uh, you also can't stop a timer. So, um, once you've encrypted something and put publish it to the world, it's going to get decrypted whether you like it or not. So, you can't really have any second thoughts. Um, and additionally, you you kind of got to trust at least that majority of the nodes in League of Entropy are not misbehaving, which by and large, pretty good assumption, but depending on your threat model, that might not be enough. Um so we thought about recently what if you could encrypt to things rather than time and rather you could encrypt to some set of conditions. So here we got a message uh hello world some of my graphics have disappeared. What a disaster. But in essence what if we could set the conditions as a message rather than a round number. So for example is the sky blue? If the sky is blue I want my message to be decrypted. Oh, here's a lovely cipher text. Ooh, the graphics have returned. Wonderful. So, we can then ask some uh committee similar to the League of Entropy. What color is the sky? They say it's gray. They emit a signature to that effect. I can't decrypt my cipher text. But if I ask them what color is the sky and it is blue, just like my cipher text has been uh encrypted with, then tada, we've got this wonderful uh private key basically to decrypt a message. Um, so with that in mind, last week we launched a decipher network. It's built on the same primitives of DRAN, but it's a bit more programmable. You can come up with any conditions you would like to encrypt to decrypt the message to. And um, we're building a new deadline switch at the moment that is a little bit better. Firstly, going to have lovely UX, even nicer looking UI hopefully. Um, because whistleblowers don't all have to can't all be Edward Snowdens. Some of them are not going to be technical technically capable. Uh also you can choose your own committee. So rather than trusting the League of Entropy, you can trust whoever you'd like to trust and just like dear it's going to be open source and freely available to everybody. Um so thank you very much. Hopefully everyone getting the beer now. I haven't taken too much of your time but I'll take questions if anyone has them. Yes. Thank you very much Patrick. Big round of applause guys. Um are there any questions by the way? Any questions? No. Everyone just wants to go drink, I guess. All right. Um, yeah. So, for the last time, uh, thank you very much, Patrick, and thank you all for today. And, uh, see you all tomorrow for the last day of Edam Sadam. Let's take care. Have a nice evening. Bye-bye.