The Future of Unstoppable Communications - Shivek Khurana

oh is there anybody named Alexander here or Elina okay so it's he's halfway here did anybody recently get married did anybody had a birthday 6 months ago 3 months ago did you have your birthday three months ago when okay this June happy belated happy birthday and do you guys feel odd about me asking this question like we're here for a presentation and I'm poking your privacy so that's our right like nobody should have the right to poke your privacy and I represent status app and we are building the future of Unstoppable Communications that includes like saving your privacy that includes giving you the right to be in secret to do what you want to do around around 1945 humans in general stopped fighting major Wars there was war like the world war and then it stopped then we had this cold war with between Russia and us then it finally subsided and money became the way to exert control because if somebody can control your money they can control what they do with your lives because they can create create a class barrier they could create a system where you do not have access to things they could create fight they could create propaganda they could give you anxiety because you cannot buy grocery because somebody decided to print more money and people who were building Bitcoin there was a group called Cipher punks around 1990s they saw this happening and they wanted to fix it they wanted the control of money to be with the people not with the state so they started working on this project and there was no clear agenda and there were multiple projects that came out of that group if you have heard of Julian Assange and Wikileaks it came out of the cipher punks group if you have heard of bit torrent it came out of the same group Bitcoin came out of the same group but there were some theoretical flaws until 2008 so Bitcoin was conceptualized in 1992 1993 maybe 94 but until 2008 we did not have a working version when Bitcoin came around it gave us two major things it gave us identity and it gave us settlement so you could have your own identity you don't need a bank to talk to somebody and when you want to send money to your mother or to your father or to your girlfriend you don't have to tell the bank that this is your phone number this is your address address this is your passport you can just create a mathematical key and send money on a decentralized network so they took control back or they wanted to take control back but the problem is when Bitcoin was being formulated the internet did not exist the phones as we know it did not exist until 2006 2007 there was no concept of social media there was no concept of mass propaganda and people only cared about their relative surroundings they did not care about what was happening in the rest of the world because it did not matter I was not connected I was only I could only see my neighbors and the the fight changed from the ground to money to your mind your mind became the new Battlefield because now they can control ideas now they can spread propaganda and internet became the mode of control because if somebody can see you if somebody can notice your behavior they can somehow alter it and we see this happening with corporates where you are forced into buying stuff because you're exposed to so many advertisements you can be singled out because people can see what is happening people can identify you from your fingerprints your phone is always tracking you you use Instagram to track yourself so all of that is becomes a system of control because somebody an actor with enough access and intent can create an identity of you and then spread propaganda advertisement is propaganda they can divide societies they can make you hate yourself they can make you accept things that are not natural and that's how the control is established now it's the internet that is being used in in a I'm not saying that money has gone away money is still also a big source to establish control but internet is equal or bigger in my opinion so around 2016 there was this weird boy named vitalik butterin who used to work for BTC media houses and he came up with the idea of a self- soverign internet in 2016 we were very close to in terms of Technology where we are right now so we had major IMS we had major chat platforms we had major B2B systems our cargo Etc were all automated and he saw that there are multiple aspects of a digital identity that needs to be decentralized so Bitcoin gave us identity and settlement but ethereum gave us three more things ethereum said that you cannot just settle money you can settle anything so there were arbitrary contracts that you could use to settle anything that you wish for examp example you could settle stocks in the form of icos you could settle art deals in the form of nfts you could settle buying a home in the form of RWS or you could tokenize a bond and sell it to people who cannot buy it you could tokenize the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and sell it in Indonesia that's what ethereum enabled but there were two more things that we don't talk about that was whisper and swarm swarm was a form of blob storage so if anybody knows S3 if anybody has used Google drive it was a way to store large files photos videos on chain in a decentralized way and Whisper was a form of peer-to-peer communication so it was a gossip based protocol and I'll talk about it later that ethereum promised to bring and with gossip you could have private Communications that nobody could censor but unfortunately ethereum found its product Market fit in the financial Market so Unis swap blow up a lot of dexes blew up icos blew up rwas are blowing up right now and these two aspects the Swarm and Whisper were either abandoned or completely ignored so swarm is still existing but has been taken over by other projects like ipfs RVE codex maybe there are a few more decentralized stored systems and Whisper was completely abandoned it was 2 years ago when they published the last commit on the repository and since then they have not done anything we as a messenger as status we relied heavily on whisper so like a normal open- Source company we would help them we would fix their bugs and we would introduce major features but when they stopped like working and when the direction went away we had to Fork whisper and Whisper became waku so waku now is the decentralized communications Network that that is similar to whisper but you fixed a lot of problem that Whisper had mainly related to spam related to sharding related to scaling and we adopted this because we relied heavily on it and we made it open and permissionless so anybody can participate in it anybody can run their nodes and anybody could like improve the software if they want to now in order to understand why do we need these Cent ized communication why do we need decentralized messaging we have to see our usage behaviors like is there anybody here who does not use any messenger telegram or Instagram or Whatsapp is anybody here young enough to not know what a telegram meant like a telegram was not the app a telegram was a piece of paper that used to go out but the Next Generation if you are 16 right now you would not know what ATT telegram actually meant but this this technology is very deep so we have to understand it in order to make it Unstoppable so we have to see how can you censor it how can you stop it and let's see a world where there is no encryption the cipher punks did not exist we did not have pgp and we are just sending plain text messages to the world so the blue client suppose wants to talk to the yellow client and I want to send a message there's a server or a service in the center which could be any messenger telegram WhatsApp Instagram and these grayed out notes are your isps because when you connect to the internet you need a service provider it could be your phone service provider and the service provider of your phone will need a bigger service provider till the point you reach the fiber lines under DC and then the message reaches a server and then it reaches the client and in this topology everybody every know in the network could see the messages you are sending so the way I was asking questions when I started this talk everybody would just know and you wouldn't even notice that your information is being leaked your conversations are being leaked so we are all engineers and I think there's an easy solution to it if you don't want people to see what what is the message being sent what do we do H we can use VPN but you can still see the content we go back to you go back to telegram yes but that's quite expensive way you have to like hold a little bit because you just went a few steps ahead we'll get there but there's a simpler step in between yes encrypt just encrypt the message if you encrypt the message nobody could see it when I start the message I encrypt it and it goes through all these notes and nobody could see it so the problem of communications is solved now we have decentralized communications that are unstoppable the talk is over thank you for coming but is it met yes whenever you send an encrypted message there is enough information available on the packet itself to figure out the intent for example if at 3:00 a.m. I'm sending a message to a hospital then the content of the message doesn't matter because if somebody can see that a message is going from me to a hospital they can figure out with enough certainty that maybe I'm sick or somebody that I love is sick and if you connect that with other data that I generate for example I generate uh my location maybe I'm posting a picture maybe I'm sharing my real time GPS coordinates with my brother with all that data and my search history it is possible to figure out the intent of the messages without reading the content of it so we have to go one step further like how do we go one step further there are two problems with encryption like when we start encrypting we run into two major problems metadata leak as this gentleman suggested and also Key Management because if you are encrypting data you also need to manage your keys but normal users are not used to Key Management because if I tell somebody that if you lose this random number which is 64 characters long all your messages are going to go away all your money is going to go away that is scary like people don't want that so what services tend to do is manage keys for you like Telegram and WhatsApp and all the famous Messengers that you know have a back door because they manage their keys for you your keys for you it gives you better ux but then you have to tie your identity to them so you need to give them your phone number you need to give them their your email and you go back to Ground Zero where Bitcoin started the Bitcoin wanted to give your identity to you but if you use these encrypted Messengers you leave your keys with them and they can have these back doors they can do whatever they want with your data most Messengers just stop here like they don't go any step further I took this screenshot of with the chat with my friend Bradley and they clearly said that they cannot read anything but then I went to the terms of services and they said they have access to everything you upload to their service and I don't know how they get away with it but that's the case right now so status status comes into this picture and tries to solve the problem with an exceptional ux because we feel that with good ux you can just get more people in and that's why I have this slide with beautiful icons because my designer wanted to me wanted me to like have a proper slide so that encourages people to join in uh we start with exceptional ux but we give you your case we are not like we are not fishy about it we will tell you up front that this is a private messenger where you own the case and then we fix the metadata protection with the vaku protocol that we acquired that we forked from the ethereum foundation Key Management is slightly tricky I don't know if we have enough time for that but if anybody's familiar with ethereum's peer Discovery process it's called disway 4 we use a similar key management system I can send you some links but I'll skip it in this talk and there appear appear Discovery tables similar to a router whenever you want to reach a website your router has a table to the ISP and and you keep hopping until you find the address of the website status uses something similar but this protocol is just outside the scope of this talk it's probably a 1hour talk on its own so I'll skip this and metadata protection happens on waku this is more juicy like this is what we do this is what we pride of uh at the base of it there is a protocol or a system a family of protocols called gossip sub and with gossip sub you can talk to a node a decentralized network of nodes to send your messages and we'll see some demos and in principle we are open and open source why do I use these two words we are open source because our code is actually open source and anybody can contribute to it but we are open because anybody can participate in the network so you can decide to be a node Runner and you can facilitate the transfer of messages and there's no permission needed you don't have to talk to us you can just start running our software and you become you start facilitating the messages now let's see the waku network so earlier we had this server a central entity and a lot of nodes where you were sending the messages now there is no centralized server you who have your own case they are in your own home and there's a network of nodes that are running the waku software every planet that is grayed out is running the waku software and we'll run the same scenario imagine that the blue node wants to send a message to the yellow node what the blue node will do is just broadcast the message onto the network and if you see the Orange Line back there that orange line has some metadata because the first node will know the IP address of the blue client it would know the time that the message was sent and maybe some more information but as soon as the message reaches the first node we strip the metadata and then we broadcast and propagate it in the network so the green lines is the same message being broadcasted but without the metadata so there is protection of metadata because it's unlikely that all your messages will go to the same node and your IP address would be leaked after that is done we do one more tricky thing we add entropy to the system so your message was intended for the yellow client but we also sent it to the orange client maybe to five other connected clients and we do this so that an external Observer cannot see what is happening if you were an external Observer just looking at the network information you cannot confirm who was the intended recipient of the message even with thousands and thousands of messages you can never confirm who was the actual recipient and at the level of the recipient in this case yellow the message could only be opened by them because it was encrypted for their key that's how we ensure that the message reaches at the right place we add entropy and we remove all the metadata if somebody is privacy conscious you might think that it's very similar to Matrix element Matrix is the protocol that is decentralized element is the messenger on top of it and yes it is quite similar but there is one major difference that is identity so with Matrix your identity is managed by special identity servers and they're connected to your real world identity so you need an email or a Google mail or a phone number to sign up and these identity servers become the the Honeypot if somebody wants to attack you they can just attack the identity server and figure out information about you tie it back to you I would say in principle in philosophy we are similar we are solving similar problems we work together sometimes like status waku and Matrix works together sometimes but our our approaches are different we are crypto first we are extendable we are permissionless and we are just not a messenger you could use the same protocol to send other messages you could connect robots on the same network you could send notifications on the same network because you can program it that's not very easy with Matrix so I have a demo here and I want all of you to download the app if you can and my team said not to do this like not to show a real demo on stage but I'm going to say I have to because otherwise it becomes boring you can search for this app and you have to go in you have to sign up and while you are signing up I'll explain some of the problems that we have with a decentralized system so if a a messenger is completely decentralized you run into multiple issues like you would have spam issues because it's permissionless and it's open so anybody can start spamming the network and your network will go down you would run into scaling issues because what if 50,000 clients connect to the same node the node will die there are issues with the order of messages if I send you hello how are you doing let's go for a coffee and you receive let's go for a coffee how are you doing hello it would sound odd but because the messages are traversing through multiple nodes the network cannot guarantee the order of delivery so that becomes a huge problem there's obviously 51% attacks but that's true for every Network every decentralized Network there are issues with scaling with battery with bandwidth but but we are not lost we have have been working on this for some time and we have solutions for three or four of these problems we have fixed spam to a large extent because we ran into spam issues for years and people will Fred our Network so we introduced a a decentralized rate limiting system we call it rln out of order messages are really hard to crack I've been working on this personally and I don't think there is a system like there's no mathematical model to fix the out of order messages you can only fix that at UI level or ux level with scaling we have done like we have achieved like good systems we can now connect to 200 or 300,000 clients simultaneously and when we add shards each Shard should be able to connect to 200 or 300,000 clients depending on the configuration and that would majorly solve the scaling issues battery and bandwidth are being worked on and message reliability message loss is also being worked on when you have a decentralized system and you are propag creating these messages there are chances that your packets get lost because you are adding entropy yourself and it is possible a client never receives your messages and nobody would know that is rare it doesn't happen like mostly but there are still some chances where you would lose these messages for that there has to be reliability modeling we are working on it but we are not there yet maybe we are 99 person there and we will see in the demo so I have the I have the app open and I'll share my QR code this is the same app that you have on your phone on desktop and you can you scan the code inside some and it doesn't work then I get fir because this is being recorded and my B will it takes a iess there's no there's no guarante there's no guarantee on the time but it takes maybe a few seconds sometimes it takes more depending on the load on the network sometimes it it never arrives like I said it gets lost and sometimes it's there but you say that we are running our company I should actually close this chat yes we this is like we run our company partially on discode and partially here did you get like a success when you sent the oh you got it okay cool you should you can also like try sending me a message and it might show up the demo Gods will help me okay what I'm going to do is just close this for a second I'll start it again because if I start it again it would have to reconnect to the nodes and it will see all the hopping messages uh three minutes I hope this works has a question in the me yes you can you can have yes go ahead Elina yeah so actually like I was wondering I really enjoy this it was interesting extremely interested uh and so I was curious um why would it it be harmful or dangerous that companies like telegram WhatsApp have our private information our messaging um on a way like I'm a normal human being like I don't mind it and another thing I've been thinking about is basically if it is a crime somebody's committing a crime and they're using any particular message Messenger to Planet wouldn't it be nice to have this access to somebody's data when you're like trying to over overcome crimes blah blah blah that's a very good question thank you we struggle with this in our company as well so there's a line that we have to draw if there is if something is being used for Crime it should be stopped for sure like we should not enable crime to happen but at the same time if you look at UK or France you would see what is happening there if somebody's trying to protect their own identity they're being execution and summoned for that so I don't have a strong stance on it uh I feel that that thing is definitely needed but I also see it being misused we build a system where the like the communications are unstoppable and how people use it is up to them unfortunately Ely That's The Stance of my company so that's what I'll say but personally I I like deal with this dilemma often that what if my product is being used for something wrong I don't have a good answer for that but I think I got some notifications so the demo worked woohoo amazing hey sorry just one was saying uh I wanted to check um how long it took to build this product basically from idea to prototype yeah this the version that you right now is probably the 15th iteration we have been working on this since 2017 we are one of the ogs we started right when ethereum started uh vitalic used to push us out a lot but in the past two years there were some problems and we could not get our product going out so we could not make a release and just two weeks ago we released version 2 which is this this beautiful thing that you see here and it seems to work it's very reliable and I'm going to send one of you a message the the good one so I have accepted your contact and I can just send any message here and this will also travel through the entire network I hope whoever send that receives the message oh now you see notifications too so it was just that it probably got disconnected from vaku and then it had to connect again right yeah we're actually running out of time so would say if you have any more questions for sh you can talk to him after the talk and yeah one Round of Applause please thank you thank you so much [Applause]