Programmable Cryptography and the future of the Internet by Justin Glibert | Devcon SEA

[Music] let's go all right good morning thanks for coming to the early first talk I know Defcon doesn't want my ideas to be spread when they put me at 9:30 a.m. when people are still sleeping so my name is Justin glibert I'm one of the co-founder of zerx Park um I will give you about 10 more seconds to get situated and then we will start uh we have quite a marathon because right after that I'm doing another talk with my friend hmar so no break nobody can leave if you get out I'll remember your name all right so clicker test let's go okay so if we soberly look at the amount of Hardware we've deployed you know like EXA flops of servers millions of kilomet of underwater CA cable thousands of satellite we combine that with the humongous amount of data available on the internet both public data enough to train matrices into being able to think but also private data most of people's desires hopes dreams and preferences are actually somewhere online and we intersect this with the amount of people that connect to the internet daily about five billion of them it's pretty clear that we're not doing as well as we could when it comes to the internet right uh and also like our digital infrastructure at large and what we can do online and you're you're free to show us the problem you care about whether it's strong lockin data silos that makes a lot of stuff much harder than they should be the inability to make money out of basically any kind of content and its Cory being the never ending reign of ads censorship accumulation of power through Network effects there are a lot of issues right and so how did we get there we have this like incredible amount of physical infrastructure and and and mental model into people head how do we get to this kind of like very disappointing outcome and so let's go through a real quick history of the internet and the web in order to explore this a little bit so what started as a few military and educational networks in the US that got to connected together as the arpanet um after a few iterations on the packet format in 19 I think yeah 83 tcpip was standardized and shortly after the aranet was dissolved in favor of the internet um this is a screenshot I took from um the global stats of of the bgp network and now the internet is made of about 30,000 different networks connected together right um and so if we take out the info cart of what the internet fundament does is that it connects any two nodes with each other uh the internet is peer-to-peer and completely symmetric what this means is no node is really more important than the others they're all like part of the system together and the way you roll is you get an IP address and you start sending and receiving packets so if we go a little bit forward um in in 1999 team burnner Le um a physicist at CERN wrote a paper that introduce the web as Interlink hypertext documents accessed via internet so if we break that down um interl is is this this URL acronym you must have seen before the uniform resource locator it's um almost like a universal language for describing resources on the web the hypertext what you what is now known as like HTML because we can't be bothered to say very fancy words from the 90s anymore is um document format that enables you to like interactively click around and and move through stuff I mean you guys know this you use it every day and and and these documents are rendered in like a human readable um output via browsers so the web at that time was very much just like a bunch of researchers sharing papers with each other in fact if we bring up the info card again what the web does fundamentally is it connects hypertext document with each other and it's also peer-to-peer and completely symmetric like anyone can host hypertex documents anyone can browse them a fun piece of trivia that reflects the philosophy at the time is that operating system came bundled with HTML servers right producers and consumers were the same people expected to put their content online and browse each other stuff and this brings us to where we're at today which is the modern web where um tools content and networks whether it's social or financials are accessed via the Internet and the web 1.0 tooling so if you look at the stack on the top right corner with tcpip at the bottom the web 1.0 in the middle and then kind of like the the the the the most common architecture we have now on top which is the the client server supernode architecture and the topology of the web changed a lot instead of a bunch of awkward researchers sharing their thoughts on their University page we ended up with a bunch of like massive nodes and a lot of dumb terminals around them right like if we take the info card of the web we're essentially back to time sharing with a lot of D Terminals and a few big important computers we went from a peer-to-peer model to a client server one which is very aetric we have a couple hundreds of very important nodes and everything else is a dumb client and that leads to an extreme centralization of data computation power infrastructure and economic outcome so if we look at this we have two different lenses right uh one is downside prevention essentially like if we want to do better we can do better but R by reducing the bad things right so if we think that centralization of data computation Etc is bad how can we reduce them but the lens I'm even more interested in is the upside creation one because it's the one we that is often lost um most interactions in computation that could be possible on the internet do not happen right it's not like the stuff you do on an everyday basis covers 100% of what you can do with the deployment we have today and the reason is that the coefficient of friction is still very very high right like if you're not part of the aggregators you can't add new features to the internet unless you go through like Y combinator and build a startup which is like so strange if you think about it right like why do we need something as Extreme as as startups we're talking about people working really hard under a lot of risks or not for a long time in order to get new stuff to happen and it's still actually it's only possible because the the aggregators are lazy right like why can't we have a feature on the internet as soon as someone wants it and so regardless of which lens is interesting to you whether it's the downside prevention one or the upside creation one I think it's clear that it's not the best we can do with the amount of data hardware and connected internet users that we have so for fun let's go through a set of analogies to take seriously but not literally so the internet laid down the primordial digital sea all computer networks whether puddles rivers or Seas became connected in one big soup of tcpip packet um and from that soup we gained the ability to have some structure hypertext documents emails SSH it wasn't much but it was honest work and while we had dreams of growing into a metropolis where multiple people would be able to coexist within zones of trust and transparency just like a city we mostly ended up in the theme parks right like mostly stripped of our agency only a lot to create what it makes sense economically like being allowed to put our best smile in a roller coaster ride where you have to like buy the photo at the end um we're kept around for as long as possible we have fun stuff to do not owning anything paying the entry ticket every day either through our attention or or labor so this is a little bit overly dramatic but you get my point right like we have concrete and electricity and I don't know all of that beautiful stuff and we build one massive Disneyland so how do we end up in the theme park right and and not the Metropolis well because we were on such a good path what happened and one way to look at this problem is clearly identifying what did the internet give us right and what did it not give us and I think people don't think about this enough like we tend to think of like oh the internet it just exists it's done we don't really think about it anymore and we like build a bunch of apps on top of like what did the internet give us what did it not give us where did it fall short and one way to think about the internet is as the perfect pipe right like it delivers packets securely across the entire world it's peer-to-peer it's fully encrypted point to point via TLS it's metric it works for all notes it doesn't really care who is the the from and the two it's civilizational scale in fact the perfect pipe is probably the only digital civilization scale technology today it's built entirely with generation one cryptography with signature hashes and encryption um and in fact most of the most successful protocols today whether email SSH torant all built only with the pipe only with the pipe as an assumption and so if we take out our civilizational dashboard you know we can take the networking checkbox we have we have we have a system with capital T trusted the networking but this begs the question how do we check the other boxes you know like we're not done we're not done we think we're done but we're not done so um and and to motivate that like how do we build Beyond peer-to-peer transmission systems um email is still the most successful identity recovery and neutral communication layer lots of innovation and low barrier to entry in order to innovate right like and still still even with the perfect pipe with Spam which cannot be checked at the layer of the pipe there are network effects that led to accumulation of power to Big players like Gmail how do we compute over mutually private data like most of what we do on the internet today is mutually private data who are the friends of my friends who likes me on Tinder who would take my bid on this financial exchange how do we authenticate the origin in transformation and aggregation of data why can't we just index the whole internet once and give it to people why do we have to like do it and then like do rent seeking on top of that it's a bit strange right and and because we trust the networking with a capital T trust right how can we trust the data in the compute and we have this massive hack this like great Theater which is uh the client server architecture and and institutional hardness as a way to solve it and so we connected the perfect pipe to what we had you know like blackbox op servers the default without accumulation of brand or an iterated game is abuse data leak downtime um while you don't think twice about sending a tcpip packet to IP address you're not like wow this this IP address is a bit sketchy I wouldn't send an IP packet there um you do think twice about putting your credit card number on a website right because you trust the pipe you don't trust the computer and the data um and some notes of course did better than others and started accumulating power that's the classic story so we ended up on like trust me bro as a foldback we merely started believing Computing in data with with the client server architecture um Computing these servers and store your data there believe in what comes out accept what cannot ask for and you rarely and this is an interesting point you rarely hear about abuse friction hacks downtimes antitrust at the networking layer right even the most powerful actor like Cloud flare are essentially utility businesses um we could remove them at any time and be fine right uh they augment the perfect pipe but they don't turn an imperfect pipe into a perfect one meanwhile you often hear about all of these issues uh in the data compute layer like hacks censorship downtime API not supported abuse of Monopoly and power and so um I I don't think we we should uh like be too harsh on ourselves because at ZX we actually believe it's impossible to do better than the perfect pipe without generation to cryptography we're actually trying to mathematically prove it right now the perfect bip as best as we can do uh with the symmetric encryption hashes and transport layer security okay so we're going to go a little bit grandio for a second we have civilization scale networking right what do we do now we do have two other boxes compute and data how does the landscape look like today on on like this effort here so for computing we rely almost exclusively on companies that have had to accumulate Brand Power data and have a lot of things at St stake in order to painstakingly build these trusted compute Network right if you have seen the panel between vitalic and goep yesterday that's what they're referring to as trusted third party so Facebook can answer um who are the the friends my friends Tinder can tell me these people like you Google can tell me as a business you can give money to these people and they will put ads out for your product and for data we have entities that also had to accumulate trust and network effect in order to generate authenticated data P tells other companies how much money I have stries to make sure they get paid id.

me tells them the person I claim I am and so it's extremely hard to add new capabilities to the internet while you don't think twice about sending a TCP IP packet to an IP address and know it will be delivered securely the amount of effort needed to build trusted party is pretty enormous so um we think that we can collectively add New Dimensions to the internet with programmable cryptography right um and I will make a note that I'm disappointed with my TR of world here I very much call it the internet because I don't really know what else to call it um if I were more ambitious with my mem making this morning I would refer to what I'm talking about as digital civilization like we're in the process of approaching digital civilization like actual digital civilization but in order to do that we first have to recognize a the existence of the pipe and B the fact that we have to get to work on the other perfect Primitives so how would that look like to create these New Dimensions we would have to construct compute that we can trust with the capital T and data that we can trust as well with the capital T So programmable cryptography that we understand today can be used to construct the perfect packet of data like this can be done um it's a packet that can be cryptographically authenticated it whether it's a web to API an email the government its Integrity can be verified back it with verified transformation any operation on the data whether aggregation uh the forward pass of a machine learning model data science filters can be verified and in that way unbundle data processing from silos and enable self- custody it's a packet with information asymmetries backed into it like properties can be hidden and transformed just in time prove that you're old enough credit worthy enough cool enough able to log in to this machine the perfect pipe is ultimately a piece of data that can stand on its own a piece of data that maintains its usefulness in context as it travels across our civilization okay deep breath in let's keep going another digital object we can create with very strong programmable cryptography is the perfect computer right um it will be fully encrypted input compute output it will be always online have perfect less uh we would be able to run it distribute it on any untrusted hardware no need to have uh the guy with the guns and the blcks at the entry to make sure nobody gets in the data center we permissionless anyone can use it um public data would be really public right not sometimes public and private data would be really private in some sense this would be God's AWS right this is this is what the universe runs on and as a side note blockchains went surprisingly far with generation one cryptography in order to build something that approaches this right like they were able to build these infinite liveness computers um that are always online and are transparent but in order to close the future gap between blockchains and the client server architecture super node we need programmable cryptography or maybe something even more powerful that we don't know about yet the end product doesn't necessarily need to look like a blockchain the presence of blocks cryptocurrencies transactions Etc is very much a detail and implementation detail it's important to note that the network like the the network effect of the perfect computer would be pretty insane right like when when when you have a computer made from like Godlike matter people would probably use it but the thing that's interesting is this network effect would accumulate to the protocol itself not whoever built it or or its operators um so we call these three objects the perfect Primitives I wouldn't be surprised if there are more of them at the end of the day um and I want to close this talk by telling you how I think ethereum fits within this cosmology right ethereum is undeniably a production grade payment system but also perhaps surprisingly ethereum is a mother of all demo for a new perfect Primitives beyond the pipe right like all of you here that have been working in this in this um in this ecosystem for a long time feel like there is something special about that computer and people struggle to explain what's special about it and my claim is the thing that's special about it is it's the first time we have actually like a real shot at building another perfect primitive beyond the pipe um but I don't think like blockchains is the only thing that can approach these perfect Primitives there are a lot more Celestial matter out there that we can tap into in order to go beyond the perfect pipe and so recognizing the existence of these Primitives right with one of them actually being at Arms Reach right now it helps us situate ethereum and the other Technologies we're working on as being part of this like Pantheon of perfects so I hope this talk can enable you to think better in the weeks to come about what you're working on thank you all right thank you Justin and that's so excited uh I would like to give you all another 30 seconds uh just scan it and then go to the Q&A session and then even if you don't have any questions just go there and get word to the questions that you wanted to be answered all right let's give more 20 seconds seconds so people can jump in and vote all right let's grab the first one what are the core incentive for the incumbents on the web to transition to new models which you have spoken to why would they want to relinquish more control Justin yeah so I think there are two ways to look at this one is um as I said in my talk I think it's really easy for people to think about the thing that's not working and be like oh if only we could solve this and solve that I think it's much harder to think through everything that we don't have right now because we can't think about it because like we would not we've not like followed the right um initial conditions in order to get there so I think core incentives in some ways would be less about like relinquishing control and ideally even winning bigger you know like at some point you realize that if if you're if you're the biggest dog but there the the the competition is not that big like sometimes you can be reason into kind of like entering an even greater game and I think that's one approach is like being able to show progressively that there are greater games to play and entering these greater games while you would relinquish control it's like being like a high school bully you know like yeah you have a lot of power but you'd rather get into the real world and kind of like have much more to play with so that's one possibility but I think it's a little bit idealis IC to be able to make that case I think another thing about reling relinquishing control is um I don't know if some of you know the the idiom like science advances one Death at a time I think it's important to know that the Computing industry has not had many death yet uh people talk a lot about these like oh massive companies they're still founder control they're the ones that going to like I should put my money into and I think there is definitely a place where a lot of the system could change very quickly you know and so whether it's through like stretch to the system like you know AI getting really good or just incumbents progressively like getting worse at innovating there are ways to change this but I don't think it's a clear incentive story as in like oh do one two three and then we figure it out the whole point of this talk is to try to get you to think about huh there's actually a lot that we haven't thought about it's not like it's really clear what we have to do it's just really hard we have to wake up every morning and like work really hard on it there's a lot we haven't thought about yet and so yeah I'll stop there because I'm seeing a question that is skyrocketing to 11 up votes I have to respect the the anonymous voting here yes and since we have a lot of things that we haven't done yet and what's the most concrete things that CX Park is working on to advance this agenda yeah so um there are a lot of presentations workshops uh put together by zerx Park this week so you can actually answer that question yourself by going to some of that but I I'll give a little add so one thing we've made a lot of progress on over the last year by putting together like industry Academia engineering Etc is starting to make progress on what this perfect packet of data would look like um people have the right intuition that something like you know like zero knowledge Pro in cryptographic data is a good step but there actually many many problems to solve afterwards some that are like actually deeper than you think not just an engineering issue so I'm actually giving a not a talk this afternoon about this you can find me on stage six I have a talk about the universal cryptographic adapter but if you just want to like immerse yourself into one full day of like what would the future look like if we were to work on this seriously come to the programmable cryptography CLS on Friday the whole day is just workshop and talks about this stuff and has been actually a lot of interesting breakthrough over the last six month and I think you you will be surprised by what we can do now that's nice you should check it out Saturday next one um how however the good primitive don't you think people want to go to the team Park anyway yeah that's a good point um so as I said before it's really hard in general to Think Through what you don't have and like strive for that versus trying to just solve the problems you're currently facing right now so I think that um well there there are different answers one is a bleak one which is let the theme park goers go to the theme park and let uh everybody else Ascend uh in fact we probably don't want to do that because we we feel responsibility toward the rest of our fellow humans so I think it's going to be a difficult thing like we're definitely in a crisis right now where people's I mean we talk a lot about attention span but I don't think this is the worst I think um the almost like the integral of like outcome you expect in your life is kind of like shrinking you know like we've been talking a lot about like younger people not being able to buy houses and spending all of their money I think this thing applies equally everywhere it's like return over intellectual effort return over Financial efforts and so as we turn into a civilization that is like more and more inclined to go to the theme park I think we have like a big big effort to put here here to figure out like how we can get out of that but at the end of the day I think that we don't have a credible story for something that would not be the theme park like what I find fascinating is in sci-fi we have a lot of like stories that resonate to people with a lot of different kinds of Technology like build an artificial sun go to Mars create a god whatever but we don't have good stories about what like a good digital civilization would look like when it comes to having symbiotic with the people right what would it look like is it just like being able to watch 10 movies at a time on Apple Vision Pro no it's not about that it's about like communion with everybody else thing is we don't have good stories for that so I think that in order to get people out of the theme park we have to just think better make efforts technologically but not just do the thing which is like the classic technocrat answer which is like we have to build more technology and everything will solve itself um and the page broke so I guess no more questions no that's good I remember the next one um so the next question is the do you think AGI or can would help us to invent the advanced man mathematical breakthrough for the next generation of cryptography or it's just going to come from the mathematicians or what do you think on it yeah I mean for sure I think I think um that's actually the thing I'm more excited about I don't want I don't want AI to like make up that we can't verify in some sense like I hate it when it writes code and gets it wrong because it has no way of checking yourself but are Great the really great thing with math is that if you ask it to put together a formal Pro and put in a theorem prover you know whether it's right or not so I think like we should put more effort into getting these these AI models to do things that we can verify at the end of the day so for sure would be helpful for the mathematics out there okay I think we got last one uh ethereum does a good job at a decentralized compute but it's way behind for data what do you think can be made yeah I think the reason for that is because um you can only go so far with an open computer right like if you have an open like registry of stuff and compute on top of that it's really hard to take a central role when it comes to data like data is not a native thing that like is thought of as like oh here's this open thing that anyone can go on you know so I think that's one of the main reason it doesn't do a great job with data what do you think can be made about this I think I'm not even sure blockchains are the right constructions for what it's worth um I think people like to meme the fact that we're going to put the entire internet on ethereum and I'm sorry to tell you it's not going to happen regardless of how much scaling works the eth cevs do so I think we have to like kind of like Get out of a delusion that it's just going to happen and think through okay what's the the whole Space of stuff we can do here um what are the other perfect Primitives all right ladies and gentlemen this is Justin Gilbert woohoo thank you thank you and the future of Internet is exciting all right uh yes the next session will start uh at 10:30 a.m. and if you thirstday we provide a water bottle at the back of the at at the meeting rooms you can