Quantum Computers: The Ultimate Opponent for Data Protection

So this is really nice here. You know, I think quantum computers are a big issue these days in the, in computer security. And so it's a privacy for individuals, especially, at least traditionally here in Germany it has been. And in fact it's really, we'll see, it's, it's, both of these things are really coming to the fore and becoming a huge matter of public concern.

So, for instance, you can read in the, in the, in the press that quantum computers, you know, hold potential to do amazing things, but they can also wreck all the computer security. And they, you know, in fact, if you're interested in web three, which is a topic here, they can take down and destroy the value in web three systems rather easily, at least the currently deployed ones. And from a, you know, as we heard in the previous speech deploying new security mechanisms and so on, is, you know, it's a time consuming and expensive process for, you know, larger organizations.

So it looks like trouble. And when you look at it from the, the point of view of, of people around the world, it's quite overwhelmingly clear that people want privacy in the electronic world, the consumers, your customers of your, of the enterprises. And this is overwhelmingly clear because like for example, in the surveys done by IBM of 10,000 people globally and other surveys, they get keep getting these consistent results.

80% of people roughly say that the thing they're most dissatisfied with about what they would call the internet, we, we might think of it as web two, is the fact that there's no privacy, that they're getting targeted ads, that their, their communica, that things are known about them and maybe even that they're being manipulated. And in fact, the, you know, interestingly at the World Economic Forum recently, every, you know, there's a survey of what do the attendees think the biggest global issues are?

And obviously some people aren't interested in them, but it is a, a fact that recently global leaders voted 80% of them for social fragmentation as the largest problem facing the planet. And the thing is that that wasn't even a category before. So in the previous years, the top 10 change around a little bit, but there's no new entrance really, just that came to the top.

But now, so, and social fragmentation, even though it won that position isn't really a defined term. It's not really even a thing. It just captures the sentiment that, you know, people are very concerned that computers have been manipulating them and causing people to quarrel and, and polarize. And this is destroying the, you know, the possibility of civilization continuing. It's a very serious issue.

And, you know, so it's reflected in people's concern about privacy. They, they're very concerned about it. Okay. And so I hope this works. Yes. So there's, you could make, I'll just make quick work of this, but you could list all the things that we use cryptography for, you know, in, in web three for blockchain to protect the value, to protect the, the confidentiality of messages to allow, you know, updating or modification of websites, you know, all the various ways to protect data, protect gets hacking and, and so on.

And so when you have quantum computers, all of those protections are gone. So this is a big, big problem.

And okay, here's my, my chance to tell about some of the things I've done in, in a distant far, far long time ago. Imagine that 1982, I was standing in front of a few hundred people or so announcing the start of a conference on cryptography. And the thing about that was, at that time, the National Security Agency, the US B N D, basically the, the director of it said, anyone who had a conference about cryptography was going to, you know, bear the full brunt of all US government attacks.

So I could have spent the rest of my life in jail for having this conference, but fortunately I didn't because I used it to launch an international association that's protected by the un. So we had, we, here you can see we've had, this is the still the dominant organization in the field, the only, it's an academic organization that is freestanding and has three flagship conferences every year in different parts of the world and also workshops and so on.

So it's, it's publishes a journal with Springer Verla and has for the whole time. I was the one who signed the original contract for that. And so it's, it's really done a lot to let cryptography out of the box and let innovation take place with secret code. So I feel like quite proud of the fact that I've been able to do that because government's instinct was to classify cryptography the same way they do nuclear secrets, which is so-called born classified in the us. So even if you think of it yourself, it's still could be classified.

It's not where it came from, but it's just the subject matter. So, Well, what could you, why, what's the intersection of cryptography and privacy today? And me?

Well, it's XX network and you can see it just look up, you know, xx.network online and you can read, see all about it. This is our dashboard and you, you can see we have several hundred nodes operating around the planet. I hope this graphic Yes, clear enough. And you see that we've been up for quite a while and it's blockchain based and there's incentives and the node operators are really well geographically spread, unlike other blockchains. And they are a very dedicated and tight knit community that was vetted through a several rounds of open public competition to become node runners.

And now they hold quite a lot of these, the, the, the, the value in the network and they're very, they're very dedicated to the issue of privacy. And so one of the things we did recently, and this is just a small commercial announcement, which is we just, it's, you might think it's business genius, but maybe it's just dumb luck. Just on Tuesday of this past week, we launched the speakeasy in in Alpha, which is basically a fully decentralized Twitter. So just as Twitter is apparently imploding over this issue, we actually have what the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey said was needed.

And that is a fully decentralized web three Twitter. So there's, there's no central entity that can kick people out.

Only the, the persons that create the individual channels have that control over their own channel. And because of, you'll see the XX Network technology, which I can describe in a moment, no one can tell who is posting which message. So this is really the only way to do a fully decentralized Twitter.

You know, we have like a fully decentralized ephemeral storage system and the fully decentralized anonymous posting system and without those you can't do it. We have them, it took us years to make them and we have patents on them. So if you'd like to back or you think it would be smart to back the next Twitter and the basic foundation for the next wave of social media, then think about backing us. We are a US C corp and you can just back us like if you're a qualified investor, anybody. So anyways, that was the commercial pitch back to the technology.

Here you can see the XX network, how we combine mixing, which is something that I published in 1979 and has over 6,000 references to my original article when I was a grad student at Berkeley, which is basically, you've heard of tour, perhaps that's a very dumbed down version of mixing. And so with our cix, we found a way to not only increase the privacy but reduce the latency to just a couple of seconds. It's a factor of several orders of magnitude speed up. And you can also see that we have a scalable consensus mechanism.

So if you know about blockchain so-called, you know, layer one, there's the, the main thing there is a consensus algorithm which keeps the data associated with the blockchain consistent from block to block. That's the, the basic idea. You could read about it in my dissertation from 1982 actually, but you can also read about it in some more recent white papers. But you know, one of the popular uses is to make electronic payment systems such as something that I also published the first article about in 1982. How many people have heard of e cash that was issued by Deutsche Bank here in Germany?

Not everyone, I'll just tell you that Deutsche Bank, back in the day when it was the largest and most reputable bank in Europe issued chewed ditch cash electronic money that I had invented in 82 and into H marks and you could use it to buy things in shops in Germany. And we also had our own cyber bucks, sort of like Bitcoin that you could use to, to buy things in a hundred or so different shops. And there was Australian dollars and US dollars and and so on.

But anyway, so now we have the XX network and, and you can see that it's, it's extremely scalable because of this endorser set notion, which is so that you only need like 400 nodes to endorse each new block and that allows it to scale linearly. All of the other blockchains, many of the other ones out there, if you try to add a lot of nodes, they'll start to slow down a lot. So our system is fully quantum resistant payments and messaging, well particularly payments and consensus I should say. And so the endorser sampling supports the linear scalability of the consensus.

And then we have also like a breakthrough, what we call compact endorsement signatures, which allow the, the consensus to be linear. So we actually demonstrated here, you can see for, for like 10 days we showed our consensus algorithm and our blockchain and our payments running all quantum resistant are the strongest type, you know, don't be fooled by this is a general comment maybe of interest to some of you government recommendations about quantum secure crypto systems that they would like you to to use. Why do they want you to use them so they can break them so they can read your traffic?

Right. This you, you know, I had the experience of going to Switzerland when I lived in Europe, I was paid by Shell Oil to go and check the cryptography of some companies in Switzerland that were selling cryptographic equipment to all kinds of companies and, and countries for military use. Not only Swift but also whole countries for military use to companies crypto, ag and great ho a few years ago, and I broke those systems when I went there, okay. And I showed how to break them.

And a few years ago I read in the newspaper that those two companies were owned and controlled secretly by BND in cooperation with nsa. And most people you maybe Germans aren't aware of this, but in Switzerland people are pissed off about that, right? Cuz it really wrecked the whole Swiss brand of, you know, high security and all that. And then the bank secrecy fell later.

So, you know, don't use, don't be a foolish enough to use the recommended quantum resistant technology because you don't do what they say to do, do what they do to protect themselves. Look at what the US government uses, look at what they're mandating for vpn. Think about it what you need, the strongest type of cryptography, the strongest type of quantum resistant cryptography. And that's what we used and we were able to demonstrate that we could, you know, so we used the single core servers, really old slope servers.

The bandwidth was capped at a hundred megabits up link and down link and still we were able to do 3,500 transactions per second payment, quantum secure payment transactions on a quantum secure blockchain. And so what that means to me is that if we, if those were really server class nodes, obviously we could do all of global payments easily because you look at the numbers visa, you know, MasterCard at Alipay and so on, it's doesn't add up to anything like that 50,000 transactions that can certainly cover all of global payments.

So this says that you can do the strongest type of quantum resistance cryptography in a fully decentralized system that is able to handle all of global payments. And so you see the consensus cannot be taken down by a quantum computer and the money cannot be diverted by a quantum computer because both aspects in were are secured by the strongest type of, of of cryptography. So was it a pretty sweet thing?

We, it was done in Go language pro program language go Lang sometimes called. We are in the process of converting it to rust so that we can integrate it back into the rest of our chains. So it's not live today, but we demonstrated it publicly for 10 days and you can watch all the videos of that and, and everything. And we were basically able to show that it scales the nearly and that fits the theoretical analysis as well.

So, you know, this is pretty interesting because this same blockchain is able to provide privacy in messaging and the same, the kind of social networking that I I mentioned and it can't really be taken down by governments like the other ones. And your money is safer in it. So Pretty interesting stuff.

All right, I'm gonna leave a minute for questions, which I don't really don't like to do, but since it's such a nice audience, I'm gonna do that. Thank you very much. I don't have any questions from the, from the virtual auditorium, but I'm sure there, there are questions in the room on there. Just a sec. And too much coffee is not healthy anyway, so we have time. In the description of your presentation, you mentioned that people are keeping data that currently cannot be decrypted, but just saying yeah, we keep them to a day that we can decrypt them.

So what is your advising fact and to really protect it because yeah, you cannot do a stronger encryption than that's currently possible. So how, how can you cope with it? I'm not sure I really fully understood the question.

I mean, I think the point is that that the type of encryption which is used to protect as the, someone is referred to as data at rest store data in a computer security context, currently it's protected with the previous generation of standard types of cryptography. And now one has to consider that it wouldn't be better to protect it with quantum resistant cryptography. And actually, you know, communicated data makes even more sense to protect with quantum resistant cryptography because you have to assume that the adversary has a copy of it and will someday be able to decrypt it.

So it's totally irresponsible to communicate data that's not protected by quantum resistant cryptography. And by the way, our messenger, Alexa Messenger does do that protect with quantum secure cryptography. But in any event, you know, so that's why the US government mandated for, for communicated data to use a certain type of cryptography because they know that if when, it's not a matter of if, but when the other countries have quantum computing available to them, they will be able to read that traffic retroactively and and and so on.

But for data at rest, you know, you don't have that issue. If someone steals a copy and you're relying on the, the cryptography to protect it, then of course you'd also like it to be protected by a quantum secure crypto cryptography because the, the stolen encrypted file might someday be decrypted, right? So I don't think there's good reason to this way. There are a lot of good reasons to use quantum resistant cryptography wherever you use cryptography and those people who say, Oh, you're wasting your, you know, your, you're, you know, in tinfoil hat theories, whatever, this is ridiculous.

It's never gonna happen and so on. That's not the history of cryptography. The history of cryptography is the governments will spend unbelievable amounts of money. They have some of the brightest and most dedicated people. I wish I had people like that working for me. I've been to some of these, you know, in super advance studies they've got the best people, thousands of mathematicians. I'm much more than we have in the open field. They've have journals that have existed, they've had, they were using cryogenic equipment in the sixties.

So if you, if you don't, they let, they let people hold ships full of passengers be killed instead of revealing that they could break the codes. So they're not, you know, this is a very serious game.

I mean, today economic sanctions are the main weapon that's being deployed globally and blockchain is the main way to circumvent it. And, and cryptography plays a key role in protecting, you know, the visibility of swift transactions and blockchain transactions.

So I mean, if you, it would be extremely naive to think that quantum computers are something that the intelligence community's not really very interested in. And in fact, if you read Nature Magazine, you'll see the US military's name as a sponsor of some of the biggest improvements in quantum computers even that weren't, don't involve other US entities.

So it's, you know, I think it's so inexpensive really, why wouldn't you just have the policy to use the strongest type of quantum resistant computing everywhere and just start moving to that as expeditiously as is practical in your situation. That would be my recommendation to the computer security community.

Okay, great. Just one question from my side.

Can we, is it safe to assume that quantum resistant as a term is in flux and there will be a version two and a version three of defining quantum resistant with the evolution of quantum computing moving on? Well, It's, Let me try to tackle the question from a different angle.

I mean, right now there's a lot of misinformation in this field about what is really quantum secure, quantum resistant. And so many people are, you know, there's a competitions and governments are saying use this, use that. I'm not seeing anyone really giving the straight story and saying, this is the most quantum secure thing that you could ever do. Use this and, and why wouldn't you? It's just a little bit of extra cycles, you know, So if you, when you, when you think about it, what you want is to have a very wide ran as very random function.

It's very difficult to invert and quantum computers, yes, they have an advantage, but it's only a twofold advantage over conventional computers. And that's, we don't think that's going to change. So it's not really that hard to see how to do it right. And that's what we've done in XX network and those, the trials I showed you were all based on, on that. So don't be fooled about quantum ready, Quantum resistant quantum, you know, just, just go for the, the, the real stuff that's, you know, you don't want impurities in your beer.

Yeah, Absolutely. Final question. I know I'm stealing the type of Coffee, the coffee, I'm for you, The question from the, from the, from the chat. Yes. Which algorithms do you recommend? Are there names that people could Google for what, what others or which, which were versions of the algorithms to use? I I just, let me, without biasing things, just say, just try to use the widest and the most clo closest to random function cryptographic systems you can Got it. That would be, that's the, the, the sort of gold standard figure of merit. Perfect.

Thank you very much for your Presentation. Okay, thanks everyone. My pleasure.