hi everybody charles hoskinson here let's talk about how we're going to fix twitter today so this is a video to jack and the twitter guys and it's basically a proposal and um also a plea for help so i'd like if we can't do it somebody to do this and i'm prepared to do this whole thing for cost if you guys would like okay so what is the problem that twitter faces twitter is a great platform but it has an issue behind authentication and verification basically people who aren't donald trump or elon musk or bill gates or barack obama or whoever gets compromised this week or impersonated are having trouble with the fact that people are pretending to be them in order to cause all kinds of havoc and she carrying and that can be to manipulate market prices bitcoin giveaway scams whatever have you there's an authentication and verification problem now in proposing a solution for this problem there's some basic principles one don't change much twitter works it's great so don't make radical changes two keep it simple and easy to understand easy to understand users have to be able to understand stuff okay three build on solid foundations and four no business model changes so when we talk about changing much this is ui ux user experience user interface stuff you don't really want to radically change a formula that works and you don't really want to change your business model right and of course finally cheap and easy to maintain so you've just had your biggest security hack in the history of the platform everybody breathing down your neck wondering how many millions and millions of dollars are we going to have to spend and how many sacrifices are we going to have to make to solve the problem uh and it turns out well not really that much it's going to be cheap you're not going to have to change much in your ui you're going to keep it simple and people are actually going to be able to understand it build on solid foundations no business model changes okay let's talk about it so how are we going to solve this well first we need some foundations one is the signature so a signature is an artifact of cryptography and you have different types of crypto and so forth but for our purposes we have something called public key crypto and the basic idea is that you have two objects one is called the public key and then the other is called a private key this has been around since the 1970s it's been around for a very long time public key crypto and it's the basis for how security works on the internet we have many standards that live here okay a signature is where somebody takes a message we'll call that message m and then what they do is they sign it with a special function mathematical function using their private key and that creates a signed message we'll call that m signed okay then anyone can verify that m signed is real it's a legitimate message by just taking the public key and it's either going to return true or false it's basically mathematically what we do when we talk about a signature well it's been around for a very long time we use it to sign legal documents use it to sign emails and it has this beautiful property called non-reputability so once you have verified that a keys indeed belongs to a person then you can use a signature to basically sign with any anything you want any document you want any message you want and then people are able to verify that that message is right assuming that that public key belongs to the person okay so that's a great foundation to sit on and here's what we can do it turns out that there's a new standard called the did standard it comes from the w3c and i got it right here so if you go to w3c.org these are the guys who standardize html and css and all those things you see on your screen and the they have a did working group and it's been around for a very long time since i think like 2013 2014 and did is basically a way of handling identity online that includes public and private keys and there's even a foundation behind diff the digital identity foundation which uses the did and look at all the members of this group microsoft ibm hyperledger accenture rsa those are some big companies and of course my company input output so there's lots of standards and we're building this as a community in an ecosystem but basically a did has two parts you have a did id and you have a did body or a did document excuse me the did id is something very small it's uh an identifier of letters and numbers you know and the document is kind of like an html file it has a structured set of information about the did and that can include crypto such as lo and behold your public key okay so here is what i'm thinking we have this amazing piece of technology on artifact of mathematics and computer science the signature the public key crypto that's been around since the 1970s and this is a science there's thousands of papers published tons of standards lots of brilliant people woke up every day and figured this stuff out so why don't we introduce the concept of the verified tweet okay set up just the verified account let's introduce the concept the verified tweet and how does that work well you have a tweet go out and then what you do is you hash something related to the tweet and then sign it with the user's private key okay you can link the hash back to the tweet verify the tweet hasn't been changed at all you can sign with the private key right and so from a gui perspective let's go through our list of requirements we say it's got to be not changing much well what would we be changing you'd have now two tweets a verified tweet and then you'd have a regular tweet okay they just cosmetically look different one has a little check the other one does not so you just display tweets a little differently so you're not really changing much is it easy to understand well of course just like that little blue check mark allows me to verify that that account belongs to donald trump a verified tweet would allow me to verify that the person tweeting controls it is it built on solid foundations yes does it require to make any business changes we'll get to that is it cheap and easy to maintain we'll get to that too and of course we'd like it to be secure right that would be another business requirement and secure against who you the issue with the twitter hack is twitter itself was hacked so how about we implement this type of a solution without requiring twitter much for that and here's how we do it well we need some way of registering a did so in the account creation or for already created accounts you put an extra little pane saying register and verify my did you click that little thing and either they can create a did there or import an existing one and it goes to a white listed id verifier and that white listed id verifier can be verisign it can be a government entity like the same people issue your driver's license whoever is in the business of checking documents and verifying that i'm charles hoskinson or you're bill smith or jack dorsey there's somebody there and basically what they do is they take a look at the did the did document all the supporting evidence provided there's some template and standard we can figure that out with you guys with best practices whatever it might be there's even industry accepted principles and so forth and at the end of the day what they do is they sign with their key they did okay and that gets sent back to twitter and then what twitter will do is when they get that did they'll sign it too after it meets whatever standard they have so you have a did with two signatures one from the white listed authority and then the other from twitter the user cannot forge these signatures they don't have those private keys but the user does control the private key associated with that did great are we done yet no then what we do is we take the did and we embed it in a blockchain okay so for example this can be the cardonal blockchain and then what happens is you get three beautiful properties for that one choose orange i'll use a thicker orange one you get time stamping two you get auditability and then three you have immutability when that date is embedded there you have an ordering of events so you know when it first came in and and you can change it over time it's always there audit means that anybody can check it in the entire world no one can restrict your ability to check that and immutable means that nobody can change the record once it's there okay these are the three core things that a blockchain will give you this beautiful open always available infrastructure that's online 24 7 can't be turned off and it gives you the ability to timestamp the ability to be auditable and the immutability that you need to know that no one can tinker with it a bit and change things on it so then basically the user knows that the did that they're looking at with that associated document twitter says yeah this one we recognize and yeah the twitter knows that that's right because a white listed agency it could be a government whoever it might be uh figured it out signed it so we actually have that whole thing and you know what prism has lots of built-in great capabilities that would make this pretty easy to integrate on both sides for both providers so we can do that we even have a beautiful website if you guys are curious go to atalaprism.io and you can see demos and visions and case studies and a lot of information about the product and uh so forth and so open source framework that we're constructing for identity okay back here so let's go back to what we want to accomplish we'd like to have verified tweets so in the account creation process the user can either create or import a did they can get their did verified and you know what they can pay a fee for that because it does cost some money to do it that fee would be paid to the id verifier twitter can get a chunk of the action but it makes it basically an economically self-sufficient activity once it goes through there's a checklist the twitter side they can either just sign anything they get or have a standard for it like maybe an additional level of checking if it's a particularly important person like a president or something like that and then suddenly we now have a credential that the user has that twitter does not have twitter does not have the private key that's inside the did document what does this mean it means that if twitter ever got hacked somebody would be able to tweet from donald trump's account or bill gates's account or whoever got hacked's account but they would not be able to produce verified tweets the only thing they could send would be unverified tweets you can even have a policy for high value users that they can only send verified tweets they can't send anything else meaning no one can tweet on their behalf for example okay now you also because of the power of the prism framework if you use that would then gain the ability over time to add more capabilities for example like threshold proofs and these are things like i'm over the age of 18 or 21 or i belong to this particular group or i possess access to this idea and we do this usually with zero knowledge cryptography zero knowledge proofs like i own something but i'm not going to show it to you but i can prove that i actually have access to this idea or password or file or something like that and those things can be tweeted to general public there's all kinds of cool crypto you can add in once you have a primitive like this and it's built into the layer of your system so the user themselves controls their identity they control their did and as a consequence they can do verified tweets prism can also handle the cases of revocation so what happens if you lose your phone we can do stuff with that and you just go back to the white listing process to go identify another did and the credentials can be rotated twitter's in the driver's seat of what the platform considers to be legitimate it's very easy to verify tweets because they just carry a little bit of extra metadata it could be as simple as the hash of the tweet or perhaps something a little bit more elegant based on what the infosec guys say is necessary and of course we go back to our design goals we'd like it to not change much verify tweets do that we'd like keep it simple oh if it appears blue it's great if it's not blue it's not verified okay super simple for the user to understand the signing can be automated and built into the phone like you can unlock the signing key with a fingerprint and it can be stored in a secure hardware enclave on the phone uh samsung knox and others have these capabilities there's dozens of ways to make that very secure we're building on super solid foundations i mean building it on top of what these guys are thinking about a lot of logos here a lot of smart people here a lot of great ideas okay easy peasy and this has been around for a while there's some good ideas here and 40 plus years of cryptography is pretty simple okay doesn't have to change your business model you're outsourcing the verification id to trusted vendors in each jurisdiction that matters so verify tweets are something that you can roll out is it cheap and easy to maintain well of course you're just basically saying all right well we're not in the business of revocation or any of these other things we're just uh going to add an extra little thing we had the blue check mark now we have the check mark plus plus and is it secure it can be made secure and of course i'll do this thing at cost if you guys want we could sit down you can even audit my financial statements to verify we're doing it cost it's going to be cheap to do super easy to do and something that probably can be done in a three to six months time horizon the benefit to the end user is that when we see trump or bill gates or elon musk tweeting we now have the verified tweet to verify that that's actually coming from them no more giveaway scams they die forever no more impersonations if twitter itself gets hacked doesn't matter no one can actually compromise the account as a happy coincidence of having crypto you can also do shielded private messages okay why because if two people have dids they can use the crypto inside the dids to establish a secure channel just like you do when you go to an e-commerce website you have that little lock in the browser okay so the magic of this means that you can pre-share keys that twitter does not possess but the two users do so as a consequence that means that you can have secure private communication you can do perfect forward secrecy you can do all kinds of really cool things in the platform uh that will enable secure communication between uh two parties and verified communication between two parties as well but then twitter can't see those messages so even if the account got hacked you'd still have a secure private messaging between the parties so that's another happy accident that you get from this type of a scheme what else can you do well you can also enhance access control because the user has a pre-registered private key they can use a challenge response protocol for login so basically they can sign something to prove that they are who they say they are to get access to the account alongside additional factors of authentication so you can have three factor authentication you can have a password a hardware device or a pin code generator or sms or whatever it is and then also a challenge response because you have a registered private key uh registered public keys the the did is register okay so you can enhance access control okay you also can do multi-sig tweets what the hell are those okay so you may have recently saw elon musk and elon musk said hey sec stands for suck elon's technically he said s e lindsey but we can kind of infer what happened there sometimes it might be better to have curated tweets so instead of tweeting to twitter elin would sign it send it and it goes to a pre-approved group that he would pick or tesla would pick or whoever he wanted to basically a group that elin decides and then they get that tweet and then they sign it as well in order for it to be broadcast and released very simple change slightly different business model but it's something that this model builds up to so when you get that verified tweet you now have m of n signatures on it as well now why is this important let's say you are a major media outlet let's say that you are apple let's say that you are the white house you are some entity where communications matter it's probably good not to unilaterally give a single person control over the release of that communication by having chains of signatures before it gets approved basically the twitter platform can now have that extra added layer of security and curation so even if elon gets compromised and his private key was compromised that group that he selected probably wouldn't be so it dramatic dramatically increases the security and there's really not much more uh to ask for on the usability it just goes to a second stage so that's another thing that you can do with this framework okay so going back to it what is our goal our goal is to make twitter better why because twitter's being used by the world and people can start wars with it crash markets with it and in my particular industry we're suffering a lot of giveaway scams and impersonation and it's hurting a lot of people millions of dollars have been stolen it's not a joke it's not a game it's sad and it's hurting the least technical and most vulnerable amongst us and it has to stop it shows that the bigger you get as a company the harder it is to protect your users and in some cases you as a company shouldn't be unilaterally in control of things or else you run into a problem so what did we do we introduced the concept of a verified tweet we based it on very old foundations from the 1970s updated to a modern standard which industry as a whole is working on and we have a framework to do all this stuff called prism and you can use very rapidly a whole constellation of verification entities don't have to pay any money for it the user covers that cost if they want to be verified it's egalitarian anybody can do it easy peasy you can add all kinds of checks and balances and signatures to this for certain very high value accounts before you approve a particular dip you have the document you have all this metadata that can be associated with them we can add threshold proofs you get audibility time stamping and immutability here and if you're really concerned about up the stability of a particular blockchain then you can for redundancy also put it on multiple blockchains like bitcoin and ethereum and say okay it has to be available on at least one of them and we can verify it once we see it so you don't even have to put all your eggs in one basket you can do multi-sig tweets with this so you can now all of a sudden have curated tweets so this gets rid of that success problem and you can do secure private messaging with it as well so people can actually use twitter as a secure communication platform in the pm level between each other and you can enhance access control for very high value users how about that easy to do i will do it at cost jack you know where to find me send me a private message i'm sorry you guys went through this but you know what great companies always recover and they recover through great ideas and we love working on things like this if anyone else in the industry wants to do something along these lines make a video let's all make videos in this industry let's solve the problem and then suddenly twitter's been brought into the blockchain age how about that maybe you can use twitter as a payment system later on by the way with these foundations a lot easier to integrate a cryptocurrency and a payment service a lot easier to do a lot of stuff once you have these types of systems in and it gives me as a user of the platform so much more security because i can have a verified account anyone who cares to have a verified account can have it and then i have an additional credential that's easy for me to manage that tells my audience when i am actually tweeting versus not tweeting and we can just keep building from there that's how solutions have to be done you have to start with basic principles don't want to change too much because the model works build on solid foundations don't change the business model itself and create something that's easy to maintain and you know prism's great if you guys want to learn more about private keys learn by doing there's a great service called mailvelope it's a chrome extension i personally use it and you can use this to actually encrypt and decrypt emails through our essay there's some tutorials here mail envelope is really really cool and here is an example of my mail envelope so this is my key right here uh charles.hoskinson iohk that's the rsa fingerprint for it and i routinely use this to encrypt decrypt messages and sign messages when i send them to people uh and uh it's incredibly secure uh and it's just really well thought out world design mailvelope's been around for i think over 10 years now and this is a great way to onboard and get a better understanding of it the user experience with prism's even better and perhaps we'll even build our own version of it one day but for now this is a wonderful onboarding mechanism to understand the intricacies of encrypting and decrypting and using pgp which is the oldest and most popular uh email encryption service that exists okay and the very same principles for this can be reapplied for verified tweets very easy to do easy to understand we can get crazy with the crypto and add all kinds of exotic crypto above and beyond what i've proposed it's in our wheelhouse we write these protocols for a living and you know what twitter if you guys contact us want to do something we'll bid it out at cost and sky's the limit and we can have something done demo ready in a few months if you want to hell we'll work overtime and find the resources and give you a demo in six weeks if you want to but that's up to you i hope this was helpful for everybody and they can kind of understand how things from the past can be modernized and brought into the future and allow people to solve what seem to be very hard problems in a very simple way put the user in control of verification let them pay for it you can use businesses that wake up every day whose day job is to do that well have increasing escalation based upon how serious the account happens to be and then once those credentials are established the user experience is super simple people just see things with either a green a green check mark next to them or there's they appear blue and it shows the tweets verified and so forth and everything just kind of works so i as a user know that i'm reading legitimate things and everything's fine and phones are really good at managing credentials and computers are really good at managing credentials now there's all kinds of great tools from face scanning to biometric authentication to shielding so those are passwords to decrypt the keys and you can even use a combination of these things based upon how paranoid you have to be and our system also happens to have an opinion on revocation which also is quite easy to do when you have trusted white listing authorities and you have a blockchain component because you can show the progression of the keys you can see old keys and new keys and so forth easy peasy so twitter that's how you solve your problem industry crypto industry do the same let's get this solved and make it one of the great success stories of our time thanks for listening everybody and jack you know where to find me
