foreign
[Music]
thank you all for bearing with us while
we ironed out a few Tech bugs and
welcome to this afternoon's last
presentation which is called how to talk
to cryptographers presented by Dan
Shearer they will be around 10 minutes
left at the end so if you have any
questions please note them and ask them
when the time arises so quickly to
introduce Dan Dan has a long career in
open source their current project is
lumo SQL which embeds a new form of data
security into the widely used embedded
database SQL Lite today Dan shares with
us the Lessons Learned working with
developers on this security project
please welcome Dan
[Applause]
well thank you Amy thank you Amy so
there's been one or two little Mix-Ups
um I'm very happy to continue uh with
either but in fact this is the a very
related talk uh of enforcing privacy
rights against big Tech and big
surveillance so um I suppose if I was
there I'd ask for a show of hands
um Amy can you hear me there are you
expecting everybody uh how to talk to
cryptographers or The Wider enforcing
privacy rights because that is what I am
good to go on so sorry about the mix-up
I'm happy to listen to anything it's all
good uh it looks like this is a unicast
presentation here basically lumosql is a
project that I've been working on now
for three years mostly launched at Linux
confer you 2020 and soft launch before
that but that was the big deal
and it turned out one little
technical project
um in the corner with two or three
people has some very big uh and very
significant ramifications and so this
talk is to document the journey that
we're on how it relates to privacy
rights in Australia and around the world
and how a different approach from the
bottom up might be what we're looking
for to solve some of the most pressing
and Urgent issues
um and so
this is not necessarily what we see
every time
why do we care about privacy what is
privacy there are some basic
fundamentals about the nature of privacy
that I suddenly found myself going back
to about halfway through the lumo SQL
project
um
the notion of privacy is more about a
tummy feeling now a two-year-old can
understand this and I really did have to
look up some psychology on Toddlers and
this sort of thing the notion of privacy
as a visceral feeling that psychologists
study is about
um no you don't want to be dashed in on
when you're maybe sitting on the
bathroom or or doing something very
intimate like that and it starts to
develop about two to three years old and
we still have it as uh as an innate
feeling that there are some things which
are very personal to ourselves we feel
uncomfortable if we're sharing them we
can set boundaries we decide who we
share these things with
um that is the notion of privacy as as a
feeling and that's a very long way away
from legislation and Tech and my my
laptop and my phone and things like that
uh whereas anonymity is the idea of
hiding my identity so that I can act
um or or indeed not act without anybody
knowing who it is who's doing those
things or who it is who holds that
information
um whilst related it's not that
um toddler tummy feeling I'm going to
keep coming back to
and naturally security is related to the
both of the above but the point of
security is that
um
it allows privacy to exist you can have
privacy without security uh it's not so
common that it is possible but generally
speaking imagine if we had a hotel and
we had a very loquacious receptionist
and that receptionist decided to ring up
and tell everybody uh in the newspapers
who was staying at the hotel well
clearly that's a privacy breach
but to fix it we go and have a word with
the receptionist and say really that's
not the way to behave and then we've
fixed the security problem so there is
no more privacy breach
and so these things are very separate
and
in trying to figure out how can we do
something about what is basically an
epic ruling disaster of of privacy that
affects us all with our children
um we had to find the details
of how do we uh Define these things so
basically
who has a right to privacy in indeed is
privacy a right and the answer is yes
and no now there's a lot of stuff on the
screen right now we'll come back to that
in a minute but all sorts of exciting
things are up here about a Declaration
of Human Rights and Australia has done
things like sign and ratify and say what
a wonderful thing about all of these in
fact
the answer is no we don't have a right
to privacy
not as a right in Australia enshrined in
law now there are discussions about
aspects of privacy in various laws there
isn't really anything in the
Constitution and there's quite a few
court cases about aspects of privacy
but what if you're not an Australian
citizen
uh what if you're an Australian citizen
overseas
and so who you are worldwide
and where you are
depends on whether you have a right to
privacy which seems a bit strange if
this is starting from a place of I feel
like I have things that make me
uncomfortable
if other people were to know them why
should that change whether I've taken
one step to the left and I'm in the
border of another country
except if you're in an island like
Australia all right and so
um
there we're going to have a look at all
the different grades if you like of
people
um but the general notion here is that
if you are in Europe then you have lots
of Rights they're written down in law
it's very very clear even if you're a
visitor even if you're there as a
student
uh or even if you're a EU citizen
traveling elsewhere
if you're in some countries that copy
Europe in some ways then you have a
lesser version of that South Korea would
argue it has a better version of that
that's arguable and then the other
countries go down from there so yes and
no do you have a right to privacy a lot
less than you might think
um and this is really a significant a
bigger pardon a significant issue
because most people seem to feel until
it's a little bit too late but yes they
have a right to privacy
um now in 2017
there's a fundamental case in Australia
called the grub case where a journalist
named Grubb
um said to Telstra I'd like access to
all of the metadata about me
so that is the information about my
personal information
and it went up to the high court there
was uh quite an argument about this and
the answer was no
no you cannot because metadata isn't
really identifying the individual it's
more about how Telstra provides the
services to the individual that was a
disastrous decision because metadata is
at the core of a quality privacy regime
and to take the European example which
is uh some some countries have indeed
taken on
it's the concept is it's an ever
expanding cloud of information so it's
that which would tend to identify a
person specifically
uh and that changes by the day as yet
another device comes along uh with yet
another way of innovatively using my
personal data and giving it to
corporations like how many steps I take
we're all familiar with that one yes but
what about the way I walk that is unique
to me
um what about uh in in a very very
genuine case that I was involved in
um there's a
a global name brand
um charity
that
um often has a humanitarian mission
there's a disaster in some country
these people will turn up of a half
dozen or so Global organizations they'll
be there
um there's been a hurricane there's been
a there's been a total wave there's been
a a war or whatever it may be
um and then after this this terrible
thing there's people who need help and
what we need is information what help do
they need how can we deliver what they
need and so
21st century we give our helpers tablets
it has a survey and we go and ask
questions
what do you need
uh how many people are in your household
and how many children do you have a
house does it have a roof
is the roof tin or plastic
do you have a goat these are really
really important things and so then the
food and shelter another Aid comes in
and the humanitarian mission is underway
and that's terrific but then what
happens if two years later as that
region is starting to pull itself
together
somebody decides that they're in charge
and they'll be a government thank you
very much and they've got a gun to say
so and they would really like all of
those surveys
and that's when the information about
your information you may not even have
identified a particular child but you
said they were there or we can maybe
calculate
the nature of the People by the kind of
food that they said that they would like
that is where we have a very direct
implication of metadata getting into the
wrong hands with an active life or death
security risk and that's a very real one
that non-government organizations are
dealing with fairly often these days
no
um yes we should share yes we should be
aware yes we should care
and yes it's deeply related to things
that we can feel unfortunately it just
seems so abstract
um and this is where
we have to look at how things are and
indeed how things are today
in many ways is not so great and so what
we're going to do uh is is consider
if I'm in Australia what is the
framework available to me and the answer
is well there's laws at Federal level
there's laws at state level there's some
bold undertakings uh by the the current
federal government that they're going to
review various aspects of privacy
um at the end of uh end of 2022 there
was a very helpful sounding law passed
about
um improving
your remedies so if there is a mass data
breach then companies have to pay quite
a lot of money they should be worried
about that so hopefully they won't be
encouraging Mass data breaches
but that's not the whole story there is
no what is called law of tort or rather
taught of privacy I should have said in
Australia uh and what that means is it's
not clear that for you the individual
who has had their privacy infringed in
some way that maybe makes you feel icky
there's no way for you to say
specifically that harmed me that is bad
and without a right of privacy that by
default in many circumstances we can
expect privacy uh
we're in a fairly weak position you go
into court you say my some things have
been infringed and then we have to
scratch around and look for the
particular law and the particular harm
that was done
as opposed to in many oh some rather
other countries where we say my rights
have been infringed you have no right to
invade my privacy and take it away and
that is by definition not allowable
and so
that is if you like the background now
as to the implementation the law and the
courts are really quite slow
um and I have some sympathy with this
I'm not sure that we want the courts and
uh and so on
to be reacting as the tech landscape
changes we don't expect new laws to be
issued
um hot on the heels of the latest
product from the latest Cloud company
but really
how can they keep up and the answer is
as things stand in 2023 no they can't
keep up
legislative environment isn't working
for the individual who has an
expectation of their privacy
a whole bunch of very large companies
and some governments are invading that
privacy or what can they do and the
answer is if they went to court which
very few are able to do
whatever they went to court for is out
of date
before it's got to court
the data sale industry the sale of your
personal information and my information
is just Galloping away and indeed it's a
global environment here on the internet
and my personal data from Australia or
from wherever I'm living is broadly
available in other countries
particularly the United States in fact
just last week or so you may have
noticed there was quite a icky instance
where
some very zealous right-wing Catholics
have been going around spending Millions
buying up commercially available data
combing through it combining the
metadata in order to identify
specifically
which Catholic priests they believe
might be gay and then going and doing
something very Catholic about it
and this illustrates that there is a a
large and growing and very unpleasant
Market in the sale of our personal data
or perhaps metadata noting that you can
do that in Australia
a lot more than you might imagine
and so evidence from court cases
even in the regime which is
as I hope to demonstrate The Shining
Light On The Hill in the European Union
is not very comforting so in 2021 there
was a case in the um in strasbord court
of Human Rights uh against the United
Kingdom government
not a European country
anymore as you may have heard and the
idea was
um gchq which is the the English or
British equivalent to Asia
um conducts Mass surveillance activities
that is to say it Scoops up information
on its citizens and everybody else's
citizens that can get it's Hands-On and
sifts through it looking for things that
they regard as suspicious or bad or that
they they're just curious about
and
although
the government the British government
was told no you can't do that as broadly
they did accept the argument but it is
possible to limit how broadly you do
that in other words they did not say
there is a whole class of information
that you just can't have access to and
that was both a win
for privacy advocacy in the sense that
yes the UK government was told to back
off in its mass surveillance and a loss
in the sense that no the court did not
uphold the notion that uh that
governments are unable to constrain
their privacy searches when they have an
infinite data set in front of them
because they can't that is a technical
fact and so a lot of things to worry
about
calling perhaps for a different approach
now
um this is very um it's a most amusing
to me map um created by someone called
Mordor intelligence now I don't actually
know much about mortar intelligence but
I have in fact checked out the uh the
these countries and the various the
regions and the various laws that
applies it's not too bad so this is
about
what is the rate of growth
of metadata
um industry if you like data sale uh in
various regions and guess what uh in
Australia and throughout Northeast Asia
this is a high growth area now I do note
that the Attorney General uh federal
attorney general of Australia has
announced that there shall be a review
um into the uh data retention
regulations which is welcome that is to
say the mandatory requirement on
Australian companies that they will keep
our metadata
for a period of time
um but that is not an answer to why is
it that Australia and many other
countries are in a very high growth area
for selling our private data now
um the this is about rates of growth
um which is why the United States for
example
is is not as not growing as fast as
others it's extremely mature there still
uh I do think that was valid I was
interested to to see that others have
done the work and I've checked it myself
um yes if you're in Australia they're
coming for us
now this
brings me to a very important
fundamental if you like Epiphany for me
in 2015
the beginnings of the European gdpr
um was sorting to coalesce what are we
going to do they were saying in Europe
and we're going to come back to this
slide you see a couple of times I'm
going to flick away from it because I'm
not going to read it
this is my personal Epiphany moment in
developing the lumo SQL open source
solution and and understanding what it
might mean
because in the beginning in the recitals
of this document the introduction if you
like
um it doesn't just talk about the right
to privacy which is there it's in the UN
Universal Declaration of Rights uh and
its various instruments as ratified and
signed by Australia but not implemented
in an Australian law
all of these things are there
but what was astonishing to me was that
the human rights framework as a network
as an interlocking collection of Rights
is specifically referred to in the
European General data protection
regulation and other regulations like it
around the world now
um it was quite a revelation if we go
through them
um you skip towards the end
this regulation is going to respect uh
private and family life home
Communications okay
but freedom of thought
and conscience and religion
that is fundamentally connected to
privacy
your freedom of expression and and
freedom to exchange information which
may not be in any way personal
that is a right again enshrined in the
U.N treaties
and founding a business
um if something goes wrong
the right to appeal and say no this
isn't right to say a court or other
thing that's called an effective remedy
if you're accused of something a fair
trial privacy is clearly involved in
that as you talk to various people
including your lawyer about what's going
on
um and then of course a whole host of
issues
um around sociological things you
languages and religions and cultural
beliefs
all of these things
are in the beginning of the gdpr as
saying look you can't really have them
if you don't have privacy
and that was the aha moment for me
because privacy rights effectively are
human rights
and even more so in the current age
where if you think of for example the
right we have in the UN Charter of
Rights to uh to clean drinking water
which is obviously much more important
of much more of an issue in some
countries than others currently
but how do we get to that and somewhere
along the line there will be an email
there'll be WhatsApp there'll be maybe
signal or other Communications related
to that right being delivered and
guaranteed
and that relates to the privacy of the
individual's concerned so
what I have concluded and what many
others conclude as well is that digital
privacy is the way that all other rights
are respected and delivered in the 21st
century
and that is why it matters and that is
why the current situation really isn't
good enough
um the gdpr has some flaws it also has
six or seven siblings in EU law
that put privacy rights and Associated
mathematics as we're going to talk about
um at the heart of everything that
happens online
other countries have taken this on New
Zealand indeed has
a privacy rights regime which is
compatible with the gdpr so does Japan
so does South Korea
Brazil and Canada
has some degree of of
commonality as well and we can tell that
this is so because the European Union
has a thing called adequacy
which was far from perfect says we
believe that this country and the way it
handles personal data is roughly
compatible with how we do it here in
Europe so it's a bit of a gold star for
um privacy Excellence
um unfortunately there's some holes in
that but we're beginning to see
that the European approach is a race to
the top
um and I I feel quite strongly there's a
distinction between what we're doing in
Australia what we see in New Zealand
um and uh I think
well there's actions that need to take
be taken and there's votes that need to
be had
even the current government and it's
very different to the recent
Government Federal Government and its
approach but even the current federal
government has acknowledged that there
are all manner of things
that aren't good enough and so this is a
quote from the attorney general Mark Dre
fuse about the mandatory retention
regime
um not being good enough
um I would add quite a list to this
there's been a a privacy isn't up to
scratch report hanging around for about
four years at the federal government
level with a lot of recommendations
about how to tighten things up
um none of them address the biggest
issue in the room of course which is
about Australia
believes in bulk surveillance it's in
lockstep with the United States as the
main partner in this in something called
the five eyes agreement so that's
Australia
U.S New Zealand
um Canada and United Kingdom
um
all of them Anglo countries which have
decided that they will exert their every
ability to Hoover up as much data as
possible and sift through it basically
without oversight and share the results
um none of that is touched by what Mr
dreyfuse is saying although I'm very
glad he's saying that Al metadata is
more important
and so
this is where we get to the pointy bit
one moment
um the pointy bit is what can we do and
the we there is from uh me and my trusty
team of Open Source developers uh me as
an Australian and you as Australian
citizens and everything in between
and so
um one of the
very simple things is we have to think
about our technology choices
these are positive actions that many
people can take in their daily lives to
some extent it's not all gloom and doom
and so
um people that have a privacy geek in
their lives will have heard
them banging on about
um is the source code available we make
a purchasing decision is the source code
available at least for the most
important components the answer is very
rarely a hundred percent yes because at
some level uh devices are locked down
there's source code relating to your
firmware in your in your phone
and so on it's a really good first pass
test now at this conference I don't have
to say too much about that
but for example I know groups of young
people I was delighted to discover that
they didn't need a lecture from the
likes of me
um they'd just gone out and bought
something called the free phone uh and
there's there's four or five others
around there which doesn't have Google
all through it at every level it doesn't
have closed Source applications where
there is an obvious open source
alternative it isn't reporting by
default
um your position and many other personal
uh facts about you back to a central
Cloud to be that Samsung's or Googles or
whoever huawees
um that is delightful and a really good
example of an individual action
uh you'll find this conference is
absolutely full of people who will bend
your ear about a very long list of
options but even thinking about it is a
good step forward
um and there are horror stories around
now that non-technical people are
beginning to realize actually this is a
serious problem
now
when it comes to Cloud suppliers
and this brings up end-to-end encryption
um particularly for example for chat
services or video services
um
and the answer to that is if it isn't
effective end-to-end encryption and by
effective I mean if somebody hasn't
responded to government requests to make
that stream available to any government
that asks
if it has effective end-to-end
encryption then that's what you want to
go for and there are some tests for that
I am not a fan of Facebook meta or uh
WhatsApp ultimately
but I will say this that WhatsApp does
have end-to-end encryption now a lot of
the metadata
is not secure and we can tell that with
WhatsApp because they are looking at
introducing carefully targeted ads
however I'm going to say something nice
about WhatsApp they said they would
leave the United Kingdom last week
if the United Kingdom passes the law
which says all end-to-end encryption
shall be compromised with the UK
government having a key that would
effectively Outlaw what's happening its
current Incarnation and they said they
would leave the country now
um good for them
I would suggest maybe not using Whatsapp
at all so signal again while not perfect
um those who know me are aware I'm part
of a project to uh to to implement
um signal server
not as part of signal.org
but signal is the best we have today
and signal is not only got end-to-end
encryption but it is very careful about
the information it leaks about who
you're talking to and who else might be
in a group and where are they from
and so when it comes to Australia's data
retention law for example
um the most
um that somebody like signal.org can
supply them is an IP address
and some metadata that that can be
pulled out of the likes of cloudflare
so basically signal.org is largely
impervious
to the Australian government's mandatory
data retention laws that's a great
example of something to choose and then
finally monoculturalism
um
is not a social statement of something
terribly controversial
it's simply the fact of uh if I have 10
000 um pieces of technology in my
company or in my local Council and they
all come from one supplier they all have
related
um source code trees then they are
probably all vulnerable to the same
privacy holes and that is why a lot of
places including some enlightened local
councils are deciding that okay they are
going to have
um electric electric vehicles which have
all manner of problems with their
software stack including privacy
but maybe we'll get one from this Asian
country one for the United States and
one from Europe and mix and match our
Fleet it's not so great for some fleet
managers but it's not a bad protection
against privacy and quality issues in
the software stack and that's a very
crude example but that level of thinking
um is is being increasingly applied in
larger organizations around the world
um in my house I'm an individual and
that level of thinking still applies
so there are some things that I will
give to one large name plan
name brand cloud provider because
I'm in the real world I have real people
I deal with they are dealing with these
clouds but then there are other classes
of my personal information that
I give to other clouds
if I'm careful
very careful then
um with with the knowledge that I have
with your research I've done I'm able to
reduce my privacy risk overall you've
probably heard me being very careful
there pulling back a little it is not
clear-cut because of course there are
issues of combining and the large clouds
do like to combine data and triangulate
into us what can they produce
um
it's not easy but there are some actions
we can do there are some recommendations
we can make um
many lists of them around
I'm going to give a few a little later
on
uh oh and the most important thing which
is actually not on this slide
is that individuals can vote now we saw
the last federal election
what can happen when people get fed up
and decide to voice an independent View
uh and that has made a significant
difference at at scale
um
similar things have happened in Chile uh
going back a few years in Brazil
um certainly in countries in the EU
where individual citizens has decided
enough is enough and they have uh
lobbied for successfully actions at The
Ballot Box
relating to protecting privacy we have a
rich series of Targets in Australia here
um we have some great advice related to
privacy we have this privacy review
um we have the proposed review of
metadata changes we have
um some terrible pieces of legislation
that uh that that need to be called out
there is the 2018
um access act
um access and assistance Act
which basically says the federal
government has infinite access to
anything happening in Australia and if
there's a technical person involved they
can be required to give the federal
government a back door and they can be
required not to talk about that
and they can be threatened with jail if
they don't
um this is a maligned piece of
legislation and the only way to deal
with that uh is
um in the Australian Federal Parliament
and the only influence we have on that
um as an individual uh is at The Ballot
Box or through lobbying or through
joining with others so there are things
we can do it's not gloom and doom it's
not the end of the world it's it's
pretty worrying
and of course
one group of Open Source developers have
decided to do something else
we thought this is a bit rubbish what
can we do what if we started
from the bottom up
is it possible that we can do something
uh regardless of the legal regime so we
have some some star
um actors behind us from SSH way back
when to Signal more modern
um
um with uh the there's the Guardian
Project which is and of course tour
wonderful pieces of Open Source that
have decided that they can assist with
privacy insecurity regardless of the
legal regime great
but for the as we've just seen for the
individual user in practice
non-technical person
they're really stuck in a hard place
today so everyone has a mobile phone and
we've studied this quite carefully
there is quite possibly one way in
um it's rather ambitious but we've made
considerable progress so every one of
your mobile phones has a database or not
called SQL Lite it's the world's most
used software uh it has
um
um an extraordinarily good history for
reliability I I used to think the other
otherwise and then I realized that
firstly I was misunderstanding and
secondly I was misunderstanding the
scale there is nothing else as far as I
know uh that is non-trivial software at
Trillium scale and there is a trillion
scale there's if you take out your phone
there is at least 300 databases sqlite
databases on there if it's not streaming
data it's probably in SQL light
most of them as plain texts equal light
it is possible to encrypt an entire
sqlite database if you do the right
Magic
and so what if we could make a small
change to SQL light
uh would need to be a small change you
don't fiddle with trillion scale
software lately
and what if we could in some way give
user permissions
enforced in SQL life and that's what
we've been working on for the last three
years
and the answer is we can't
uh and in fact we have solved the how do
we modify sqlite without breaking sqlite
problem we believe we have done we've
worked very carefully with the sqlite
community to ensure that we do we
believe we've solved the problem of
what
can we give the individual user
uh in meaningful control so
there was unfortunately the industry
hijacked the infamous cookie laws in the
EU deliberately and made it so that we
all suffer from click fatigue saying yes
I accept cookies
um
how can we meaningfully give users
control over each row of data in sqlite
and the answer is
with something very clever
we use mathematics we use a form of
encryption
that is called attribute-based
encryption
uh the idea is that the you can read or
write
the data depending on the keys you hold
and the user can delegate keys
I imagine for example we think of a
class of application on our phone
banking apps
what if the bank was not in charge of
the commissions over that data if the
user could say the banks can only read
the data or append to it but they can't
rewrite anything
that is an example of what we're heading
for so by default
the telephone operating system that
you're using whether it's apple or one
of the Androids from Huawei or no matter
who
um
if it's a particular class of
application the user can select what
that application is allowed to do and
the permissions are in the data so
wherever the data goes
um is where the permissions go
now the technical details of that are
really quite immense
um
there's quite a lot to understand how
does um attribute-based encryption work
why have I got both a PhD and a masters
and some very competent developers in in
addition working on this in Rust
and integrating that into sqlite all of
this is really quite technical but the
basic issue is it's possible not only to
enforce these permissions but to roll
them out at scale
if we get some ducks lined up such as
approaching the platform owners I don't
know who we have in the audience from
Google and Amazon today but I want to
hear from you
there's new namespaces there's all sorts
of exciting reasons why you might want
to get in making privacy enforceable
from the user up
now
adoption from App developers that's a
bit of an easier door to push because
the current encryption options for
sqlite aren't great and we we believe
that we have a way to fix that we're
very pleased with our measurements uh so
far
we want
and uh
finally
it is ambitious to the point of
hubristic but what if every telephone
had this what if every line of every
data of every sqlite database and had
these permissions associated with it
wherever that data went
that would be an industry default and
that would be privacy from the bottom up
so that's what we're aiming for I
understand that's the 10 minute warning
which means we have some q and A's
thank you Dan unfortunately that's the
end and we've come right up to our a
room coordinator here sorry say that
again
hello Amy hello
um unfortunately that's not the 10
minute warning we've come up right
against our finish time at 5 25. so have
we just now we have just sorry so sorry
we're not able to thank you very much
for that thank you thank you so much and
apologies again for mangling your
introduction thank you for picking up a
very strange ball and running with it
thank you so much
and thanks to everyone else here um
we'll see you tomorrow hopefully or at
dinner at 6 pm thank you
yep