Preroll 36C3 Music Herald: Good evening and welcome to day two of the Congress. Our next speaker, Paul Gardner-Stephen is fighting for a free, secure and resilient communications. He's known as the leader of the cerebral projects, building cell phone mesh networks and also as the creator of the mega 65 computer, that you can see right here. Some Applause And. So he's going to tell us about his next project right now and also explore some issues that we face about, building networks and keeping them secure and resilient. So please welcome Paul Gardner-Stephen "Creating Resilient and Sustainable mobile networks". A round of applause. applause Paul Gardner-Stephen: OK. Thanks for coming along, everyone. Tonight is getting a little bit late in the night , Sidney, for me it is past my normal bedtime, so apologies if I yawn. It's not that I'm bored or disengaged. It's just I flew in from Australia yesterday and still haven't really had enough sleep. But we should be fine. So cool. So what we can see here we have the mega 65 prototype and we have a prototype of the megaphone and I'll talk about those two in a minute. So the entire presentation is actually going to be delivered with the technology that we're creating. So a bit of a dog food eating session for this kind of thing is a bit of proof by example that we can actually do useful things with 8-bit systems because a whole pile of advantages when it comes to the security and digital sovereignty with that. So we'll switch the screen to the screen. Super excellent. So we can have a look and make sure I've got the correct disk in there. Yes, we do. We will drop to see 64 mode. And we'll load the wrong one. For sure, we don't have to wait the long time if I press and hold down the caps lock key. The CPU runs at the full speed instead of normal speed. And so now it will light up. Its Commodore 64 software, right. So of course it has to be cracked. Even if I had to supply the originals to the cracking crew because in 2019. So we'll let that go for the year. The graphic change a little bit as we go along and let the grease roll out there. So all of this has been created in FPGA. So we have complete sovereignty in that sense over the architecture so that we can really start trying to, you know, to make systems that we have full control over from that full hardware layer and that are simple enough that we don't need to have a huge, massive team of people to actually work on these things. A lot of what we are talking about here has been created in maybe three or four person years over the last few years. So it is quite possible to do a lot with these systems without needing to have the huge resources of a multinational company or something, which is kind of key. Okay, so we'll do. Mega. Oh. 36C3. Okay. I'll press a five for presentation mode, which really just hides the cursor. And then I can use my clicker. So we have to switch, the camera here for a moment applause we switch the camera. So it's a genuine homemade Commodore 64 compatible joystick. And it makes the most satisfying click noise when we use it. So if we switch back to the slides, that will be great. But they are super, cool. So I am indeed going to be talking about creating resilient and sustainable mobile phones and hopefully that link when we already have the the artifact there of the megaphone prototype, that will become clearer as we go through. So really, the last talk, was it kind of interesting talking about this whole a different angle, this whole thing, that communications has actually become really weaponized over the last decade or two in particular that, you know, we're seeing that, you know, where it used to be natural disasters, that are the main problem, that now there is this whole problem of manmade disaster, which is a major problem for us. And so we see Internet shut communication shutdowns. We have surveillance happening in different places where it really ought not be happening. You know, this state level actors that are very well resourced, able to find zero day exploits. And the attack surface, as we know in modern communications devices is simply huge. And so this is this is very asymmetric in the power equation between, you know, the forces that seek to oppress people and, you know, the vulnerable people at the coalface who are just trying to get on with their lives and believe good decent lives and need communications to help protect themselves and enable that to happen. And that we're seeing that the value of communications is so well understood by these pressing forces that it really has become quite a you know, it's quite high up their list of things to do. You know, you don't send the army in first to quiet people down. You cut off their Internet as the first thing. So this is part of the backdrop of what we see. And so what I would say is that the digital summer has actually finished. We're now in the digital autumn. We can see in that, you know, with the with farms and trees and things that, you know, there's still plenty of fruit to see in the early autumn. Right? And there's lots on the ground. It feels like this time of plenty will continue. And, you know, we can all eat as we need that there is enough more or less to go around. But the risk that we have is from this parable of the grasshopper and the yet. Who here knows the parable of the grasshopper and the ant? Hands right up. Is it really hard for me to see up here? Okay. We'll stop and say who doesn't know? Okay, cool. So I thought actually it was originally a German kind of problem. This is the story of where the grashoper, you know, the grasshopper is kind of lounging around and enjoying the summer. While ant aren't busy carrying all the seeds back into the nest. And the ant's telling the grasshopper, hey, you need to get some food and stuff and put away for the winter so that you can actually survive the winter. And the grasshopper is basically in denial about the fact that, you know, the season will change. And then, of course, the season changes. It snows and gets cold. And then the grasshopper kind of goes knocking on the door of the antholl, not the lake, kind of really have doors, but that's fine. It's like, oh, I'm starving and cold out here. And and ant is kind of like, well, I've told you so kind of thing. And I think actually in the end, it kind of lets it into we that want to scare children too much with their stories. And so this is actually the challenge that we have that we, I love every time I come to these events or the creativity that we see. You know, we're enjoying the digital summer and all of the things that is letting us create and, you know, the great open source software and tools and everything that's going on, it's absolutely fantastic. And we want that to be to continue indefinitely. But we know that, as we said, that, you know, the you know, the chilling winds are beginning to to come that tell us that unless we actually do something about it, that this isn't actually going to continue indefinitely. And just a statement that I really want to make here is this last point that I've got. The freedoms of the second half of the 20th century, post- World War 2. If you look at history, they are an aberration. To my knowledge, never before and I fear perhaps never again will we have that degree of personal liberty, focus on, you know, individual freedom and agency and everything that was in this post-World War era and is now starting to unwind and starting to unwind back to the normal totally asymmetric, you know. Well, to say sharing of power is the wrong word. It's the greedy collection of power and depravation of the mass population from having any thing resembling a fair share of what's going on. And so we have to act if we want for the, you know, the digital summer to continue or at worst for the digital winter to be as short and shallow as we can have it, so that the you know, we can come back to a new digital summer. Because once we hit the digital winter, it will actually be too late. Because if we push this analogy, you know that the digital winter is the time when there is no food on the train or it isn't any longer possible or at least practical to create new technologies to enable us to, you know, to feed our digital needs. And we can't plant any new crop, so to speak, until the digital spring comes again after that. And so the opportunity, like with the grasshopper is now before the winter comes to say, right, what do we need to have in our store of technology, the store of protocols, all of these different things, so that when the digital winter comes, we don't starve. And fortunately, you know, we can actually change the length of the digital winter. We can empower people so that, you know, the bitter cold of the digital winter is moderated and the spring can come as soon as it can. And the trouble that we have with this, we actually don't know when the digital winter will come exactly. We see these challenges around in the way that different governments and non-state actors as well, you know, working you in propaganda and all all of these things that are becoming sadly more intense and acute around us. We don't know when that tipping point will happen. But given the complexity of supply chains and things that are necessary in this, I think Bunny was talking about that earlier today, that this is actually quite easy for it to actually quite quickly flip into the digital winter mode. And then as with the real winter, at the very beginning of winter, there might still be enough to eat, but it gets harder and harder very rapidly. And, you know, if the winter gets too deep, then it's just not going to be possible to continue with these things. And so we've tried to think about what's needed to actually overcome this. What do we need focusing on mobile communications as a key piece of that? And there's a reason for that in that it's the way that we can communicate, organize, you know, collectively protect communities against the threats that come in. If we look at things like that great Haiti earthquake just back in 2010, the breakdown of communications and law and order meant that they were quite horrible things going on. We don't know about three days, actually, of the earthquake there. So there were militias that were basically robbing medical teams, trying to transport people between different hospitals. And there were much nastier things with, you know, gangs of people going around from village to village, basically doing whatever they want to, whoever they want. It was really not cool. And so we want to avoid that kind of problem that comes, when people are not able to to collectively work together effectively as a community. And so the GPO four freedoms that we know from software, they're a great starting point. But I think actually we've seen enough things like with TiVoization and all these sorts of other challenges, that this is not sufficient, when it comes to hardware. And there's actually some even more complicated things. You start talking about mobile phone kind of hardware, as to how we can do that, which I'll talk about in a moment. But these are a starting point of what I've come up with as things that I see as being necessary. There's ample room for improvement. And in fact, with any of what we're trying to do in this space, we need folks to come along and help us. We can't do it alone. We need to work together so that we can help one another when the digital winter comes. So the first freedom is simply the freedom from energy infrastructure. We know critical infrastructure is disturbingly vulnerable, that the security of it is quite bad. But also you have these like large centralized places that produce the energy that we need. And, you know, we see power cut offs in Venezuela and all of these sorts of things, regardless of who's actually doing it, whether it's sabotage or whether it was purposeful from the government, I don't know. It actually doesn't matter. The fact is, it happens. But also, of course, a natural disaster. Power goes out. Fortunately, this is actually one of the easiest things to solve. We just need to include some kind of alternative energy supply into the kind of devices that we're creating. So that could be solar panel on the back. Or you could have the you know, the Faraday, you know, you shake it like a martini kind of thing to generate power or both, whatever you feel like. Or if you can find a good supply of NASA radio, I hope then with generators, that would also be fantastic. And we'll keep you warm through the winter as well. But, you know, if anyone has a supply of those, let me know. I'd love to hear. So then the second freedom is actually quite similar to the first. It's the realization that we need energy to communicate in communications, to organize ourselves and be effective. And again, the communications infrastructure is in many ways that she even more fragile than the energy production. Infrastructure is much easier to guard a couple of power stations in a country than it is to guard every phone tower and all of the interconnecting links and all these sorts of things between them. As we said, communications depravation is already being weaponized against the vulnerable around us. Again, fortunate there's been a whole pile of work in the space of the previous work I've done with the serval mesh and freifunk. And a whole bunch of groups working on a whole bunch of different things in this kind of space for peer to peer secure, authenticated communications. So, yes, there's work to be done, but this is an area where there's actually already like the energy one. There's been quite a lot of work done that makes that quite feasible to work on. So then we start going into some of the the harder ones, we need to make sure that we are not dependent on, you know, the major vendors of our devices, when it comes to the security of our devices. So this starts with simple things like that the GPL provides. So, you know, full source code has to be available. But more than that, we actually have to make sure that we can actually exercise those rights in practice. So it needs to be simple enough that we can actually, you know, go right. Okay. There's a security vulnerability in such and such like you now. Yes. You were talking about earlier today with some of the bluetooth things. And then to actually be out to patch it yourself, it's quite obvious that this is not the case for whether it's firmware or whether it's the regular operating system on modern mobile phones. So who here is actually built Android from source themselves? Excellent. Expected to see a few folks here. Who has tried and gave up in disgust. Right. More hands? Yes. I myself was all like, you know, I work on the civil project and we do a whole pile of things and basically just know after spending a number of hours on, it just went like, you know, this is actually this is a lot of work for something that ought to be straightforward if we want to be out to make rapid progress. And so we want to have systems that are simple enough, we can patch. But in fact, there's another really key advantage, the simplicity that I'll probably come over a few times in this talk, and that is that simplicity reduces the attack surface. If we are in an asymmetric power environment, where there are whether they are state or non-state actors seeking to deprive vulnerable people of communications, they're going to have potentially the ability to put whole teams looking for vulnerabilities in software. In contrast, we might be lucky to have someone who's going to try and madly find when things are being exploited and to patch them. So we need to have ways around this kind of thing. And to my mind, reducing the attack surface is the only way that we can actually have any real hope of, you know, being at a keep up in that arms race of security. So Freedom #4 is related to this previous one. Is actually saying not only do we want to be at a patch, where she wants to be at a change, enhance doing these things. And again, it comes back to the same basic need that the software is actually able to be compiled. And the hardware designs are simple enough that we can actually, you know, to work on these things so that we get not merely in theory have permission to innovate, but that it is in practice feasible to do so. And again, the simpler the system, the the the more probable it is that we can actually succeed in this kind of space. And then again, there's a lot of these are quite interrelated, that's part of why I say it would actually be great to get feedback on how we might restructure these to make the boundaries really clear between these freedoms that we need. So we need the freedom to maintain the devices for the long run. So who here has or has had a fair phone, for example? I love the fair phone by the way. A number of us. I've had one as well. And, you know, if you talk to the people at Faith, I think they have a team of a bunch of people just trying to maintain Android on the faire phone 2, for example. And also now on the faire phone 3 as it comes out. And this is actually really hard work. But again, the complexity and the barriers that are there, make it really difficult to be able to just keep the thing running with the same hardware little and each time you want to target new hardware with new capabilities. This is just going to be, you know, as a community, we can probably do one or two devices if we kind of all collected our effort. But to actually do it for, you know, devices that meet individual needs or, you know, appropriate for a particular area might have, as we say, a different energy source. So I might want to try putting, you know, some thermal electric thing or whatever that at the moment to do that with mobile phone hardware is just prohibitive in the complexity and the, you know, the resourcing and effort that it would require. So we need to find solutions around this. And then again, related to that, overall, we have this problem of scale dependency. I think this is one of the really key things at the moment to make a mobile phone. You need to have a big enough market and you'd have a big enough enterprise and enough capital and all of the rest of it to actually be had to go through the very expensive process of designing the thing, getting injection molding, tooling and all of that kind of thing made. That, you know, to do that for a modern phone. I suspect it's a few million euros to do it reasonably well. And if you did it on the cheap and skinny is probably still maybe something like a million euros to achieve. So we have to somehow break this down, to make it feasible to do. And as I said earlier, simplicity is a key theme to my mind, and it is the only way I think that we can actually do it. So we've already talked about the challenges of distributing an Android ROM, let alone modifying it to do new things in any kind of sophisticated way. And even if you do, the hardware is actually too complicated. And there's a whole pile of trust issues around the complicated hardware. If you can't understand something, by definition, it's a black box. And if it's a black box, by definition, you can't trust it. Because you don't know what's inside. So, you know, we we have this point again, the digital winter. You don't want any black boxes or if you do, you want them very carefully monitored and managed. And so the system has to be not simple enough to make once. It is simple enough that we can actually remake it again and again and again, as we have need. It's a bit like the difference between a chainsaw or an ax, right? If you want to be in a remote area and have to be self-sufficient. Much better to depend on ax to chop your wood, because if you need two, you can make a new handle for your ax. And you know, with a bit more effort, you could do some very simple metallurgy and, you know, metal smelting with iron ore. If you happen to be lucky enough to have an area or copper or whatever, it's going to be a much easier proposition than having to do that and then somehow make a fine machine tooling and making you chain parts and motor parts and all of this kind of thing. So it has to be if it is going to be resilient and survivable, it has to be simple enough that you actually can build it with relatively simple tools going forward. Electronics is going to be a big challenge in this area because, you know, you need to be PCV fabrication, you need to get components and things. But we have to try and reduce the barriers as much as we can, so that at least, for example, component scavenging, for example, might be an option. Or devices that will be available, because they're still needed by other industries that have more protection as we head into a digital winter environment that we can take and repurpose that kind of hardware. So that this kind of leads into this tension then of saying, okay, if we make something which is simple enough, we know we as a community, we only have limited resources available to us, to make this kind of resilient device. Do we make one or do we all kind of like run off and make different kind of things? And I think the you know, this is a tension. I'm not going to claim that. I know the absolute best setting for this. I think we need to have, as I say, kind of multiple germ lines so that if one system gets chronically critically broken or proves to be ineffective and that, you know, there are others kind of in the wing that can kind of fill that niche in the environment. But we don't have so many, that if you don't get anywhere. And so this is a bit tricky. My gut feeling is, you know, making a an initial device that can kind of demonstrate some of these kind of positive properties. And then so other people will look at and go like, well, that's really great. That's got us forward. But, you know, that was a really stupid design. I think this is a way better way to do it in the way, that we have that freedom in the open source community to do, is probably a pretty good way to do things. And I would say, we're not yet at the end point of that proof of concept, but we're trying to move things forward to that and that point. So, come actual to the the megaphone that we're trying to create. And so in terms of what we've actually set out to do for the goals and kind of the methodology, we want something, which is simple, secure, self- sufficient and survivable. A lot of the work that I do is, for example, with, you know, NGOs. We've worked with folks from Red Cross. We work with folks from the UN World Food Program, who part of the interestingly, are the distributors of communications in the UN cluster system for disasters. Because they kind of like hand out blankets and they hand out rice and things. Someone basically say to them, well, you should also be handing out the communications. And so that's just kind of how it's fell. And so, you know, in an easy way I do smartphony kind of things like would be great to have some navigation, it would be great to have in a disaster context, the ability to fill in forms on the screen with a touch screen and the rest of it and have the uplink through. So if you think, you know, an Ebola outbreak in Africa, for example, to be out a collect, you know that case information to track down the you know, the case zeros and. Kind of thing, you need communications that can work. Often these outbreaks happen in places where law and order and civil society is not really working. Because if it was, then they wouldn't have had the outbreak there, it would have been managed more effectively. And so you need this kind of, you know, dependable device that can work independent of everything else that's going on. And that might have to do software updates, for example, over a really expensive narrowband satellite link that might be, you know, tens of bytes per second or less. So that was kind of some of the, you know, the motivation around this to create it. And it separately have been working on the Mega 65 project for a couple of years at that point. And it just kind of dawned on me that actually this simple 8 bit architecture is powerful enough to actually be useful to do some things. Math kind of, you know, well, you're doing this. You know, the fun proof of, you know, proof by example, really, of delivering the slides with this machine to show. that you can do useful things if you write the code carefully and carefully written code is more likely to be verifiable and secure. And it's probably I don't think you can get any simpler than an eight bit system and still be useful like I don't think we want to be trying to use an Intel 4004 derived 4 Bit CPU to do things. Boeing's if someone can find a way to do something with a system that's that simple and they can still do everything we need and it makes it even easier to verify. Fantastic. My gut feeling is it would actually be worse on every point, because the amount of work that you would have to do to do each useful thing, you end up with code which is actually larger in size. That I think, my feeling is that the 8 Bit architecture is about that sweet point. And so anyway, so as a result of the Mega 65 work, it's based directly on that. So the the phone actually is a Mega 65 importable form and will show that in a little bit. And so we're getting towards that kind of proof of concept stage. So we had the first phone calls back in Linuxconf. So if you kind of dig back through this, the the video of that talk where with a much earlier prototype, we actually had people calling the machine, which is quite fun. And I took a little bit later as well about the some of the audio part kind of issues around that. So let's look at those six freedoms again now, and what we're trying to do with the megaphone. So energy independence. The first thing is we've got a filthy, great big battery. I hate it when phones go flat. And when you're in a disaster zone or these kind of vulnerable situations, you really don't want it going flat at the wrong time. So we've put a 32 watt our lithium ion phosphate battery that should have 2000 full charge cycles in there. The device is about the size of an intended switch in terms of surface area. So putting high performance solar cells like you would put on the solar racing car or on your roof, we can probably get about seven watts with that. And if you do the kind of math that's, you know, four or so hours of charge time, but we know in reality that the, you know, the solar environment will often be much worse than that. It might be only 10 percent of what it to be 1 percent of that if you're talking about these kinds of latitudes under cloudy conditions. And so you really want to have the big battery and as big a solar panel as you can and you want the power consumption to be as low as possible. So we've got CPO data to candlelight little teeny tiny FPGAs, that are managing the whole power environment and wake up the main FPGA only when something important needs to happen. So we believe with 32 watt hours, we should be out to get about a thousand hours standby with a 4G off the shelf cellular modem. And that's, you know, assuming the solar panel was actually, you know, like, you know, in a black box, even the light here, if we had the solar, the seven watt solar panel would have a sunny side up and we would be able to maintain charge indefinitely on the device, because we only need to have about 8 Milli Watts coming in. So we're talking about one one thousandth of the capacity of the solar panel. OK. So if a communications for independence, we really want as many possible ways to communicate as we can and the naughty little things that we can't trust, in particular the cellular modem, we want to have a sandbox and quarantined so that it can't spread its naughty plague of whatever vulnerabilities it has in there. Again, there are black box. We can't trust them. They're too hard for us to implement. So this is kind of a decision that we've taken. We'd much rather have a fully open 4G modem and if someone makes one fantastic, will incorporate it straight in. Right. because the systemis designed to be easy to change. But in the meantime, we have to kind of deal with what there is. The great thing is that these m.2 cellular modems are used in vending machines, in cars, in all sorts of things. So they're just the common eyes. Again, if he had to scavenge them in the future. This would be quite feasible and also means, we can upgrade. So we have two of these slots, so we could actually have a dual 5G Commodore 64 so that, you know, because he wants to light weight extra time when you're downloading your games, right? And 40 kilobytes can take a long time to download. I've only got one 5G link, right? We have two of them so we can do it in parallel. Because he was to more than about, you know, four milliseconds to download new software and again, limited communications availability in these kind of oppressive environments. This is actually key. You might only have short communications window. So while it is a little bit tongue in cheek, it's not entirely. And of course, with several mesh, we've been doing, you know, UHF? packet radio. So we've put in try band Laura compatible radios in there. Not Laura when we're doing it fully. We're just sending out radio packets and listening in with the modules. We've also got ESP 1, 266 Wi-Fi and some Bluetooth in there. So that's some other potential options. Acoustic networking. So we've got 4 microphones that are directly connected to our FPGA so we can do crazy signal processing on that. And we've got a nice loud speaker that should work up into the ultrasonic range so we could even have quite decent communications over, you know, 10 or so meters in the acoustic band. And there's a crazy bunch. And I've forgotten the name of the research group that do air gap jumping. And they've done some quite crazy things with acoustics with the live your headphones plugged into your computer on your desk in a headphone jack. You can software reconfigure that and make that that's a speaker and microphone. There's anyone that's interested in a hall after. And we can have a look and try and find the link for you. We've also got infrared LED. And so the idea with all of these kind of things and whatever else you can kind of do, is that it should be really hard for an adversary to actually jam all of these things at the same time. You know, you might be able to do broadband RF jamming, but that's not going to stop the acoustics or the LED. And even if you can kind of make a lot of noise, it's gonna be really hard to block the LED, if people are kind of holding the devices near one another to do delay tolerant transfer. And of course, any other crazy things that people come up with. Again, a simple system design that you can extend it easily yourself. OK. Security independence. So the operating system runs in a little bit CPU, which is basically a slightly enhanced version of the Commodore 64 CPU. It has a a bit hypervisor, which is 16 kilobytes inside hardware limitation, because we don't want it getting bigger. If it gets 16K then you have to throw some other things out and right. What does it actually really need to do so, that you still have a system which is actually much more verifiable. And this kind of small software, it should be quite possible on this machine to run a simple C compiler, for example, to we had to compile the software that is actually running the core operating system, so we can have that whole complete offgrid operation. We've really talked a little bit about having the untrusted components fully sandboxed. So for example, cellular modems only have a 80 command serial interface to the rest of the system. And so this is going to make it much harder for an adversary to work out how with a fully compromised cellular modem, you can compromise the rest of the system by giving presumably bogus responses to 80 command requests. And because we know that's where the vulnerable point is, we can put a lot of effort in our software to really interrogate the command response to the coming back and no look for any QIT command responses within a semicolon, drop tables and all the rest of it in there. It should be pretty straightforward to pick up. So we also have an integrated hardware in sufferance inspectors, so that you can real time verify. It is a little bit fun. So I can hit mega tab and we call it matrix mode for good reason. So the system is still running in the background. So the slides are still there. So I can go back to the previous slow, I begin to say, it was a joystick actually when I'm in there. Yes, they you go. Or file a bug for that, but we can, if I go back into it, we can look at all of memory in real time. So if you are truly paranoid and you are about to, for example, do some encrypted email on your, you know, digitally sovereign device. You could actually go into this, stop the CPU and then inspect every byte of memory and compare it to your physical printout of the, you know, 30 or 40 kilobytes of your software. Or you might every time he might do, you know, half a kilobyte or something, right?! And verify it so that progressively over time, you've actually verified that the system is always byte identical. At that point in time to what it should be doing. And again, the simplicity, we only have one program running at a time. So, you know, you know exactly what the system is doing. And we can tasks which we got a built in phrase constantly if I press the restore key. Anyone who's used a Commodore 64 and with an action replay will probably recognize the inspired format. And so that's our program. They're running with hardware, thumbnail, generation of colors, a bit wrong. We need to fix that. But, you know, we've got other software that we've had running on it. And so if we wanted to, you know, break up the presentation with a quick game of Gyruss, for example. We can do that. I need to switch the joystick. What I can do that in here as well. Jay. silence retro music You know, if we wanted to, we can do that. And then we can go back and, you know, pretend that we weren't doing anything naughty at all. And of course, I forgot to save what I was doing first, right. So I have to load the program again. So that's my bad. That's right. Because reboot time is about two seconds. typing commands So the worst part now is that we actually we haven't got a command to jumped through the slides and so it actually takes a little bit of time to render each slide as we go through. So that that's my punishment for not saving first. But see what we might do. We'll skip that for the moment. And I'm kind of at the right point anyway to talk about it, which is the audio powers and a mobile phone. This is a really important area to protect. So, so important, that is the only diagram that I've put an entire presentation. So at the top we have a normal mobile phone. So basically what we see is that the untrustable cellular modem is not merely on trustable. It's like an evil squid that has tentacles at reach into every part of your mobile phone that you really don't want it getting into. So it has the direct connection to your microphone and speaker. The normal CPU in your mobile phone usually has to say pretty please, oh untrustable, completely untrustworthy cellular modem. May I please have something which you're going to tell me is the audio that's coming in through the microphone? Whether or not it's actually the audio or not, there's a whole separate thing. It might be doing all manner of crazy things first, because you can't tell because it's a big fat black box in the way. And then just to make sure that the you know, it can fully compromise, what you're doing often is on the same memory bus. And so, you know, you might go, oh, I'm being all secret squirrel from the cellular modem and asking you anything. And it's just quietly lifting the covers and looking at what you got under there going like, oh, no, no, that bites wrong. You really want that value in that bite. And likewise, the RAM and the storage. So, you know, the cellular modem can totally compromise your bootloader and all of that kind of stuff along the way. Let's just say that that's not really a very survivable model or a very resilient model or a very secure model for a phone. So we have instead is that we've basically put the fully untranslatable thing completely out in its own little tiny shed. We've got the tin can and string between us and it with a very controlled interface and the microphone and speaker, thank you very much, are directly connected to our FPGA. So we can do encryption at the microphone and decryption at the speaker. The storage is secure, so we could even have massive one time pad. So we could actually do sig sally style provably secure communications over distance. If you can set up the key material beforehand for one time pad. So it's a radically different approach to what we see with devices out there at the moment. So we'll just get the the last few slides up in. Oh, no, for CONAN. Whoops. So even simple software can have bugs. This is why we need many eyes. Think of a load. This one first. Yep. And now I can load the other one because it just hadn't loaded the fonts in. Yeah. Cool. It's coming. Yeah. You could even use the joystick to move read and the text if you want to. Okay, so if we think then about this whole, you know, like what are we actually trying to achieve around this and what are some of the things that we need in the, in the. The Commodore derived 8 bit platform to us has a whole pile of advantages as the basis for doing this. Now, we could have done it with a completely different platform. You'll like some would think like RISC-V, for example, is a nice open platform. Could be an idea. Might it be that the RISC-V CPU was actually still too complicated to actually verify and trust yourself is my kind of view, but I'm really happy that other people might disagree with me. Again, multiple germ lines, totally different ways of doing things, and at least one of them keeps working at any point in time would be really, really good. You're kind of combination things as well. So one of the things that we're looking at is having, for example, a Raspberry Pi running the PI port of Android that somebody else maintains. I don't have to do it. And then having the 8 bit layer actually visualizing all of the IO around that, including access to the SD card storage, including access to the screen. And as that, she also makes it possible for us to work to make custom mobile devices for people living with disability. And actually some of the Android again is easy to maintain because we don't even have to recompile it. We can just get the standard version and then make it think it's got a normal touchscreen when in actual fact it might have some completely different input method going on. So there's a bunch of advantages. I've run out of the official time that have a lot of so I quickly go through and it will go into the questions. So the platform is really well documented. So there's another whole pile of tools and everything programing languages. So this is pretty straightforward to go through. We've already talked about capability maintenance again. So that is actually another key point: Making the hardware big actually is a massive advantage because then we can do normal PCP fabrication. We don't have to be any BGA parts placement, which is a real pain to do in your home oven, it is possible, but you don't want to have to work to learn how to do it in digital winter. And yet it's largely this kind of similar size to existing kind of devices out there. There's a bunch of advantages with that. There's a whole pile of different things that we really would like some folks to help us with to try and get this finished and out there for people to try out and to, you know, we had a mature it and make it work. So it doesn't matter whether you have a programmable 8 bit computer I've ever done any FPGA work or PCB work or whatever. You know, there's lots of space for people to join in what is quite, we think is actually both an important and actually a really fun and enjoyable project to work on. And so really just want to finish. But she said that I think it is a thinking about this talk and preparing for it. I think actually, it is a call to action. You know, the digital autumn has begun. Digital winter is on its way. We don't know when it's going to come. And it might come a lot quicker, than we would really like it to come, you know? Myself and the people who are already working on the project, we can't do everything alone. We're doing what we can. We going to try to organize another event in early April up in Berlin. But there's no need to wait for that to get involved. You know, we'll be around at the vintage computer area. If anyone wants to come and have a look or ask anything about how you might get involved or just play around with the platform, it's quite fun to use. Oups. And yeah, we'll leave it at that point. So any questions would be really welcome. applause Herald: That was incredible. You have the best present and set up that I've ever seen. PGS: Laughing Thank you. Herald: That joistick is amazing. Applause PGS: The joystick is also open source hardware. I can give you the plans to make one of those you sell from from parts. It's the spare joystick part through arcade games basically. Herald: Yes, please. OK. We're taking questions. I remind you, we have six microphones in the audience. We also have the amazing signal angel that's going to relay questions from the Internet. And we're going to take one right now. Signal-angel: Okay. So you already talked about some events, but maybe can you bit more elaborate on how you're planning to involve the community? PGS: Okay. So how we gonna involve the community? Basically, anyway, the community would like to be involved. The moment in terms of with the phone as myself and kind of the work at a university and we have kind of a couple of part time students working on things. So the bus number is disturbingly near one at the moment. So there's ample scope to help. We've got a few other people who are helping with the Mega 65 project itself. And so there is obviously this crossover in that. But what would be really great would be to find, for example, a couple of people who are willing to work on software, primarily coding and C. You don't even have to know any 65 to assembler to begin with, to do things like, you know, finishing off the dialer software and things that we demonstrated back in January and get it all working, so we can actually walk around with a pair of large plastic bricks by our heads, talking on the phones that we've actually created. That would be a really great way to work, to get some initial forward movement. And then things like case design, there's a whole bunch of stuff that, you know, we'd welcome involvement on. Herald: Thank you. Do we have more from the Signal Angels? Yes, we do. Signal-Angel: So, okay, um, there's a question when a prototype will be available. PGS: Okay. When a prototype would be available, I'm happy to give out blank PCBs or post them to people. I've got actually packed them with me. We've got looking at the next prototype is actually being built at the moment. So, you know, these can be built for about 400 euros at the moment. So you can buy like five of these instead of an iPhone. Right? So it's already it's it's economically survivable as well in comparison. Essentially, it's one of the really quite funny things that we kind of making isn't going like a few person years of effort. And we can already make a mobile phone case, not a small and ch'mic, but it's got a joystick port. Right. Does your iPhone have a joystick port? So, you know, it's it's amazing. We've actually been able to do quite quickly. So, it's the kind of project where we do have people kind of come in to help us. You know, I think like, you know, by next Congress, we ought to have people running around with megaphones and being able to communicate in fun an independent kind of ways. So, yeah. Herald: Thank you. Microphone one, please. Mic 1: Thanks for a cool talk. And I have another question because you want to reduce black boxes. But what about encryption? Because it's really complex. And how do you plan to reduce this black box? PGS: Ah okay. So an excellent question. So the best encryption there is, is actually the simplest. It's called one time pad. So if you can actually meet with people. So again, we're talking about focusing on supporting local communities in one another. If you get your megaphone on the other person's megaphone and you come in infrared range, for example, and then you shake them like martinis to generate some random data and you do that until you've decided you've got enough one time pad and that one time pad is secure enough in your device, then actually like xor is pretty easy to debug. Right? Herald: Thank you. Microphone number three. Mic 3: So you talked about the form factor right now being Nintendo's switch. PGS: Yeah. Mic 3:Do you have plans on going smaller than that? More like a classic mobile phone? PGS: Yeah, I think it's actually quite possible. So the. So this is if you like, that the first version is this one. You can see it's about five centimeters thick. The second one, we think we can get down to about four centimeters thick, but it's otherwise the same size as PCB. We've got a student amount is going to try and work on making one that's about the size of only the screen, still probably about four centimeters thick. And we think that that's going to be quiet. It's the PCB layout. He's basically been cursing me for the last three months to try and get all the trucks routing without it needing to be a 15 layer sponge torte kind of PCB, but that should be quite possible to do it again. That's the kind of thing. Once you've got a working prototype, then the people, you're like, okay, we're going to be on the miniaturization team, too. And part of me try and make something which is even smaller. But, you know, there's always tradeoffs in these things. Again, the smaller you make it, the less solar panel you can have on the back. So that's kind of these things. It's only trying to make it as thin as we can. I think it makes a whole pile of sense. Herald: Honestly, you can make it smaller, but I don't think you should. Because when the zombie apocalypse happens, it's a communication to the weapon. PGS: Yeah. And it's less. Right. It's kind of, you know. Exactly. We can use a full sized one as well. Right. I've kind of got, you know, quite a nice solid metal keyboard in there as well. Herald: A question from the Internet, please show. Signal-Angel: So what do you think about the open moko phone? PGS: The Openmoko phone? I'll try. Remember the details about those and the whole again. Everything that's being done on all of these fronts to make fully open devices with a few black boxes as possible is fantastic. So as I say, open moko can make an M.2 form factor cellular modem that we can put in the megaphone. I would be so, so happy. But we can do a whole pile of stuff, while we are waiting for that to happen? Herald: Thank you. We actually had a talk yesterday about from one of the people behind the Openmoko. So you can watch the recording if you want. Next question, microphone one. Mic 1: Sure. Thank you for the great talk. I was interested in the Mega 65 itself. Is that available? Can can, is it sold? PGS: Yes, it's all okay. So the two most common questions, We have about the mega 65 is can I buy one now and how much does it cost? Unfortunately, the answer to both of those is we don't yet know exactly. It'll be a three digit number in euros for the price. This is pretty certain. But at the moment, our big challenge is we. This one is it's a prototype made with the vacuum for molding. So each case cost upwards of 500 euros for the case. This is not really sustainable. So we know we need to make injection molding tooling for that. And so the guys from the German part of the mega 65 team are running a fund raiser, just a little bit careful that Australian law for fundraising is a bit weird. So I am not doing any fund raising. Some people here in Germany are doing some fund raising to try and raise the money for the mall. If you look at mega65.org, you can find out what they're doing in that space and and have a look at that. Herald: Thank you. Do we have more Internet questions? Nope. Cool, cool. I think that's it. So thank you again for the wonderful talk. My pleasure. Thank you. Applause Postroll music Subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2020. Join, and help us!