WEBVTT

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So this is a hotel room,
kind of like the one I'm staying in.

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I get bored sometimes.

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A room like this has not a lot
to offer for entertainment.

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But for a hacker, it gets a little
interesting because that television

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is not like the television in your home,

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it's a node on a network. Right?

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That means I can mess with it.

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If I plug a little device
like this into my computer,

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it's an infrared transceiver,
I can send the codes that

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the TV remote might send
and some other codes.

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So what?
Well, I can watch movies for free.

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(Laughter)

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That doesn't matter to me so much,
but I can play video games too.

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Hey, but what's this?

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I can not only do this
for my TV in my hotel room,

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I can control your TV in your hotel room.

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(Laughter)

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So I can watch you
if you're checking out with one of these,

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you know, TV based registration things,

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if you're surfing
the web on your hotel TV,

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I can watch you do it.

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Sometimes it's interesting stuff.

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Funds transfer.

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Really big funds transfers.

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You never know what people
might want to do

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while they're surfing the web
from their hotel room.

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(Laughter)

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The point is I get to decide
if you're watching Disney or porn tonight.

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Anybody else staying 
at the Affinia hotel?

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(Laughter)

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This is a project I worked on
when we were trying to figure out

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the security properties of wireless
networks; it's called the "Hackerbot".

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This is a robot we've built that can
drive around and find Wi-Fi users,

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drive up to them and show them
their passwords on the screen.

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(Laughter)

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We just wanted to build a robot,

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but we didn't know
what to make it do, so -

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We made the pistol
version of the same thing.

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This is called the "Sniper Yagi".

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It's for your long-range
password sniffing action,

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about a mile away I can watch
your wireless network.

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This is a project I worked on with
Ben Laurie to show passive surveillance.

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So what it is, is a map
of the conference called

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"Computers, Freedom and Privacy".

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And this conference was
in a hotel, and what we did is we,

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you know, put a computer
in each room of the conference

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that logged all the Bluetooth traffic.

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So as everybody came and went
with their phones and laptops

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we were able to just log that,
correlate it,

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and then I can print out a map like this
for everybody at the conference.

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This is Kim Cameron,
the Chief Privacy Architect at Microsoft.

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(Laughter)

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Unbeknownst to him,

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I got to see everywhere he went.

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And I can correlate this
and show who he hangs out with

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(phone dialing)
when he got bored,

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(phone dialing)
hangs out in the lobby with somebody.

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Anybody here use cellphones?

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(Laughter)

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(Phone ringing)

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So my phone is calling -

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(Ringing)

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calling -

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Voice mail: You have 100 messages.

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Palbos Holman: Uh oh!

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VM: First unheard message -

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PH: Where do I press -

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VM: Message skipped.
First skipped message.

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PH: Uh oh!

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VM: Main menu. To listen to your -
You have pressed an incorrect key -

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You have two skipped messages.
Three saved messages.

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Goodbye.

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PH: Uh oh!
So we're in Brad's voice mail.

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(Laughter)

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And I was going to record him
a new message,

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but I seem to have pressed an invalid key,

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so we're going to move on.

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And I'll explain how that works some
other day because we're short on time.

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Anybody here used MySpace?

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MySpace users? Oh!

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Used to be popular.
It's kind of like Facebook.

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This guy, a buddy of ours Samy,
was trying to meet chicks on MySpace

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which I think is what
it used to be good for.

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And what he did is he had
a page on MySpace about him.

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It lists all your friends,
and that's how you know

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somebody's cool is that they have
a lot of friends on MySpace.

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Well, Samy didn't have any friends.

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He wrote a little bit of Javascript code
that he put in his page,

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so that whenever you look at his page

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it would just automagically
add you as his friend.

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And it would skip the whole
acknowledgement response protocol

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saying "Is Samy really your friend?"

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But then it would copy
that code onto your page,

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so that whenever anybody
looked at your page

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it would automatically add them
as Samy's friend too.

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(Laughter)

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And it would change your page
to say that "Samy is your hero."

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(Laughter)

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So in under 24 hours, Samy had
over a million friends on MySpace.

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(Laughter)

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Hey, he just finished serving
3-years probation for that.

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(Laughter)

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Even better, Christopher Abad,
this guy, another hacker,

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also trying to meet chicks
on MySpace but having spotty results.

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Some of these dates
didn't work out so well,

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so what Abad did
is he wrote a little bit of code

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to connect MySpace to Spam Assassin,
which is an open source spam filter.

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It works just like
the spam filter in your email.

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You train it by giving it some spam

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train it by giving it a little
bit of legitimate email,

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and it tries to use
artificial intelligence

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to work out the difference. Right?

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Well, he just trained it on profiles
from girls he dated and liked

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as legitimate email.

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Profiles from girls he dated
and not liked, as spam,

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and then ran it against
every profile on MySpace.

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(Laughter)

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Out spits girls you might like to date.

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What I say about Abad is, I think,
there's like three startups here.

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I don't know why we need Match.com,
when we can have Spam dating?

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You know this is innovation.

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He's got a problem, he found a solution.

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Does anybody use these - bleep -
keys for opening your car remotely?

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They're popular in, well,
maybe not Chicago, OK.

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So kids these days will drive
through a Wal-Mart parking lot

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clicking open, open, open, bloop.

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Eventually you find another
Jetta or whatever just like yours,

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maybe a different color,
that uses the same key code.

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Kids will just loot it, lock it up and go.

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Your insurance company
will roll over on you

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because there's not
evidence of a break-in.

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For one manufacturer we figured
out how to manipulate that key

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so that it will open every car
from that manufacturer.

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(Laughter)

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There is a point to be made about this
which I barely have time for,

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but it's that your car is now a PC,
your phone is also a PC,

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your toaster, if it is not a PC,
soon will be. Right?

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And I'm not joking about that.

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And the point of that is
that when that happens

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you inherit all the security
properties and problems of PC's.

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And we have a lot of them.

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So keep that in mind,
we can talk more about that later.

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Anybody use a lock like this
on your front door?

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OK, good.

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I do too.

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This is a Schlage lock.

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It's on half of the front doors
in America.

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I brought one to show you.

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So this is my Schlage lock.

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This is a key that fits the lock,
but isn't cut right, so it won't turn it.

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Anybody here ever tried
to pick locks with tools like this?

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All right, got a few,
few nefarious lock pickers.

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Well, it's for kids with OCD.

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You've got to put them in there,
and finick with them,

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spend hours getting the finesse
down to manipulate the pins.

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You know, for the ADD kids in the house
there's an easier way.

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I put my little magic key in here,

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I put a little pressure on there
to turn it, (Tapping)

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smack it a few times
with this special mallet

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and I just picked the lock. We're in.

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It's easy.

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And in fact, I don't really know
much more about this than you do.

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It's really, really easy.

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I have a keychain I made
of the same kind of key

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for every other lock in America.

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And if you're interested,
I bought a key machine

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so that I can cut these keys
and I made some for all of you guys.

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(Laughter)

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(Applause)

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So my gift to you,
come afterwards and I will show you

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how to pick a lock
and give you one of these keys

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you can take home and try it on your door.

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Anybody used these USB thumb drives?

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Yeah, print my Word document, yeah!

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They're very popular.

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Mine works kind of like yours.
You can print my Word document for me.

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But while you're doing that,
invisibly and magically in the background

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it's just making a handy backup
of your My Documents folder,

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and your browser history and cookies
and your registry and password database,

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and all the things that you might need
someday if you have a problem.

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So we just like to make these things
and litter them around at conferences.

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(Laughter)

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Anybody here use credit cards?

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(Laughter)

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Oh, good!

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Yeah, so they're popular
and wildly secure.

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(Laughter)

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Well, there's new credit cards
that you might have gotten in the mail

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with a letter explaining how
it's your new "Secure credit card".

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Anybody get one of these?

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You know it's secure because
it has a chip in it, an RFID tag,

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and you can use these in
Taxicabs and at Starbucks,

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I brought one to show you,
by just touching the reader.

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Has anybody seen these before?

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Okay, who's got one?

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Bring it on up here.

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(Laughter)

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There's a prize in it for you.

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I just want to show you
some things we learned about them.

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I got this credit card in the mail.

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I really do need some volunteers,
in fact, I need

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one, two, three, four, five
volunteers because the winners

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are going to get these
awesome stainless steel wallets

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that protect you against the problem that
you guessed, I'm about to demonstrate.

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Bring your credit card up here
and I'll show you.

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I want to try it on one of these
awesome new credit cards.

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OK.

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Do we have a conference organizer,

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somebody who can coerce people
into cooperating?

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(Laughing)

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It's by your own volition because -

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This is where the demo gets really awesome

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I know you guys have never seen -

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(Inaudible question)

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What's that?

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They're really cool wallets
made of stainless steel.

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Anybody else seen code
on screen at TED before?

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Yeah, this is pretty awesome.

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(Laughter)

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OK, great I got volunteers.

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So who has one of these
exciting credit cards?

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OK, here we go.

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I'm about to share
your credit card number

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only to 350 close friends.

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Hear the beep?

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That means someone's hacking
your credit card.

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OK, what did we get?

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Valued customer and the credit
card number and expiration date.

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It turns out your secure new
credit card is not totally secure.

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Anybody else want to try yours
while you're here?

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Man: Can you install overdraft protection?

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PH: Beep, let's see what we got?

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So we bitched about
this and AMEX changed it,

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so it doesn't show the name anymore.

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Which is progress.
You can see mine, if it shows it.

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Yeah, it shows my name on it,
that's what my Mom calls me anyway.

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Yours doesn't have it.

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Anyway, so next time you get
something in the mail

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that says it's secure, send it to me.

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(Laughter)

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Oh wait, one of these is empty, hold on.

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I think this is the one, yep, here you go.

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You get the one that's disassembled.

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All right, cool.

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(Applause)

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I still have a few minutes yet left,
so I'm going to make a couple of points.

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(Laughter)

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Oh, shit.

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That's my subliminal messaging campaign.
It was supposed to be much faster.

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Here's the most exciting slide
ever shown at TED.

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This is the protocol diagram for SSL,

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which is the encryption
system in your web browser

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that protects your credit card when you're
sending it to Amazon and so on.

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Very exciting, I know, but the point is

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hackers will attack every
point in this protocol, right?

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I'm going to send two responses
when the server's expecting one.

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I'm going to send a zero
when it's expecting a one.

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I'm going to send twice as much
data as it's expecting.

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I'm going to take twice as long
answering as it's expecting.

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Just try a bunch of stuff.
See where it breaks.

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See what falls in my lap.

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When I find a hole like that
then I can start looking for an exploit.

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This is a little more what SSL looks
like to hackers, that's really boring.

00:13:06.240 --> 00:13:10.747
This guy kills a million Africans a year.

00:13:11.031 --> 00:13:14.791
It's Anopheles stephensi mosquito
carrying malaria.

00:13:15.738 --> 00:13:17.788
Is this the wrong talk?

00:13:17.788 --> 00:13:19.403
(Laughter)

00:13:19.403 --> 00:13:23.258
This is a protocol diagram for malaria.

00:13:23.892 --> 00:13:27.477
So what we're doing in our lab
is attacking this protocol

00:13:27.477 --> 00:13:29.681
at every point we can find.

00:13:29.681 --> 00:13:32.758
It has a very complex life cycle
that I won't go into now,

00:13:32.758 --> 00:13:36.227
but it spends some time in humans,
some time in mosquitos

00:13:36.227 --> 00:13:39.467
and what I need are hackers.

00:13:39.467 --> 00:13:43.508
Because hackers have a mind
that's optimized for discovery.

00:13:43.934 --> 00:13:47.407
They have a mind that's optimized
for figuring out what's possible.

00:13:47.407 --> 00:13:49.805
You know, I often illustrate this
by saying,

00:13:49.805 --> 00:13:54.676
If you get some random new
gadget and show it to your Mom,

00:13:55.455 --> 00:13:59.245
she might say, "Well, what does this do?"
And you'd say "Mom, it's a phone."

00:13:59.245 --> 00:14:02.566
And instantly, she'd would know
exactly what it's for.

00:14:02.566 --> 00:14:05.085
But with a hacker,
the question is different.

00:14:05.085 --> 00:14:08.909
The question is,
"What can I make this do?"

00:14:09.102 --> 00:14:12.029
I'm going to take all the screws out,
and take the back off,

00:14:12.029 --> 00:14:13.984
and break it into a lot of little pieces.

00:14:13.984 --> 00:14:17.343
But then I'm going to figure out
what I can build from the rubble.

00:14:17.343 --> 00:14:21.299
That's discovery, and we need to do that
in science and technology

00:14:21.299 --> 00:14:23.439
to figure out what's possible.

00:14:23.439 --> 00:14:27.118
And so in the lab what I'm trying
to do is apply that mindset

00:14:27.118 --> 00:14:29.583
to some of the biggest
problems humans have.

00:14:29.583 --> 00:14:34.152
We work on malaria, thanks to
Bill Gates, who asked us to work on it.

00:14:34.152 --> 00:14:36.863
This is how we used to solve malaria.

00:14:36.863 --> 00:14:39.070
This is a real ad from like the 40's.

00:14:39.070 --> 00:14:43.205
We eradicated malaria in the US
by spraying DDT everywhere.

00:14:44.455 --> 00:14:48.505
In the lab what we do is a lot of work
to try and understand the problem.

00:14:48.505 --> 00:14:53.658
This is a high-speed video,
we have a badass video camera,

00:14:53.658 --> 00:14:56.293
trying to learn how mosquitos fly.

00:14:56.293 --> 00:14:59.441
And you can see that
they're more like swimming in air.

00:14:59.441 --> 00:15:01.299
We actually have no idea how they fly.

00:15:01.299 --> 00:15:03.520
But we have a cool video camera so we -

00:15:03.520 --> 00:15:05.534
(Laughter)

00:15:05.534 --> 00:15:09.245
Yeah, it cost more than a Ferrari.

00:15:09.245 --> 00:15:12.395
Anyway we came up with some
ways to take care of mosquitos.

00:15:12.395 --> 00:15:14.807
Let's shoot them down with laser beams.

00:15:14.807 --> 00:15:19.318
This is what happens when you put
one of every kind of scientist in a room

00:15:19.318 --> 00:15:21.318
and a laser junky.

00:15:21.318 --> 00:15:25.237
So people thought it was funny at first,

00:15:25.237 --> 00:15:30.076
but we figured out, you know, we can
build this out of consumer electronics.

00:15:30.076 --> 00:15:33.390
It's using the CCD from a webcam,

00:15:33.390 --> 00:15:36.590
the laser from a Blu-ray burner,

00:15:36.590 --> 00:15:40.212
the laser galvo is from a laser printer.

00:15:40.212 --> 00:15:43.220
We do motion detection on a GPU processor

00:15:43.220 --> 00:15:45.414
like you might find in video game system.

00:15:45.414 --> 00:15:47.343
It's all stuff that follows Moore's law.

00:15:47.343 --> 00:15:50.228
So it's actually not going to
be that expensive to do it.

00:15:50.228 --> 00:15:52.466
The idea is that we would put

00:15:52.466 --> 00:15:56.317
a perimeter of these laser systems
around a building or a village

00:15:56.317 --> 00:15:59.507
and just shoot all the mosquitos
on their way in to feed on humans.

00:15:59.507 --> 00:16:02.800
And we might want to do that
for your backyard.

00:16:02.800 --> 00:16:04.763
We could also do it to protect crops.

00:16:04.763 --> 00:16:06.629
Our team is right now working on

00:16:06.629 --> 00:16:09.285
characterizing what they
need to do the same thing for

00:16:09.285 --> 00:16:12.899
the pest that has wiped out
about two thirds

00:16:12.899 --> 00:16:16.477
of the Orange groves in Florida.

00:16:18.102 --> 00:16:20.719
So people laughed at first.

00:16:20.719 --> 00:16:23.441
This is a video of our system working.

00:16:23.441 --> 00:16:26.119
We are tracking mosquitos live
as they fly around.

00:16:26.119 --> 00:16:28.622
Those crosshairs are put there
by our computer.

00:16:28.622 --> 00:16:30.483
It just watches them, finds them moving

00:16:30.483 --> 00:16:34.217
and then it aims a laser at them
to sample their wing beat frequency.

00:16:34.217 --> 00:16:37.424
Figure out from that, is this a mosquito?

00:16:37.424 --> 00:16:40.325
Is it Anopheles Stephensi?
Is it female?

00:16:40.325 --> 00:16:44.912
And if all that's true then
we shoot it down with lethal laser.

00:16:44.912 --> 00:16:46.981
(Laughter)

00:16:46.981 --> 00:16:48.753
So we have this working in a lab.

00:16:48.753 --> 00:16:51.879
We're working on taking
that project into the field now.

00:16:51.879 --> 00:16:56.425
All this happens at the Intellectual
Ventures Lab in Seattle where I work

00:16:56.425 --> 00:17:01.626
and we try and take on some
of the hardest problems that humans have.

00:17:01.626 --> 00:17:03.468
This is the money shot.

00:17:03.468 --> 00:17:06.731
You can see we just burned
his wing off with a UV laser.

00:17:06.731 --> 00:17:08.849
He's not coming back.

00:17:08.849 --> 00:17:12.072
(Applause)

00:17:12.072 --> 00:17:15.874
Kind of vaporized
his wing right there, yeah.

00:17:15.874 --> 00:17:18.636
They love it.
I mean, you know.

00:17:18.636 --> 00:17:20.769
Never got called by PETA or anyone else.

00:17:20.769 --> 00:17:23.226
I mean, it's the perfect enemy.

00:17:23.226 --> 00:17:26.379
There's just no one coming
to the rescue of mosquitos.

00:17:26.379 --> 00:17:29.660
Sometimes we overdo it.

00:17:29.660 --> 00:17:32.093
So anyway, I'm going to get off stage.

00:17:32.093 --> 00:17:35.141
This is the Intellectual Ventures Lab
where I work.

00:17:35.141 --> 00:17:37.835
Basically we use every kind of scientist

00:17:37.835 --> 00:17:42.185
and one of every tool in the world
to work on crazy invention projects.

00:17:42.185 --> 00:17:43.537
Thanks.

00:17:43.537 --> 00:17:45.285
(Applause)