Laurent Castillo I Signing with Confidence: YOLO to Clear Signing I Ledger I Pragma San Fran 2024

[Music] with that we are ready for our next talk and for this I'd like to bring on Laur from Ledger who is the VP of architecture to tell you about all the things that they've done to improve the signing experience so please give him a big round of [Applause] applause hi everyone very excited to be here at pr San Francisco to tell you about clear signing la the architecture VP ATER and let me tell you a bit more what we have been doing to clear sign all the things on blockchains actually so but let me first start with a very very small question who in the will be comfortabletion for those who are told to say yes got to sell you right after the talk so come to see mee so now this is wrong in many many different kind of ways so basically you don't know if it's a legit operation it can ed malicious payload you don't know if you're signing an unintended transaction for for some basically you don't know what you're doing when when when you're doing something like that so this is in a Nell what we blind signing in polite company or yow when we friends and this is this is no different from actually signing a blank check so this is not something anyone will do in real life there's no reason to actually do that when you're interacting on Web e actually this is unreadable this is unpredictable and this is basically very very uns to sign and honestly we're not talking this is really an issue that is becoming more and more prevalent bigger and bigger attackers have shifted a little bit their target from actually stealing your 24 World your seed phrase which signing was one of the main attacks you could see on on on blockchains like 10 years ago to actually more and more fishing and scam attacks where they're trying to make uh you sign a wrong transaction that will empty your wallet if you're not careful about it and here put a couple of example of the kind of attacks you could see and the amounts that are behind those attacks and actually this is just small just tip of the and the number of attacks that you can see on those kind of uh on those kind of blind sign blind signing is really in the billions actually nowadays so this is really a problem we need to solve as an industry as an ecosystem and everybody needs to be very aware that we need to improve the user experience to avoid this kind of attacks for for our own end users and that's why here we are I'm here to tell you about what we call clear signing which is how can we improve this kind of this kind of user experience uh to make them really easily understandable by by end users and this is the kind of interface we want to build for anyone when they are interacting and signing a message or a transaction before broadcasting it to the blockchain so as you can see this is a transaction that is being encrypted this is actually mess that ised and display to the user in a better way with a clear intent with amounts of token that are going to be spped or authorized converted in in a unit that can be understood by the user with ticker added to the interface in the end this is an interface which is far more transparent for users far more human friendendly and actually an interf that the user can trust them to Smart decision they interacting with the blockchain so this is kind of the handal vision we have for clear signing and how we want to actually secure our end users on the blockchain but now how can we actually get there this is what I'm going to describe a little bit let me tell you a little bit about our proposal to to implement signing goes starting with a little bit of context the type of data that users had to sign on on the blockchain has evolved quite a bit only on eum but also on other blockchains from the very first transaction iNum in 2015 all the way to nowadays so we went through signing message simple very very simple string messages with the191 to actually structured messages with the i712 which is kind of becoming the de facto standard to sign messages when when when when you're interacting on Web stream to nowadays and and probably in the future E37 which is going to be the de facto way to interact with smart contract accounts and will actually introduce another another category of sign messages so at Leder weve always Tred to follow that trend and introduce clear signing for our users following all those solutions and let meoc on the last because can give bit more understanding about our reasoning and for the signing clear signing initiates that we have so we started in 202 to introduce plugins plugins were really small applications that you could develop for for your Leder device which actually passes the transaction on the device and Buil the UI Buil the display for the users to showcase to them what they are going to approve this was really nice you really powerful ui for users to explain to them what they're going to do required very specific knowledge which is eded software development which is not really associated with smart contract development or development so really it was a little bit painful to do and even more painful to maintain so not very scable and only reserve to people who really wanted to do the exercise of clear signing for their users oner devices so when we wanted to do clear signing for E 712 one year later in 2022 we switch little bit the model around and we went more for a data driven declarative approach where the goal was to actually Buil a ui from description of what the the UI should look like for the user this was a better way to actually simplify the way you describe your message and I show you an example later of what I have in mind for that and it was working really well actually but main problem it was mostly only forer devices and it was only for and so we are here to introduce the clear signing initiative which is basically let's standardize all together the way we can describe those u for hardware wallets and for any kind of wallets actually so that when you Maker you can very simply tell wallets what ui should look like for users so that in the end you can very much [Music] will see when they are actually reviewing your transaction on your your message and this is going to be a standard so that so that for us it's not going to be only Ledger but all the wallets that hopefully will support this initiative and it's going to be also data driven and declarative so it's very easy to scale to the to the whole ecosystem so before we dig a little bit into what the standards look like I want to answer one simple question that we get regularly why are bi is not enough because definitely Abi contain some information about the structure of your message and transaction the thing you want to sign actually the problem is that they are very let's say developer oriented so they have been built from the development tool from your smart contract low level code and they actually contain the description of the actual function you're calling on the blockchain and this is the kind of interface you can build when you have the Abi when you have the Abi available for your contract as you can see it's lacking quite a bit in term of clarity for your users so the function call itself is not really a clear intent of what you want to do here it's actually a swap for those who know the the paraswap contract uh the tokens you want to swap is actually split between an amount in the base unit which is completely unreadable for for most end users the the erc2 token talking about is actually the address on the left here so I I put you give you the challenge to find which token it actually corresponds to when you're signing the transaction so all of this make it very unreadable for the end users and it's barely better than actually the HH of the message you want to sign actually so it's as difficult to review for most users as the HH would have been for for anyone so here what we'reosing is to simply complement the data that is in thei that gives add exactly it should display the the data that you're actually reviewing and that going to sign so as an example here we can I can tell you that basically you're telling the wallet that there's an amount parameter in your transaction where where you can actually find token which responds to this amount and displing which label you should display it to the user and you can actually tell in my message these are the field that are required these are the field that are just optional and you can skip if you want to compact a little bit the interface and these are the fields that you can simply exclude because they make no sense for the user to review because they are purely protocol parameters for instance so this is the basic idea of ​​the standard we're proposing code ERC 77 sas to ui users when they toevw theirtion and a little bit the philosophy we had in mind when we created this standard is for the standard to be human readable this one is fairly important because we want the standard to be very easy to write for the apps developer and the best tool is still a text editor for anyone actually to write their file so standard is actually built so that you can simply write the JSON description with a simple text editor you don't need any additional advanced tools to write your your interface your interface file we thought about it to be lightweight and efficient because we have in mind that this standard should be actually useful for any wallets not only software wallets that have a lot of power to to pass things but also forware Wallet that are far more resource constra and you need to be a bit more Smart let's say in the type of things you do on our because you have a lot of constraint in of computational power and memory you have we want the standard to be flexible and extensible first extensible to other type of metadata and data you want to sign so as I mention what's coming next is abstraction abstraction hasn't really standardiz yet the format of the user operation at least the signature of the user operation so we need to be flexible so that in the future we can cover with standard those kind of use cases to and we definitely intend also to target other blockchains with this methodology with this way of clear signing so that actually in the end whatever blockchain you use whatever use case you have you can use an interface that is far more understandable and as I mentioned it's data driven declarative so that it's a simple file to write for the app developer and and not a full development environment that they need to Tol signingers this this is basically the main philosophy we have behind this clear singing standard and today I'm happy to to tell you that we have released quite a few pieces of this clear signing initiative at Leder where where we wanted to have an end to end environment in which you can actually test standard play with real devices so on the creation side weve weve released the standard as an ERC so it's ERC 7730 that is available on the EUMC repository i invite you to contribute to theum magician discussion so that we can actually release it as an official ERC weve also relased in open source some editing tools which which will give away for the developer to actually visualize the end of their standard F so you just write the file and you will see on simulated screen from real device what it will look like the middle piece is actually the curation part so it's going to be very important for wallets to have easy mechanism to curate thosec 7730 file because we don't want uh to expose our end users to any kind of the apps that might scam them or actually sort them so for that we've done basically two things we have created the public registry for under ler control but hopefully in the medium to long term under community control where they can just register their their theirc 7730 file this this will enable giving transparency and discoverability to the industry on which kind of file are available and on Leder side we have actually started creating all the tools to curate those fil so that we can really give our users assurance that what they are signing is really trustable and has really been controlled by someone actually so we have we have a central repository where we we take all those files and we convert them in a format which is signed by Ledger and which is trusted by Ledger device and on the integration side we've done everything so that we can actually use on Leder device V standard file and you can actually see the transformation of the UI on ler devices the first one being icesas recently ending ofay that enable you to as a wallet to integrate signature of any kind OFS with fair easily with with this ERC 7730 F and we actually also implemented the support on ourices part to support on the device itself the building of the UI thanks to our new standard so with all that we have fairly comprehensive set of tools which enables trying these standards on a device and we hope to make it real far more adopted by the industry both by other wallets but also by the app developers to improve the the user their user interface and can you help us doing that actually so it's simple actually if you are the developer um please write your ERC 77 file it's just one simple j file to control and and and build the UI for and users on any wallets actually in the future publish it to the registry and actually at the E global that is coming we will be there to help you do that if you're really interested in trying that in real life and for wall just use our latest Leder device signer kit so that you can actually clear sign with any Ledger hardware Wallet so it's very easy to integrate and you will be able to use Ledger hardware signers anywhere in your wallet to clear sign any transaction and uh just to give you a little bit of what what we have in mind for the future so 2024 was mostly about creating the basis for this clear signing standard creating the basic capabilities for our devices to to clear sign using this new methodology in Q we really want to accelerate the adtion ofard so we are being in many different conferences doing the same talk and trying to convince people to to adopt this new methodology to do clear signing we we're also going to release the final form of both the standard and the support of the standard on our devices and a new form for all the all the SDKs support l that will make it very [Music] andieldices and in the future next year on we really want to tle eum to the problematic of Account abstraction right now account abstraction is very very fragmentedum there many different formats and basically we have to any kind of any new smart contract have blch of this as you can imagine for for a company doing this is really problematic doesn't really scale we won't be able to tackle all the all the smart contract out there so we really want to improve that situation by bringing to the table stand that will kind of unify the way we can we can clear sign and toos Canly to other blockchains so that you are not limited to a single blockchain as role so here we are and hopefully you will help us build this better clear signing situation honestly for the whole ecosystem so that we can all the ofishing ands for users and going to be to very for everyone toribute theort we made it as little as possible and for a very big reward which is actually making the life of your of your users far better and far more safe which is one of the biggest problem we have currently in the ecosystem the trust that people might have when they do that so we put here few resources that you can go and online yourself if you to as I to get some more contex more help how you can do that just to say and a chat for thanks a lot for listening to me today and hope to see you soon later [Applause] [Music]