Human Key Infrastructure for Human Flourishing - Bangkok 2024

[Music] uh how's the sound is the sound okay all good cool and testing my setup over here hi everybody uh my name is Shy I'm one of the founders at holim foundation and yeah really excited to be with this group of people today I think that there are really important conversations occurring right now the technology of Civic infrastructure um uh uh politics philosophy and just apply technology in general so uh one thing that I want to share with you today is something we've been thinking about for a little while and we think still requires a little bit of thought and development but uh it's it's a novel idea right based off of a concept that has been thought about and published about for a very very very long time um and that's this idea of a natural digital right so it seems something that should be intuitive it it seems like it's something that should exist already but it's not really quite out there yet um there really isn't a lot of academic or intellectual uh uh contributions or or work that's exploring these ideas explicitly although there's definitely a very rich intellectual tradition so I think it's it's when we're talking about these topics I think it's also important to ground them in the shared experiences of different uh people or communities and different folks might have different definitions so you know when I think of a of a right when I think of a a natural rights uh certain things come to mind and I would love to ask you guys you know feel free to to shout out what what what would you call a natural right peace freedom Liberty speech water water love and and what what really makes these rights natural what makes them really something that can be guaranteed that are inable that are Universal uh that can be considered uh irrevocable by any any institution um that's something that's a big open question and something that um let me grab my clicker here um something that um something that thinkers have been thinking about for for a really long time but I want to present a very general framework for what I want to cover today as related to the things we care about uh uh altogether which is how do we uh fund public goods infrastructure how do we come around Commons like water uh Global Commons around peace uh around freedom to information and access uh to information and free speech and so one thing I really want to explore is this idea that uh all of these com Commons that we discuss in in these relationships whether it's for Earth or whether it's for political stuff or or Civic stuff uh these are all going to be rooted in the relationships that people have with each other uh their environment and with the power structures that exist whether those power structures are other people or power structures that are intrinsic to Nature and these ideas stem back to philosophers like Thomas aquinus right who in a lot of ways was a radical at his time in his time where he basically was like okay well you know the natural law is this idea that anything that is natural to humans is considered ethical and what's considered uh uh natural is it's based off of reason so if we can reason and re uh uh rationalize our actions and behavior then these are ethical uh these These are ethical guaranteed Universal rights or actions or affordances there's a lot of problems with that right as we've seen in the 20th century and and today as well um but Thomas aquinus really he how should I say he uh made this relative he he set these natural rights relative to the existing power structure as he saw in his time which is appealing to the mysteries of the universe and the stuff that you really can't explain in uh you know what was that back like around uh the Byzantine Empire times um which is uh like like yeah like he appealed to theological principles he was like all right well there's supreme law which is decided by God and whatever God decides we deal with that uh if God decides that you know water is a right then we'll have that if God takes it away then so be it uh if God decides that there's animals for us to use for food or farming or you know subsistence Etc then that's great but if God to punish us well you know then our natural rights are always going to be sub you know relative to that so you know when we think of um so so when we think of these like natural rights there's always this uh relative placing of them to power um now what's interesting is when we start thinking about um thank you [Music] okay I think that's that's just a little little music part of the show but um so yeah so when we're thinking of uh Power and how these rights might be instantiated and uh what kind of like how what happens when you actually Grant people rights you're granting them power and by granting them power you're granting them also agency and that agency can interact right in complex ways that drives decisions of uh collectives of people right where the collective has a top- down feedback on individual agents and agents can also individually Inspire change or push uh push push the group into a in in in a direction um so yeah so you know as we were like as some folks you know shared with us like okay you know uh um access to information peace water uh things that we all take for granted sure they're natural maybe we can reason about them we can rationalize that these rights should be available for everyone right uh that they are intrinsic to human nature we can appeal to lock John Lock and say you know everyone has a right to Liberty to Freedom has the right to um uh to ownership Etc but no government can take that away just because I said so because rationally it makes sense but unless those rights are instantiated and enforceable in some form or manner they really aren't they don't have much utility right so great we can like reason about them but if we can't actually enforce natural rights then what's the point right we'll just have to go through these Cycles uh where we ReDiscover them after periods of increased totalitarian control and reaction force reactionary forces against that and um that's not necessarily ideal so that's the overall framework and what I want to share with you guys today is how we can take Natural Rights Make Them digital and through cryptography make them enforceable and how does that work well cryptography is our way some it's kind of a relatively new if you look at it in the history of you know human intellectual tradition it's a relatively new tool that lets us harness the power of entropy and Randomness in the universe to create things that are relatively stable that we can always refer to that uh are unique right we can prove uniqueness with cryptography we can also show whether something has ever changed at any point in time or deviated from its original state uh we can verify whether something is authentic or not and we can also show how over time it has changed between discrete States so this makes it really really great for coordination between people that need to prove that they're communicating with specific you know a very specific spe person or interacting with a very specific procedure algorithm or piece of software um and because uh because of this it's really great uh you know because of this um it's really great for like implementing deterministic I guess you could think of it as like uh uh ways of like deterministic implementations of Rights right when you can build software with specific ethical principles in mind that are based off of the same reasonal uh uh rational uh deduction of Reason about why we should have certain affordances or rights and instantiate those into the code so at Holm Foundation we're making digital human rights real and the way that we're doing this is by granting every human a cryptographic key that only they can control and we're going to show how this can be used to unlock uh digital rights for privacy security ownership and most importantly personhood in a digital in a digital sphere so we have a couple different protocols I want to walk you through that unlock some portions of this and it's by no means a complete uh a complete coverage of of of what's needed to really take us there but we start with keys we add security to those keys and then from those two we can generate uh identity that grants us the ability to prove uh uh uh Civic status uh to prove other facts about ourselves so let's start off with human Keys what why are they keys and why are they human uh so they're keys because with these quote unquote Keys you can unlock digital experiences software ownership uh that are uniquely attributable just to you or the permissions that you've delegated or approved of in the past so and we call them human keys because we think of we think of these Keys um as very different from how typical cryptographic Keys work today which are derived from Randomness and that's because these keys are often used for like you know communication between servers uh to like authenticate an email or to make sure that uh the WhatsApp message you're sending really is coming from that phone number so Randomness is great when you're putting this stuff out into the back end and you really don't care what the user experience looks like and you can actually store those keys on a server somewhere and like actually somebody else is in control of that right but when we want to when we want to make these Keys something that are as um let's see how should I say are as natural or intuitive uh you know for for every single person as say like um double clicking something or turning a door knob right some sort of naturalistic human behavior we have to think about ways how we can make those keys and default ownership of that person at any point in time even though they might not like have the key on their on their like physically on their personhood so so the way we think about it is we can derive human keys from humanfriendly data so human data would be things like what you are uh it could be like your face how you move your Gates your uh Biometrics it could be what you have it could be something like very special that you carry with you all the time uh like a key like a actual Hardware key or it could be some other piece of like say uh entropy generating uh artifact like a like a special quartz crystal that defract light in a certain C way it could also be what you know it could be like a stable thought pattern that only you know that you could present to some uh device or authentication Service that you could use to derive this key so what this means is as long as you have a system that you can interact with you can present this human data to it and uh derive this key no matter where you are no matter what your situation is so this system we call mishy Network it's a decentralized network built as an actively validated service on igen layer that's a lot of catch uh buzzwords and catchphrases but basically what this is It's a system for incentivizing people to run infrastructure that can run this service with complete privacy uh completely oblivious to what data they're actually processing um but the ability basically to they have this incentive to run this infrastructure so whenever somebody needs to create a key that service is always available um so great we can create Keys that's really really great if we can create keys from individuals and those keys are persistent and you can grab them at any time they're recoverable you can't lose them that's great but it's only one piece of the puzzle the other piece is how do we um how do we actually use these keys in a way that is secure and safe and it's a really difficult proc problem right like I mean if you follow anything in uh the decentralized world space you know that whenever you give people ownership of their own Keys you invite them to become an attack point for malicious or Bad actors whether it's Bots or scammers or frauders or nation states that try to extract that key or convince you to use your key in ways that you shouldn't so there is a solution to this and I think it's something that's been around for a little while but hasn't seen adoption quite yet and that's called two-party computation or 2pc the way 2pc works is the human key or any key really uh is just one half of an authentication scheme so on one side you derive your key from a a resilient decentralized Network and then when you want to sign or do something with your key you query another service or network to to basically double check your work so the way that it works without going into too much detail is now you have these two separate decentralized networks that are non-cl usive that can't interact with each other in any way we're able to derive a key from one of these networks and then with the other network we can Implement things like uh transaction simulation or things like AI assisted prediction of the action that you're performing when you sign that transaction or when you authenticate or click a button on the internet with that key um in ways that you can't see because all of the you know sophistication of the internet is often boiled down to like really simple ux patterns and we don't really know what's happening on the back end so the ability to to second check what you're actually doing to check the Providence of the code that you're interacting with that's something we can put you know we could put it on another server but even better if we could put it into another Network that can check to make sure if that server is always behaving properly or if other nodes in that Network are always behaving properly and so all of these things come together um into uh a very elegant user interface that we've designed that can be embedded anywhere so this is how we get human Keys into every single application on the Internet by providing a very simple if frame that in a few lines of code can be embedded on any on any website any application and that abstracts away a lot of these issues without sacrificing security because we're implementing this 2pc scheme and once we have this elegant UI once we have this way of securely and privately deriving these keys that we can't lose that we can use on a day-to-day basis we can build identity atives on top of that so we can do things like taking a passport tapping it to our phone and without any permission asides from getting the passport in the first place prove our Civic status or prove our unique personhood that's just the tip of the iceberg so we're really interested and motivated and I should say like absolutely uh uh crazy about this idea where the intrinsic Humanity that defines us should be where we root our security when interacting with digital systems and we won't stop until we get to a point where we feel we can Implement uh actual software or protocols where digital rights are instantiated into their base you know OS into their base specifications and where decentralized networks can provide a sort of resilience for these hardened digital rights that are truly inable that are truly Universal and fundamental so yeah that's a lot to take in uh if this is interesting to you or if this kind of gets you thinking about some stuff there's tons of ways to get involved with this project whether you're a builder a funer an aid organization uh come talk to us we're really interested in what you have to say and you can check out and learn more about us at hm. thank [Applause] you all right do we have time for one question from the audience yes have to sh that please yeah hold up uh thank you really great talk um yeah it feels to me like you're in a a similar sort of space but tackling a different problem to like ZK proofs and that kind of that kind of world and I'm just curious like what sort of Integrations you're interest looking at or or if there's yeah any work in that area sorry of course thank you uh yeah so we yeah we're pretty wide and the way that we're thinking about is building really base infam that uh can underscore like just really root the security and Trust assumptions of specific use cases so uh we actually just concluded a hackathon with the funding the commons Builder residency and we were really interested in folks that are building novel ways of thinking about how do we issue with privacy uh and and and robustness um a universal personhood credentialing system where no matter where you are where you're from what's your history whether you have government IDs or not or have a government even can you still prove some Bas level facts that can qualify you as like a base digital citizen um I think that stuff is really cool and then on top of that in general like Unstoppable Civic infrastructure so Civic infra that no matter what happens no matter where you are in the world that you can still participate in Collective decision- making with other people that are part of your group I think are really cool use cases all right one more round of applause for shotti thank you so much can we get Chris on the stage [Music]