*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*
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