Hyperledger Foundation Media & Entertainment SIG, 6 Apr 2021

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From YouTube: Verizon Full Transparency Initiative

Description

A presentation from Hyperledger's Media and Entertainment Special Interest Group on April 6, 2021 about Verizon's Full Transparency Initiative, a blockchain-based system to transparently track all changes made to official news releases in their Corporate Newsroom. This was the first bold step towards expanding the adoption of this open-sourced system across brands and media entities.

More about Verizon's transparency work is at: https://www.verizon.com/about/news/transparency-technology

And if you're interested in using blockchain in media and entertainment use cases, feel free to join the Media and Entertainment Special Interest Group at: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/MESIG/

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A

Hi welcome everybody to another invited talk from the hyperledger and media entertainment, special interest group for those of you who are new much, as the name of the group suggests, we're looking at the possible benefits for both the worlds of media and entertainment through the hyperledger block, lane blockchain platform and today, speaking directly to these issues, our three guests, who are all part and parcel of verizon's full transparency initiative.

A

More specifically, that's jason, small and dante pachella directly from verizon and joining them is hunter prenderga, perendo, gast of beggy pardon from mad hive, so those those guys together will give us an introduction to their collaborative work and perhaps even to the broader initiative of citizen verizon, which is a very, very uh wide-ranging socio-economic and civic initiative with a global reach.

A

So thank you very much to all three of you for coming. Thank you equally to everybody. Who's joining us today, either for the first time or for a repeat visit, and you guys it's over to you.

B

Great, thank you so much. um I'm really excited to be here. I'm jason small, we'll get to introductions individually as we go along, um so dante and hunter will be presenting at different points in this presentation, but I'm going to go ahead and kick it off here by sharing my.

B

B

uh So great to be speaking with you folks, I'm jason small. I sit in corporate communications at verizon and I'm extraordinarily extraordinarily lucky to be part of this initiative.

B

It's not often a brand does something like this uh just a little bit of background, so I'm going to set up the why we did this and a little bit of the what it is and then hunter will go into the how it works and dante will follow up with some other great things that we haven't even actually shared in the past, that I think you guys will be interested to learn about what verizon is doing um so.

B

My role in this about 18 months ago, as a corporate communications, professional and our team uh and within verizon, we wanted to figure out how to um embody the the brand uh purpose, which is um to be innovative and trustworthy. And so we wanted to do something different with our communications.

B

And when we looked at the landscape a year and a half ago and the options with technology, um we looked at eight different options and the one that we're going to share with you today, based on blockchain, led the pack for a lot of good reasons.

B

So just a little bit of the setup here and the context within which we made this decision. um What you're looking at right here is a scatter plot of bad state actors and the the red areas on here are actually the hashtags that they're creating the conversations and topics they're creating now this bird's eye view of these six bad state actors shows the prowess and social media of how they can conduct themselves and operate so that they can generate the narrative that benefits them.

B

The scary part about this and how it's evolved- and many of you may already know this- is that they've now gotten a lot more sophisticated and to the point where they can hack a cms, publish a new story on a legitimate website and before it's taken down, amplified and social using their prowess.

B

That's scary, for a lot of reasons you you can obviously tell how fast true excuse me how fast uh fake news travels uh than truth, based on the stat. You see here, um and this threat keeps evolving. So it's harder to chase these down the way they did exist in social and now that it's even more sophisticated and it looks like it's coming from a credible source, it's even more scary.

B

um I'll also add to that um that we, this is an evolving threat, so, as you can see in the center here, this is a recent news story in early march, so evolving from a let's say, a news organization, a media entity into the brand space. It gets a lot more scary in terms of how it could impact stock price. So it's an elevated uh sense of threat here and it and it continues to um to increase. We as a brand aren't positioning our solution as the s as the solution.

B

For all of this, in fact, I'm just setting the stage for how the veracity of content is under assault, and this is one step towards how we can get back to a more trustworthy and transparent way of communicating to society at general. So we as a company, want to help try to fix this at a societal level, not just selfishly in terms of what's in it for our brand, and so we've built what we're going to share with you in an open source manner.

B

To get to that, we we want to create something that can be used to better societ to better society at large, not just our brand itself. We set out to create a new standard in trust and transparency, to be clear. Our primary objective for this was for brand reputation, and that means how how many other brands and media entities can we get to participate in what it is we created set aside any revenue or product opportunities here, because that was this is coming from the corporate communications group.

B

Now, obviously, there are, uh there are some profitable uh directions. We could take this, and so we've been working with the right folks. We've had a lot of inbound interest after we launched this and we're working with other third parties to discuss how this could evolve in a way that solves for all, not just what we're trying to do so. The solution that I'm sharing with you isn't just for brands.

B

It could also be for media entities and you'll you'll see how it works in just a minute here, but just a little bit more on the background of what it took to get here so 2019, we had eight ideas, as I shared.

B

um We had to do a lot of discovery to find the right partners to work with massive documentation for a brand like verizon, to undertake something like this from a risk and compliance level incorporating all of the right stakeholders, the security checks that we need, the privacy impact assessments and all of those things and I'm happy to say we stuck with it, and it takes a really solid set of leadership and a culture to be able to do this and I'm proud to say.

B

I work at a place where we did so we launched this back in october as a result. Through the end of last year, uh we had attention from forbes and lots of other uh lots of other parties um and news amplification.

B

I think it was uh over a hundred different news stories that were generated, we're proud of that, but we're not done, and so um one of the reasons we're here today to share this all with you is- is to keep getting this message out there, the stakeholders that we had to engage to get this right.

B

Some of the smartest folks within verizon, I'm fortunate I've been working with dante, pachella who's on this call for 18 months now on this project um and had the right guidance inside the business to help make this happen um as and as well, we've partnered with uh matt hive and that's hunter prendergast, who will present shortly here on the blockchain piece of this, but going back to the big picture here. The goal here is what, if society had a new indicator for trust.

B

So, just like, we see https and you know, there's a certificate there to provide a secure transaction and, if you're, looking at a social media profile, we need trust indicators so that you know that this is a confirmed profile for a specific, celebrity or public figure.

B

What if we could do that for content, so we created full transparency to try to get us there and it has. This is version one by the way, and it's just on our website I'll cover uh the pieces of content that that um we apply it to but it for uh for other third parties. It could apply to corporate newsrooms at other major brands or to media entities as I shared earlier.

B

So how does it work? This is for official news releases. Only we don't track other.com pages. We don't track articles that are not official news releases. We wanted to put a stake in the ground to say when we make an announcement, if we change it, we we are now forced to be transparent because of the nature of this technology, and you can go and verify that, so we don't track images, videos and certain other.

B

I would say immaterial markup, but significant changes to copy and headlines. All of that is tracked. So, as you see here, we change the headline and we track that and showcase it in the version. History of the news, release and I'll show you how that works in just a moment.

B

To summarize how our time, stamping works and the way in which we push this information to blockchain. Excuse me, our timestamps are generated every time. Someone goes into our publishing system, which is drupal and clicks publish, so it could be 10 changes in one single uh publication. Excuse me in one single push, and that gives it one time stamp and then you'll see 10 pieces marked up within the news release or if we did, those 10 changes and publish them all individually.

B

You would see 10 time stamps on on the right-hand rail, which I'll show you in just a moment. We also do these in a an efficient way in terms of how our team works. So in corporate communications and news releases, when we publish a release, we know that most of the changes will occur statistically within the first two hours. We still surface 100 of those changes. We just put them into a more friendly user interface by making it a parent-child relationship. So in the first two hours we may make 10 changes.

B

Those will collapse as child to one parent time stamp so that you could see what the changes were, but it's not um but it, but it makes it a lot more condensed and a lot more user friendly when you're reviewing the information within the news release history commenting so what we wanted to be able to do is contextualize these changes. Obviously there are changes we may make that if at face value it needs more context.

B

We want to be able to do that, taking our cues from existing tools out there that allow you to do that in markup for different documents. We added the ability to comment on a timestamp. So if we make a change, we can contextualize that and then, in terms of our historical releases, we've had uh more than 12 000 news releases since the year 2000 and all of those are in our database. We did not retroactively put those all on blockchain.

B

What we did was start with october 20th and the rest are what we call archived and we created an indicator uh in our design and in our copy to show clearly which pieces are and are not tracked, and if it goes down, we do have the ability to surface automatically a notice for folks that um it is actively uh being addressed um and the the user is aware of that. As they're reviewing our news release, we expect to have rolling changes.

B

In fact, if we didn't have anything to lose here or anything to risk it would it's really inconsequential and at face value looks insignificant. So we have changes. If you look back through the 120 plus news releases we published since um the end of october. Our news releases do have changes and they are transparent and you can see what we changed and when so, we didn't go into this thinking, we're going to have a perfect record and have nothing at risk and that's evident in the releases that are live today.

B

So what I wanted to do here for a moment before I turn it over to hunter. I hope that's explains a little bit of the. Why, behind uh the reason verizon did this, I just want to show you a little bit more of the what specifically how this works on our website. So I'm just going to pull up the screen here, I'm going to show you two different examples. This first example on my screen is showing you a news release with no changes, so this was just published this morning over here.

B

On the right hand, side, it says no updates, because we've made no effective changes to this and then, of course, we have a little a little blurb about the initiative and a page where you can go to learn more and uh explains more about the entire initiative, along with a white paper, etc. So, as I scroll down through, you could see, there's no material changes and no updates listed here. Shifting to a piece excuse me to a news release that does have changes.

B

The difference here is on the right-hand rail you'll, see view changes, and that indicates there is a record created on blockchain. So the default view for the news release is clean for all of our journalists and visitors and shareholders.

B

When I click view changes a right-hand rail pops out, this is also mobile, responsive and, and the user interface on mobile does reflect this, but in a slightly easier way to digest what you see here is a time stamp for every single time. We've updated this news release going back to the original version, so all I do is click on it and I can scroll down and see. This is the original that was published and, as I work through the different time, stamps and click on them, it has.

B

It has the ability to anchor down to and scroll to whatever the change material change was, and our markup is represented in a really intuitive way. Just like you would see essentially in google docs, where new text is highlighted in gray and uh removed or edited text does have a strike through.

B

As you see up here, we changed tropical storm to hurricane, and so it's uh self-evident in the way that we've crafted a user interface in the design, and then I can go back to the latest version and I can even dismiss the box on the right hand side. So that's the demo of how the product works again. It is not. um It is not on 100 of all content on verizon.com, only our official news releases so anything that falls under this category news releases.

B

We do have other information that we publish that's general content or marketing, oriented dot com, page static.com pages. We do not use it there, it's only on our official news releases. um So with that shared with you guys, I'm excited to turn this over to hunter prendergast. I'm going to stop sharing my screen here just a moment I'll.

B

Let hunter introduce himself and a little bit about his background, but just for awareness um a little bit of a setup here when verizon first started this initiative, we had to choose and select carefully to find the right partner to help us implement the blockchain piece of this, and so I'm excited to share with you. The relationship we have with madnet has been great ever since, and uh hunter will take it from here to share with you. What's what's under the hood for you.

B

C

Excellent, thank you very much jason. I appreciate you um introducing me and let me get my screen share pulled up here so that.

C

C

Laid out correctly.

C

I'm actually going to stop the screen share and do one more. I apologize. Everyone just want to make sure that I don't have to look up at a weird angle. While I am.

C

C

Okay, can everyone see my presentation correctly? Yes,.

B

Yes, we got you there hunter. Thank you.

C

All right, thank you, jason, so my name is hunter prendergast, I'm the vice president of engineering for madhya, as jason had said, uh I was the lead tech, uh technical or I was the lead engineer who stood behind the technical implementation of the cryptographic protocols, standing behind the full transparency initiative, um and today what I'll be discussing is a little bit of the nitty-gritty details of what those cryptographic algorithms are and how they actually operate.

C

I'm not going to cover everything today for obvious reasons, it's more material than we have time to cover, but I wanted to highlight what was the general overview of how these protocols operate and then go into a few very important sub components that speak to the eventuality of these protocols and wait the way that they may be leveraged in future implementations, as well as an overview of what this stack actually looks like the system is set up, such that full transparency operates as the non-repudiation uh layer that uh leverages a thing called crypto rtb, crypto rtb is a protocol that comes out of ad ledger.

C

It was originally implemented as a means to provide non-repudiation and integrity claims against machine to machine interaction within the advertising stack. This protocol was extended and afforded the extra functionality that was necessary to make verizon's project within full transparency operate inside of the existing infrastructure provided by this public key infrastructure system.

C

In order to minimize the lift in order to build the full transparency system and behind this whole uh protocol stack is the actual blockchain and we'll go into more detail about what each one of these sub components does shortly as a slightly more in-depth view of the architecture that stands behind the system, the front end that jason was just presenting essentially operates by interacting with the blockchain, as well as the ad ledger identity provider system through a transparent software as a service api.

C

This is a simple abstraction that allows their system to interact with the underlying services without having to care or differentiate between the different layers of functionality uh that are the actual public key infrastructure versus the underlying blockchain itself uh and then at the very bottom. What you'll see is that the ethereum root of trust?

C

This is a reference back to the fact that the mad network essentially snapshots its uh state back to the ethereum network as a means of holding the mad network itself accountable as it progresses through the chain and so map network is itself a layer. Two blockchain solution on the ethereum blockchain to go into more detail about what each one of those sub components actually does from the previous slide, we can say that verizon's, full transparency tool is a non-repudiation and data integrity tool.

C

It means that once something has been claimed in the public domain, it cannot be unclaimed so to speak um and the that integrity, meaning that once it's been claimed, it is apparent that it has uh been claimed and that has not been modified.

C

uh Since then, the ad ledger crypto rtb layer in the middle, that is the protocol, essentially acts as the jwt based identity provider, pki and then the underlying blockchain operates as essentially a time stamping service, as well as what is a rough mapping to what we would call in a traditional public key infrastructure technology as the online certificate status protocol or certificate transparency.

C

How these rough mappings apply will be a little bit more apparent shortly, but these are just general kind of um analogous mappings. I won't say that they're perfectly one for one.

C

What's actually stored in the blockchain within any given within any given entity's account space in the blockchain, so to speak, such as verizon, you would have a certificate that essentially has a link back to its entire certificate chain inside of the blockchain, and this is the source of proof of identity.

C

Inside of the system that ties back to a single root of trust anchor and that root of trust anchor is the uh ad ledger: crypto rtb pki, with respect to the actual article data, uh how this non-repudiation and data integrity guarantees are proven on chain has to do with the section at the bottom of the screen here, where each article is essentially stored in a linked list, and so for each article that gets stored.

C

There is a head that gets stored and it points to the maximum revision number for a given article and then each node is, respectively, a new article revision in the history of a given article, and so by going to the head and then iterating backwards, you can effectively walk the complete history of a given article inside of the blockchain.

C

In addition to those objects that are written directly into the blockchain in order to extend the functionality of the system such that, it also allows verification to entities that exist in an environment. That's not directly able to parse the blockchain or have access to it, such as resource constrained environments, think mobile phones, other things of that nature.

C

An independent proof, object is also constructed. That is a modification of the traditional json web token, and so the header of these objects essentially contains the parsing information and the root of trust proof the certificate chain.

C

If you will inside of the claim sections of these jwts, we communicate the important information of who, when the hash, so essentially what revision number and then uris, where those uris reference where the actual underlying article data itself may be referenced, and then the footer is, of course, signature and these jwts are signed by verizon using a key that is referenced inside of the certificate that is ref or that is registered on the magnet blockchain.

C

I wanted to highlight one specific component out of these jwts. That speaks very much to the future. uh Iteration and capabilities of this system is the hash, especially the hash itself is not done in the traditional way of simply taking all of the data associated with release and hashing it as a blog, rather than doing it in this simplistic manner.

C

We went with a slightly more complex implementation.

C

The idea here was that, if you wanted to be able to prove say a sub quote or a subsection of an article, we wanted that to be trivial instead of having to prove an entire article at once, and the manner in which we're actually able to do this is that, rather than simply hashing all of the data in one go, we take the data and we feed it through a chunking algorithm, and so once we have the data chunked out, we then put it into a merkle tree and we use the root hash of the merkle tree as the hash inside of those jwt objects, as well as the hash that gets written into the blockchain.

C

What this allows is that we can create a thing called the merkle range proof against the section of the article or the associated content that we wish to form a proof against and that we can, instead of providing just the original jwt that was uh issued by in this instance, verizon.

C

We can change out one simple field and claims, which is the hash itself for a proof of inclusion against the uh merkel range proof that we're just discussing, and what this allows is that a third party may form a proof against the original jwt, that's issued by verizon um and is provably associated with them in the blockchain through the pki, and that this uh proof may be formed.

C

This proof that can be formed non-interactively can then be issued into a third-party context, so some other environment other than just the verizon front, end so to speak, and you could still cryptographically prove um all of the associated information without having to actually have all of the original content. So you could effectively prove a quote: had originated from a specific entity inside of a specific article, and you could tie that back to a specific revision of that article.

C

And you could do all of this non-interactively, based on the set of information that was already formed in the original presentation of proofs from the actual protocol itself.

C

This is honestly one of the really exciting things that we.

C

Want to see you know extended and used in a lot of different ways, because speaking back to some of the points that jason was talking about, being able to diminish the ability of an individual to communicate, false information in social media or other places has an immense benefit to society, and we think that this is at least a mechanism by which this could potentially be addressed.

C

This is the end of the technical uh components that I wanted to address today, so uh I'll obviously be answering questions about the technology at the end, um as well as dante and jason, but for now I'll pass over the microphone to dante and I'll. Allow you to uh begin your presentation.

D

Thanks hunter thanks, thanks jason.

D

So as hunter and jason reviewed, the current system handles uh whole text articles hunter covered. Some of the uh advanced features that we want to the the sub quote uh aspect we're also looking at doing other forms of content, including images. So we have a prototype. It's just not incorporated into the full transparency system at this stage, but it's a future effort that we want to do so.

D

The prototype um you can easily have from the from the production device into the network in our prototype, we're actually covering to the point of creation or the point of image capture. So this could be a a camera, a video camera or a laptop or mobile phone, we're leveraging a secure enclave or a secure element if it's uh lte or 5g, enabled and we're holding the private key in the secure enclave and doing a sign request for the transit for the blockchain transaction.

D

So we take week the device captures the raw photo sends the request to be signed by the by the key and then uh has the hash, metadata and thumbnail uh signed, and that transaction goes into a web front end and from the web front end. It gets deposited to the blockchain registry once it's filed into the registry, then a registry proof is sent back to the device.

D

So now the device has the the registry proof and location, and that could then be used in a subsequent publish of that uh piece of content.

D

So we can also extract other key image characteristics as needed. We could do like exif data or other publishing information. uh We can run multiple hash methods against that that piece of content- and we can even do some uh timestamp and anonymizing geolocation.

D

uh We can do some anonymizing on the identity of the individual or the device or the individual operating the device or the device itself.

D

And then on the client side after the the piece of content is registered, then on the on the client side, it's pretty simple to do a verification against that registry, because we have that uh registry proof in the transaction location. So the client can use that data to query the registry and verify the proof of uh that original content at a station.

D

The other thing that can be done is even independent of having that proof. The hash could be generated for that piece of content and that hash can be submitted to the registry and have a lookup performed on it. And then the registry can return back the thumbnail and the the information of that original attestation and can say uh yes.

D

This is the this content was registered with with this hash, and this is the uh accompanying data, including the thumbnail and then, if, if the hash is not located, then it returns back a false to the application, and then the user knows that um you know to be wary of this content uh because there's no matching registry information for it.

D

So that's that's a quick rundown of the of the content attestation form and then, as I say, we hope to incorporate that in the near future into the full transparency service. Thank you with that. We can now take questions.

B

And I'll, uh thank you, dante and hunter um just wanted to add to that before we turn back over you david to possibly coach the questions through. um Thank you for those bearing with us. You have a mixture of expertise on here I sit. Obviously, I sit in a different chair than dante and hunter so based on the question uh just uh bear with us, as we try to figure out. uh Who might excuse me who the best person answer to the question might be.

A

Maybe it's probably good if I read out the questions, because a lot of the folks have their screens uh blacked out so maybe they're on a phone um and therefore would benefit from hearing the questions read out so going through them in chronological order, um a mere nine minutes into the first presentation, sean asked a question is any of the initiative for the technology behind mad network, uh backed by the defense or intelligence community, because your initial graphic, the one of the the bad actors, the exploding, um what paintballs was fascinating.

B

Thanks for that, david I'll I'll, let uh I'll let hunter answer the immediate question um and then I have a little bit of color behind that.

C

So at this time, the uh technology itself not backed um by anything having to do with the dod department of defense or otherwise uh the technology um could theoretically be used in such contexts. But uh at this time it is not.

B

And I just wanted to add to that. uh Based on our announcement, we have had a lot of different parties reach out to us, so we've seen in uh we've seen in those conversations how the technology could apply there um I'll leave it at that.

A

Second question: could this technology be used to authenticate the veracity of videos or audio in the future.

B

Not being the sme, I could say uh I probably I'm gonna. Let dante feel that one given the chair. He sits in.

D

Yeah so as we cover with the last two slides, I think the question was early in the deck um with the last two slides that is intended to cover images.

D

uh Video is a little bit more tricky because you, you know, as as you may be aware, a hash is going to return the same value every single time, so there's a little bit additional structure that needs to be put around it, because you need a point of reference. So if somebody trims off the beginning of the video, then the hash for the entire thing won't match. So you have to uh subdivide the asset and that's some that's some of the work that we're following up on.

A

And would that be the same challenge for audio as well.

D

Audio is a little bit easier, but um yeah you still have the same. If somebody trims off the beginning of the audio, then it's not going to match the hash. uh You know similar uh in advance discussion for even the image. If you put a board or anything that the model that I showed any so we, the starting point is the raw photo from the device.

D

But, as you uh do like red eye correction or other filters, then you know we're working with um industry partners in the space to see what we can do to to solidify that work and be able to have the in the device or the application then signed the the work that was done. So we have the raw photo as a basis and then any corrective action that was taken would also be registered and linked back to that raw.

A

Photo kyle was asking whether it's possible to see your white paper or a white paper that would explain some of the technical details.

B

Absolutely thank you for the question I'll paste that in the chat as we're moving forward it'll, take you I'll paste the direct link to the white paper and also the general overview page for the initiative.

A

Next question: uh first, first of all there was comment made. This looks like a digital rights management for devices, but with transparency. Would that be fair to say.

B

Dante, you probably can feel that a little better than that.

D

Yeah, I I think you can have that view to it. Yes, that um this is like a you know in the classic form of drm. This is not the classic application of it, but in the generalized sense of rights management, you could look at it uh in that manner that you're essentially capturing uh where the piece of content was sourced, and then the history along the way is similar to what jason showed, with full transparency.

A

So, if that's a fair statement to make, then there was a follow-up question: how can you guarantee the device itself has not been compromised.

D

Yes, that's a great question: we can look at the firmware, so the device manufacturer itself can sign for the device and for the uh each version of firmware that it currently has. So we can. We can have knowledge of what firmware was running on the device when the capture took place.

A

Next question: is this a web or network only solution? um Where is it? Is there a perhaps a parallel discussion about content security on mobile devices.

D

Yeah, I could take that also, if you want jason thanks dante um yeah, the the for the content attestation piece, we we definitely incorporated mobile devices. I mentioned a secure element, so you can have a secure enclave. Secure element, that's actually easier in the mobile device to be able to secure that object. We could extend it to iot devices in general uh and then we also incorporated in our prototype uh laptops so having um it.

D

Actually, what we actually did was use the third party secure enclave on a usb stick, but you know it would be symbolic of being able to um put that on a board have like a like a crypto helper on the device and that's doing the the sign request.

D

Does that answer the question.

A

Hopefully it didn't come from me, so if it doesn't, then I'm sure we'll get a very quick follow-up and we can um loop back to continue the same discussion uh following a very positive comment, which was very cool technology.

A

uh There was a related question uh regarding whether or not verizon is also facing uh sorry interfacing iot, with hyperledger on the blockchain.

D

um Yeah, nothing- that's been uh made public at this time, but you know these are relevant spaces that uh I think many carriers are looking at.

A

um In fact, when it comes to hyperledger and seeing as we've spoken about photographs as well, you guys must be aware of the project at the new york times regarding the provenance of photographs. Does that in any way overlap with your uh initiatives and intentions, or is it? Is it something of a very different path? That's being taken technologically.

D

Jason, you want to talk about the overall initiative and then I can take the technical question. Yeah.

B

So um we we've, we have uh I'll say simply that we have a great relationship with new york times uh from a 5g perspective, and so um I I could tell you that uh we we touch base on the right things, and this would be one of them. um But outside of that, um we see that they're. You know we have uh parallel um purposes in general, but for a lot of reasons, the the the uh technology underlaying. It um is a serious consideration as well, so I I'm going to leave it at that.

B

So I don't conflate things dante. Do you want to add color yeah.

D

Yeah, so I think that you know they. uh Both projects uh originated organically, um uh separate, but there's a yes there's a lot of crossover between at least the overall intention and the main thrust of the work.

D

Some of the implementation details have some differences, but you know we should be able to to do some interoperability if the industry required it.

B

David, you might be on mute.

A

Yes, I am thank you I just so just to say I put a link to the new york times project in the chat next question. uh This seems quote like a robust solution for a lot of the issues we've been dealing with on social media. For several years has there has any thought being given to integrations on social media venues such as twitter, facebook, etc?.

B

um I we because of version one of this technology uh and the great you know, comments like this- that we've gotten back feedback from third parties, etc. It's there's no lack of uh of potential for this I'll say that and yes, that's been one of uh that's been one of the many great applications this technology can have.

A

It's funny I'm working my way through the hbo documentary series about cue anon at the moment and all of the effort that's gone into figuring out who q is so. There might be some some interesting adventures there. Kyle has a very technical question: how are the merkle tree leaf nodes there? We go. I've closed out the construction. How are the merkle tree leaf nodes or data blocks? Chunked per word as the slide suggests, or something else like an html element.

B

I can take that I'm just kidding hunter. Do you wanna.

C

um So the way that it's being done currently is actually based on white space, but the chunking algorithm is a field. That's actually named inside of the associated proof object. The idea was that, although we could name a few different, rational, chunking algorithms on day one, we had no idea what future implementations would necessitate or what would be optimal. So uh you essentially name the associated chunking algorithm from a list of allowed chunking algorithms, and it then does chunk, however, that algorithm does operate currently. Like I said earlier, though, it is based on white space.

A

Could this technology be used to augment the authenticity of digital signatures, for instance with docusign.

D

Yeah, that's one of the use cases we've examined is uh being able to to approve the authenticity of digital signatures um in an open system that would have uh perpetuity.

A

We have another question about whether or not it could be applied to video. I think we've probably covered that um could, in quotation marks, adversary countries also use this technology to prevent their adversary countries from promoting fake news within their boundaries.

A

Could you foresee a world where folks use this technology to simply immunize and rid the world of fake news, falsities and non-truths.

B

I think that's a great question. uh We had a lot of great questions from this group so far. um One of the things we recognized in the beginning is that this isn't a truth machine, um so we you can still put fake information into this system if you're a bat. If you are, um if you are the source, um so while there are it, it has a lot of transparency associated with it credibility.

B

um I would say- and actually this this analogy kind of just occurred to me in the sense that you can almost see this as um and I'll see how good this analogy is or isn't as I'm speaking to it, but on linkedin, when you share something your professional credibility is attached to it right, whereas in twitter it's a lot more loose and so moving the ecosystem from a more twitter-like to a more linkedin like uh attachment to the information you share, elevates the level of credibility associated with the organization.

B

That said, you can still, um you could still put a lie, or you know or fake news into the system. So it depends on the integrity of the organization, but the uh the net net result is. It's attached to the entity and so over time that attachment depreciates the credibility and would essentially remove them as a legitimate source, uh and I did I didn't, speak to the boundaries uh piece of it.

B

So if you know, if anyone else, you know dante hunter, have thoughts, please feel free to add, if not we're fine, but uh you know when we talk about geoconstraining this, I don't have the insight into what it would take to to geographically bound a technology like this and in terms of the all of the different considerations, technological considerations involved between state to state and systems and how we isolate networks etc.

B

But I don't bel, I don't believe it would be an easy lift unless you were more of a restrictive country um like like those in the world that we hear often are controlling access to connectivity. So I don't believe it could easily do that.

D

Yeah, I suppose, if um at the root of social media or browsers, you pointed it to uh national registry and that's where the proofs were coming from. If you could enforce that constraint, then then that would be the essentially the single source of truth. um I would hope that we could do something more globally, that uh everyone saw a consistent single source of truth instead of uh a fragmented uh ecosystem, and that's something you know that we're trying to promote.

D

um I think the main, the main part to underscore with what jason said is that traceability and the reputation over time that, as as he said, we can't attest to the truth of a statement, but we can say where the statement was sourced from which is one of the problems underscoring uh the propagation of fake news today.

D

And a lot of times you see uh the the source of a fake of a fake article would have ended up being sourced by uh the same entity or someone with um adjacent interests.

D

So you know they point to the source of an article and say: oh yeah, I'm put I'm promoting this because I heard it from this other source over here. So unless you know having more transparency in the overall ecosystem would at least improve that.

A

A

As far as the mad network, creating a hash on the ethereum network for authentication, will this require spending ethereum every time being? uh Well, let's start with that.

C

So to speak, to that uh the hash that's actually written back into the ethereum blockchain is done on a periodic basis. So currently that's every 1024 magnet blocks, which means that you can fold a significant amount of state back into a compact representation inside of ethereum.

C

So, although, yes, everything that everything that is written does ultimately require something to be written back to ethereum. um How frequently that occurs is uh very infrequently with respect to how much data can be um proven inside of that one right that does occur against ethereum.

A

And in a similar vein is the mad token required for verizon to use the network. Much like ethereum is required to interface with that network.

C

So the system does actually leverage uh the token systems that stand behind mad network. Those systems are actually abstracted uh for the purposes of verizon, though uh meaning that they do not ever have to concern themselves directly with those um low-level implementations.

C

That's going back to the abstraction of the blockchain as a service api that we are speaking or that I spoke to early on in my presentation.

A

Have you been? Oh sorry, please go on.

D

Yeah hunter: did you want to address the energy aspect of that.

C

um So yeah, if we wanted to touch on the the energy concerns um with respect to uh the differentiation between, say, ethereum and the side chain madness side chain. um The side chain itself is a proof of stake system, meaning that uh the amount of energy that it consumes is fractions of what the proof of work, mining systems uh for bitcoin and actually the ethereum main net do leverage.

C

um But since we do back up into the ethereum blockchain itself, we I guess are at least in part responsible for some of the energy consumption of the ethereum main net. But a very small component of the total.

A

Have you been looking at uh supply chain standards for digital goods like dboms or design, build operate, maintain contracts.

D

Yeah, I'm not familiar with with that acronym, but yes, we've been looking at supply chain.

A

Okay, uh well, it's simplified a little a little bit later in the subsequent sentence. Actually, digital.

E

Bill of materials.

A

Oh sorry, I'm missing. Thank you. I misunderstood your acronyms being was relating to a different supply chain issue.

D

Yes yeah, so we act, we actually did a couple of prototypes in the vendor, managed inventory space uh using blockchains and- and we continue to do further analysis of supply chain applications.

A

uh A more direct question relating to future contacts, whom can I talk to a verizon, about integrating iot with blockchain for your mad technology, for iot modules,.

B

Thanks for that, um so on the initiative page, which I shared in the chat, if you scroll back up, there is an email contact at the bottom of there and that's where we triage all of the inbound interest, um carl. If, if you do send us that email, please mention that you are a part of this. uh This webinar please.

A

uh Wouldn't a github public project have given you guys similar types of guarantees with arguably greater.

A

B

I'm reading through that myself and I definitely know I can't field that one, I'm not sure if dante or hunter might be better.

D

So is the question geared towards a crowdsourcing effort.

A

Mansur, would you like to jump in.

F

Yeah it was, it was more around how easy or difficult it is to understand what a hash on a blockchain means right. You still need to give me the payload for me to verify that what is on the blockchain is actually being represented on your website correctly, whereas if you just had a github repo, where you actually track changes using um the verbosity is already there.

F

I understand that you want to decentralize the trust required, but then there are already a lot of trust bottlenecks in this architecture. Right you've got your crm. You've got your pki. You've got magnet and yeah, I'm not convinced if that has actually adequately decentralized. The trust enough to justify doing this. Instead of doing a github repo.

D

Yeah, uh you know, as it's currently structured it's it's not. um It's set up to be decentralized, but it's not operated in a decentralized manner at the current time. But it's um it's using a lot of open source uh software and we can uh admit other uh participants. We we've had discussions with with other uh corporate partners about joining the initiative.

D

So it's that's. The intent of it is to go into that end. State from you know, jason showed a uh the project and all the different teams that had to be involved for us to move forward as a corporate entity. So you know in large corporations, there's a lot of different uh pieces, a lot of stakeholders, a lot of different uh processes that need to be incorporated and with carriers.

D

There's also the regulatory aspect that jason touched on so given all that it's easier to work with a single technology partner and have a defined objective and a project plan and then open it up once once we launch it- and you know the corporation can get behind it, then to attract other uh partners to that network and expand from that beachhead.

A

In fact, mansur just by chance has a what will probably be the last question. I've got a very quick follow-up. One myself, so mansur again asks after an expression of gratitude. Thanks for the super informative presentations, what tools or libraries did you use to do the secure enclave authentication of camera outputs, and is that something that's open source.

D

um Yes, it's not open source. At the current time we've been exploring. We use two different systems, one from uh from a vendor that filament that's the usb stick that I had referred to and then the other one is an internal project, security applet that verizon themselves built in our device technologies, uh partner team. uh We are looking to open source that, but it is a it's a lengthy process to do so.

D

Thanks for the question.

A

We've got time for one more, which I think I'll selfishly claim for myself.

A

Have you guys done anything regarding fake news about covid, um because I know this is something that I've been invited to sort of take part in a project at ucla hospital because they're very concerned about especially on millennial platforms, so especially on tick tock and things like clubhouse right, where it's just it's a streaming audio signal.

A

um So it just moves too fast in order to be able to monitor it, but is there anything that you've done there? These are the uh scientifically dubious claims about covid over the last year, or so.

B

um I can speak from a corporate communications perspective from a technology perspective. um I don't I don't know that we have and dante could. If dante's aware he could share, um of course, being the size the size of the company we are, um we can do our best to represent our no knowledge of the universe where we're working. um I can tell you that um the short answer is no.

B

I don't have anything at my fingertips to point to to say here's what we've done, um but I can tell you just like with this initiative our our brand- uh and forgive me forget for for a very five second tangent here. um I work here for eight years, because I've been impressed with how this company has evolved to actually care about society from the inside out instead of from the outside in in ways that I haven't seen and I've had many roles at different companies.

B

So I stay here for that reason, and this initiative is just one signal of that. We make statements through our news releases. You can see some even in the last two weeks regarding uh some some sensitive things happening out there in society. We're doing that. More often for reasons you can imagine, we have to be careful about what we say and when so that we can move in the right direction and not just say what we want to say, but do something behind it to prove it.

B

So I hope that was a little informative, and so I don't have an immediate example to point to, but I can tell you that when, uh when we do have the opportunity we evaluate it make sure we're doing something before we say something dante. Is there anything from a technology perspective that you have.

D

uh Yeah, I was just answering uh nathan had a question on raspberry pi, so I was just answering today. um Can.

E

I can I sorry, gentlemen, can I ask you a question? um Sorry, it's real, really frustrating. I had three incoming calls and that takes me that just knocks me completely out of the this webinar, but I've got a question um uh so because verizon is doing a great thing here with um the protection of content, I'm just wondering, let's say for cctv, cameras, etc, etc.

E

If it would not make sense for verizon to be discussing these things with their cellular module suppliers for cctv cameras and that's how you would integrate iot with the blockchain uh and if you're, on the same line that I am. uh I really hope that you can refer me to talk to somebody.

E

My name is carl weaver and I work for itos, and we know that this is that what verizon is doing is going to be great for close circuit uh tv, because you're essentially you're essentially applying this video and still imagery to the blockchain for transparency purposes purposes. But it needs to funnel back to the iot device vendor uh to implement this technology, and then we want to be involved because that's kind of what we do, the integration of iot with blockchain does any of this make any sense. Gentlemen. If so, can we please chat.

D

Yes, uh all affirmative, um I can put you into contact with our device technologies team and then for like, as jason mentioned at the top of the call, he sponsors the overall corporate initiative, but on the device side, we really should connect you with uh our device technology partners. uh This involves the same team that I was referring to that had built the uh security applet.

E

Sounds great, um uh I think I left my email, but um if somebody could get me that contact person that I can chat with this week, that would be outstanding. I I'm very diligent. I got taken off this um webinar three times and here I am back on. Thank.

D

You uh yeah, I don't see the um here. Let me do it.

E

One more time here hold on a second I've got.

C

It I'll I'll paste it in here. That's that's my picture.

E

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Everybody sorry.

A

To get interrupted, okay! No! No! No! No problem! That's the whole point uh with that. I think out of respect for everyone's time. We should probably draw things to uh to a gentle end. Thank you to thank you to all three of you guys, for I think what is going to prove to be uh the impetus for future research. So I'd. Imagine that we're all very grateful for the white paper in particular. So thanks very much for coming on at different times of the day in different places, and we hope, if I may, yeah yeah.

A

No, please yeah go on.

B

Thank you for having us here and I again this is not a standalone for verizon. So part of the reason we do webinars like this is so that we have folks reach out to us, and how can we talk to you? How can we work with you? So this is intended to be an open source initiative and there are a lot of ways this could go.

B

So I hope you guys anybody watching this in the replay would go to the initiative uh on our website and see the contact alias if you do have uh interest in working with us on this. So thank you.

A

Super so thank you, jason, thank you dante and thank you hunter.

B

Great. Thank you, david okay,.

F

Yeah thanks everyone and one quick note for people to continue the conversation. The media and entertainment sake has a mailing list. I dropped a link in the chat. If you we want to continue the discussion with each other. Let's use the list fantastic.

A

The power of two davids: okay, thanks.

F

Everyone, okay.

E

Thanks everyone. Thank you.