From Crypto AG to Trustless Computing: a Vision for Swiss Leadership in Digital Trust
Last January 29th, 2020 - just two weeks before the Crypto AG Affair bombshell revelations - our Trustless Computing Association, and its spin-off startup TRUSTLESS.AI, gathered leading IT security experts and Swiss institutions in Zurich for the 7th Edition of Free and Safe in Cyberspace Conference and Pre-Conference.
As in previous editions, we discussed and further widened a consensus around a new IT security paradigms and certifications aimed to achieve radically-unprecedented privacy and security for the most sensitive human communications and transactions, while concurrently ensuring legitimate and constitutional lawful access.
Among the participating panelists and keynoters, leaders from Digital Switzerland, Credit Suisse, ETH, Sberbank, Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW), Accenture, ElectroSuisse, ICT Switzerland, Swiss Federal Ministry of Finance, Information Security Society Switzerland (ISSS), In the Cyber, InfoGuard, and Kryptus. See the event home page for a 5-minute video trailer and videos.
As the Crypto AG Affair further proved - given the scope of World conflicts and threats, and the ever-increasing ability of even small groups for individuals to cause significant human harm - we cannot hope ever to have access to IT systems delivering meaningful digital privacy and security unless there will continue to be ways for western security agencies governments to execute intercept or search and seizure orders, at least when they are legitimately mandated and authorized to do so.
In other words, "we can't choose between personal freedom and public safety. It is a both or neither challenge" as the slogan of our Free and Safe in Cyberspace Conference Series states.
Why Nearly everything is hackable by numerous unaccountable actors
The dire need for a solution to this dichotomy was confirmed by recent revelations about the Jeff Bezos hack, and Crypto AG and its "sister company," which made it finally clear to the general public that even the richest persons or the heads of state most countries of the World, cannot buy IT systems that can meaningfully protect even their most sensitive digital communications.
What is paradoxical is that they can't protect themselves, not only from abusive powerful nations but even from vast numbers of unaccountable and criminal state and non-state hacking entities.
The latter is due to the popular ways by which the security agencies of such nations go about fulfilling their missions.
Firstly, as the Crypto AG scandal confirmed, powerful nations cumulatively spend tens of billions each year inserting, hiding and purchasing critical vulnerabilities in ALL systems for enabling their targeted and massive surveillance, including buying and investing in crucial firms, infiltrating them or their supply chains, and pressuring them in myriad ways. If the actions of CIA in Crypto AG were so brazen, yes so successful for decades, and if even Swiss authorities were so "blind," we can expect such subversive actions to be ongoing on all companies in Switzerland, NATO countries and worldwide that offer the highest levels of confidentiality of data and metadata of communications or financial transactions.
Secondly, powerful nations have a crucial requirement that their stockpiled back-doors are in the form of critical vulnerabilities that are "easily masked as implementation or human errors," as official German BND Crypto AG documents outlined, to provide them with plausible deniability if discovered (so-called "bug-doors"); in turn, making it often much easier for 3rd parties to exploit them.
Lastly, such nations' security agencies have been, and are, unable to keep powerful information and hacking tools under proper lock and key, as shown by the Snowden, Vault 7, Shadow Brokers, and Hacking Team hack revelations.
So, therefore, the combination of these three factors, create collateral damage by which every secure computing device and secure app is hackable even by a large number of mid-level hackers - not because we are not technically capable of preventing it, or hackers are getting too skillful, but because we haven't yet found ways to transparently reconcile the need for individual privacy and the need for legitimate cyber-investigations.
The Good and the Bad of The Greatest Intelligence Operation of the Century
Arguably, the affair of Crypto AG and its "sister company" - with all its abuses, huge collateral damages, - likely overall "clearly contributed to making the world a little safer" as the former head of the German BND stated, or at least until the end of the Cold War.
The "greatest intelligence operation of the century" - while including constraining the emergence of legitimate democratic socialist regimes around the World - also likely helped one overreaching superpower to prevail over a worse one. It even likely and helped to lead Swiss private banks in their critical quest to stay clear of a large majority of the most dangerous criminals, terrorism financiers, and despots.
But then, starting with doubts in the 90s, and now with this extremely detailed and documented bombshell revelations, the "toy has broken," and those intelligence agencies can no longer rely on dangerous criminals or heads of state to trust IT systems, just because they are from self-declared neutral countries, with a track record of engineering excellence.
Since the Cold War till Today
With the end of the Cold War, with the progressive emergence of the truth about Crypto AG after the 1992 Hans Buehler scandal, the rich and powerful started increasingly using a wide variety of ever-changing and more complex IT systems - which such agencies do not directly control, as they did Crypto AG and similar. Therefore it has become much more messy and complicated for CIA, BND, Swiss Intelligence, and other intelligence agencies to carry on their legitimate work in intercepting criminals and rogue nations.
In this Wild West, intelligence agencies have no other choice but to increase their investments and shrewdness in a race to far outcompete nations and resourced criminal syndicates as the greatest stockpilers of multiple critical vulnerabilities of exploits in ALL systems. This is achieved by trying to stay the first buyers, inserters, and stockpilers of fresh, new, and "plausibly deniable" critical vulnerabilities.
Their legitimate hacking capability is less consistent and produces less reliable evidence and intelligence, due to the high probability of concurrent undetected hacking by multiple entities - and the fact that such systems are often designed to make forensic analysis harder rather than easier - so much so that evidence so acquired is structurally contested by highest civilian courts in Europe, such as in France, Italy and Germany.
The problem is even more significant because it is becoming ever more apparent that we cannot choose between freedom and public safety. That is because, in the process of maximizing their mission security agencies have not only eliminated the privacy of citizens and active citizens but even broken by design even the technologies, standards and certifications that are used by their own government for the most critical system to maintain a genuinely democratic regime - and therefore, in turn, public safety, favoring the fraudulent undemocratic emergence of autocratic regimes in western nations.
Examples of that are the continued compromisation of by NSA of the US NIST standardization body, and the hacking of the US Office for Personnel Management, of western elected officials and heads of state like Angel Merkel, of the US Democratic National Committee, the terrible state of electronic electoral voting systems, and the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential elections as well as the utter vulnerability of mainstream social media networks, like Facebook, to large-scale hacking and illegal manipulations.
The Conference
The conference was opened by Nicolas Burer, Managing Director of Digital Switzerland opened the event and the broader context of new Swiss digital trust labels/certifications in Switzerland, highlighting the Swiss Digital Initiative and its initiatives for Swiss Digital Trust Labels. Launched last year by Digital Switzerland, the President and former President of the Swiss Federation, and endorsed by the largest Swiss enterprises and banks, some of the largest IT giants, including by Microsoft and by Huawei, has made its 1st project the creation of Swiss Digital Trust Labels, or certifications, to differentiate new higher Swiss standards.
Then Rufo Guerreschi, Exec. Dir. of Trustless Computing Association and CEO of TRUSTLESS.AI, presented the initiative for a Trustless Computing Certification Body, for a new Swiss-based international standards-setting and certification/labeling body which that aims to ensure radically-unprecedented levels of digital privacy and security for private human computing and financial transactions, while concurrently solidly ensuring offline in-person legitimate and constitutional lawful access. (video, deck).
The conference then followed its unique format since the 1st Edition, structured around 4 Challenges of Free and Safe in Cyberspace, which were identified as a critical sequence of challenges whose solution would best turn IT into a great instrument of the global public good. During the Challenge A Panel, Roberto Gallo, CEO of Kryptus and President of the Brazilian Defense Industry Association, highlighted the technical challenges of certifications for high-assurance IT systems for critical domains. During Challenge B Panel, Paolo Lezzi, president of In the Cyber, new owner of the famed Hacking Team - allegedly maker of the malware used to hack Jeff Bezos - discussed the need and challenges of international security certifications for lawful targeted surveillance tools. Kai Schramm, VP of Security Architecture from Credit Suisse, discussed ways in which IT security and privacy can be turned from a major threat to a primary competitive advantage against direct competitors and other encroaching actors. Among the other speakers: Adrian Perrig, Monique Morrow, Dobszay Levente, Arie Malz, as well as Uwe Kissmann, Paul Foster, and Adolf Doerig.
Most of the organizations participating with speakers to the conference also confirmed participation in a closed-door pre-conference, held on the same day, reserved to entities actively interested in becoming founding members of such Swiss-based Trustless Computing Certification Body.
The Trustless Computing Certification Body
The Trustless Computing Certification Body is an initiative a new Swiss-based international standards-setting and certification/labeling body that aims to ensure radically-unprecedented levels of digital privacy and security for private human computing and financial transactions, while concurrently solidly ensuring offline in-person legitimate and constitutional lawful access by a Swiss/EU local, national government, and through them, to legitimate requests by foreign law enforcement or intelligence agencies, like the CIA.
TCCB achieves such goals through its unique Trustless Computing Paradigms, that ensure uncompromising zero-trust approach down to CPU design and fabrication oversight, and a transparent solution to the need for legitimate lawful access - as validated by such an ultra-resilient and independent international certification body, within Swiss and EU current legislation.
TCCB includes a Seevik Room process, by which all sensitive data and code are stored in 3 hosting rooms in 3 different nations part of different military/intelligence alliances, one of which Switzerland. The validity of civilian court orders and absence of blatant unconstitutionality of other supposed legal authority or executive orders will be ensured by inherently requiring that physical access by anyone to such hosting rooms is conditional on the physical presence and approval of at least five randomly-selected citizen-jury-like body, in addition to system administrators and an expert legal counsel, as detailed in research documents since 2015.
The initial new compliant open-licensed patent-unencumbered target architecture, computing base, and ecosystem will be initially targeted to a wide user base of enterprises, private banks, high net worth individuals, politicians, journalists, and mission-critical NGOs - that will carry compliant ultra-thin devices in custom leather wallets and phone cases - the Seevik Pod can then be embedded in the back of smartphones and public touch-screen kiosks, to bring meaningful digital freedom to all citizens, and sovereignty to our societies.
Italy, Austria, and Germany have been actively interested or engaged for years and more recently by large private entities from Switzerland, the EU, the US, China, and South Korea. Among our R&D partners, since 2016, the Italian OCSI ISTICOM and their Austrian A-SIT and CIO participated as formal governance partners to EU funding proposals for the creation of such new international IT security standards-setting and certification body. Over the last months, we met with top management of the German BSI, the German entity setting the highest security standards for the German government.
Turning CRYPTO AG from a great problem into a great opportunity from Switzeralnd, and its private banking and IT security sectors
Switzerland could take on the opportunity to lead a few other leading nations and private entities to turn the embarrassing Crypto AG revelations from a blunder for its reputation of neutrality and its IT security sector into an opportunity to re-establish and re-launched those by decisively leading the creation of novel socio-technical mechanisms and international organizations uncompromisingly trustless and transparent ways to reconcile (A) the need to establish a lead in secure IT for individuals, private banks and public agencies in Switzerland and worldwide, and (B) the need to prevent and prosecute grave crimes, and for a responsible and balanced Swiss geopolitical posture.
Switzerland has a unique opportunity to be one of a few nations to become founding partners of the TCCB, with a symbolic yearly monetary contribution and participation with some decision-making power in the TCCB governance. Ultimately the trustworthiness of TCCB and its resilience to state pressures relies on the quality of its governance.
Swiss private banks have successfully secured their server-side digital infrastructure with technology and processes that are often beyond military-grade. Meanwhile, their client-side solutions have had to rely on the abysmal security of commercial browsers and, more recently of mobile phones.
After the end of Swiss banking secrecy, and the recent multi-billion dollar fines of leading Swiss private banks for allegedly helping foreign citizens evade taxes, the Swiss ecosystem could and should seriously consider that – leveraging their unique expertise in communications security and privacy laws – Switzerland's main business model of "providing UHNWIs and firms unique confidentiality against other nations' tax authorities" could be complemented and partly replaced by "providing UHNWIs and firms unique confidentiality and security against competitors, hackers, and illegitimately snooping governments."
Current secure client-side solutions used within banks and between banks and their clients mostly create high friction and inconvenience, while levels of security and privacy that far from what the client demands. Such levels are also substantially lower than solutions provided by encroaching IT giants that leverage their exclusive access to secure technologies embedded in user devices to increasingly offer digital trust and financial services, and even less than leading open-source "secure messaging apps." Even the "call back" process, ultimate safeguards against financial fraud, is very much in danger as a battle between voice cloning and voice print authentication technologies is being waged, with uncertain outcomes. Even the secure client-side solutions currently used today for the most critical use case scenarios comprise of a mix of mobile applications, hardware authentication devices, and big data analysis that ultimately rely on the trustworthiness of hardware, software, and manufacturing processes that are terribly insecure and beyond their control, or possibly subject to foreign government compromisation as shown by revelations about the "sister company" of Crypto AG, or mounting doubts about Omnisec. At this point, some level of ownership or steady control by CIA, and possibly other NATO member intelligence agency, should be assumed for all Swiss (and non-Swiss) companies.
It is, therefore, no surprise that the two largest Swiss private banking associations - Association of Swiss Asset and Wealth Management Bank (VAV-APG) and the Association of Swiss Private Banks (ABPS) - have made their main goal during their 2019 last annual meeting to turn cybersecurity in a competitive locational advantage.
Provided Switzerland acts timely and decisively based on what is already known and widely presumed about Crypto AG, similar Swiss companies and Swiss government oversight - Switzerland has still the most to offer and most to benefit by being the host location for a truly independent international certification organization for IT security that can be trusted not to be unduly pressured by powerful governments, including the Swiss one, and the US one through the Swiss one. In contrast to the US, China, Russia, and Israel, and nearly all other nations, Switzerland does not have very strict export control laws, overly extensive executive powers, nor laws that prescribe or are strongly conducive to producing surreptitious access for law enforcement.
Switzerland maintains a historical leadership for the most secure IT systems for human communications and financial transactions - with engineers and architects produced over decades by entities like Crypto AG, Kudelski, Infoguard, Securosys, and ETH, and more recently by leading startups in the areas of biometrics, quantum cryptography and blockchain - like ProtonMail, Threema, IDquantique, Dfinity - are a unique asset, even though, after Crypto AG, there will need to be deep continuous background checks, executed by an international body, on the likelihood that key staff of Swiss companies may be bought, blackmailed, or hired by state and non-state entities with undeclared conflicting interests.
The Roadmap ahead and Momentum
The Trustless Computing Certification Body initiative is a private initiative adopted on a voluntary basis by IT providers seeking such certifications, which is downward-compatible to the highest level of EU and Swiss state-mandated private-market IT security certifications for human communications and transactions, such as SwissID LoT3 or eIDAS Qualified. So, therefore, it does not necessitate any formal governmental uptake.
Nevertheless, together with our prospective Swiss partners, we agreed on the need to multiple engage multiple ministries of the Swiss Federal Government, in addition to the Swiss Digital Initiative - in addition to several EU nations - to ensure that there is a full understanding to how such initiative is a win-win opportunity for Switzerland reputation, economy, public safety, and digital sovereignty, while overall increasing the ability of foreign law enforcement security agencies and international entities like Interpol to pursue their most legitimate and pressing cyber-investigations needs.
Meanwhile, we have widened our engagement over the last six months with multiple Group Head-level and Group C-level executives of 3 of the top 5 Swiss private banks, and with 2 of the top 4 global smartphone makers, for their interest to join as founding members of the TCCB, and being the first to offer TCCB-compliant mobile computing devices. Our startup spin-off TRUSTLESS.AI - which is raising funds for such TCCB-compliant systems and for TCCB, and whose governance will be totally segregated from the governance of TCCB - was nominated as 1 of only five finalists for Early Stage category of the 2020 Swiss Fintech Awards, which is the most prestigious of its kind in Switzerland, supported by leading Swiss private banks and with its senior executives in its juries.
Long Term Vision
In the longer-term, the TCCB could well be the basis for Switzerland to lead new open transnational initiatives to build high-visibility high-impact multilateral treaties and governance capabilities in critical digital sectors, both outside and within the United Nations processes, such as the UN High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation.
Last but not least, the creation in Switzerland of such new certification body and complaint ecosystems, would be instrumental to very large opportunities of economic locational economic advantage for its banking sector and many emerging tech sectors where unprecedented IT security will be a key competitive advantage (sensitive AI, IoT, human computing, etc.) as detailed in our plans for a Trustless Computing Cluster and Campus of Eastern Switzerland, which leverage a Trustless Dual-Use Initiative for joint military and civilian capability building.