Now, my goal here is to make you a little bit uncomfortable and also to be very brief. So, I ask you to think a little bit about what is a strength of Ethereum? Decentralized, permissionless, trustless, secure, open source. Why do we feel comfortable deriving inputs into that system from wallets that really have none of those properties? Seems very strange to me.
Should seem strange to you, too. Think of it in terms of crops. So, L1 and above has these wonderful crops properties. If you think about client-side hardware, really doesn't have those properties. Oligarch-dominated, closed source, and uh opaque, right?
Uh there's an over-reliance on mobile phones, microcontrollers, and secure elements. Mobile phone is not the ideal security platform. The App Store is a minefield. Uh it's always hot. Uh every phone store employee has these admin privileges over your SIM.
And everything is oligarch-dominated. Very much the opposite of crops principle. Uh hardware wallets certainly better, but uh MCU and secure element, they're generally cobbled together from these off-shelf parts. The important parts of the MCU and and all of the secure element are are closed source. Uh I find it particularly strange that the secure element is the you know, the end of the the root of trust.
Uh not only closed source, but I really exceptionally closed source. In the normal world, if there's a vulnerability, it gets reported to the CVE database. Everybody knows about it. Everybody starts to work on mitigation. In secure element, everything is under NDA.
So, there are vulnerabilities. You just don't know about them. But some people know about them, but you don't know who those people are. You don't know how many there are. It's very strange.
Is that really self-custody? Uh so, I've been talking about this for a number of years with varying levels of engagement. I was pleased to see in the last year to Vitalik himself has started highlighting this. And I would encourage you to go look up his his Singapore speech or some of the things he's written on Reddit his blog. Basically saying hardware is hard, but we have to go there.
We can't keep allowing this blind spot in in the Texas app. So, uh, there are little bits of progress. I'll I'll uh, highlight a few. Um, May the end of May there was announced a consortium the open Titan engine uh, our company Crossbar and Qualcomm MediaTek a number of other companies are joining consortium to maintain this open source engine. So that's kind of like open source SE side.
On the MCU side there are a lot of risk most risk five implementations are closed. The implementation itself is closed. But there are some open implementations that are getting uh, increasingly good. Uh, Tropic Square made a lot of uh, news with having the uh, at least an open source chip in the in the safe seven. I think this is commendable.
It's it's a step forward. Uh, there's a active group in Flashbots T collective uh, discussing open root of trust. And of course there's Vitalik uh, put a a lot of his own Ethereum into this initiative called Vansa. You can read about it. Uh, trying to make some progress.
And then there's there's our company uh, Crossbar. We have a couple of uh, open hardware platforms a dev kit uh, and then a couple form factor credit card and a USB dongle. Uh, those are all open source including there's the board support package the hardware and then most unusually the actually the chip RTL is open source. Uh, so I'd encourage you to to look at those and work on them. Uh on Saturday uh at the Brew event, I'll be giving a more technical talk on If you think about open source RTL, one of the first things you come to as a problem is uh verifiability.
How do you know that uh published code has anything to do with the little black rectangle you're holding in your hand? It's very hard to correspond those two. It is difficult. And so I'll talk about some of the approaches we've been uh working kind of at the forefront of of making progress on that. So I'll I'll wrap up quickly and say uh you know, call to action is I I encourage everybody to not be too comfortable about this.
I I don't know why people think, you know, this is uh hardware's too hard or oligarchs, that's just the way the world works in mobile phones. We can't do anything about it. I I don't think we should have that attitude. Uh uh also ask you to support some kind of open source uh you know, develop on our platform, develop on some open platform. And also be a little tolerant of the open source hardware process.
It's different than open source software process, harder, slower. People are really uncomfortable to see a a bug reported in hardware. But you know, your other option is to have unreported bugs in hardware and I don't think that's better. So uh it also requires a little more actual coordination. You know, things like masks have to be bought and so on.
So uh I would say let's let's work together to make at least a little progress on this uh important, difficult issue. All right, thank you.
[applause]
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.