I'd like to introduce Ryan Lackey. Talking about Ephemeral Communications: Why and how? >>
Hi everyone I'm Ryan Lackey with CloudFlare. And I'm pleased to be back after a long time. I'm
introducing my panel which is Jon Callas with Silent Circle, Elissa Shevinsky of Glimpse, and
Nico Sel of Wickr. So we're going to talk about Ephemeral Communications Apps or
applications that are short lived, very short duration storage and messages. The funny
thing about this is it used to be the default. It used to be that storage was incredibly
expensive. Disks were in the multi‑tens of pounds, hundreds of pounds range, big rack
mounted devices. You were really careful about what you saved, you wouldn't just retain
everything. And the fault was to erase all of content.That got solved I guess in the 80s and
90s to the point where it wasn't about deleting text information and it got to the point where
video and everything else was sort of persistent. Then there was too much and you had all
this content and you could never find anything. So until pretty much search engines, web,
ultavista,Google came about, even if you had all this information it would sort of
disappear and you could pretty much hope if the information existed about you anywhere
people wouldn't find it. At least it wouldn't come immediately to mind when you
typed something into a web browser. There's another advantage that pretty much
everybody using the internet like a professional user, academic people like that. That
was actually true even through a lot of the early two thousands. You could assume people were
using the internet for specific purposes. Either finding information or using it to do
various things, but they weren't using it every second of their lives. But something changed.
That's pretty much what happened. Now everybody carries around a super computer in their
pocket constantly connected, constantly storing data, and using it to talk to everybody
all the time. It makes it easy to store everything, store everything by default through
Facebook, Twitter, all your history, email lives everywhere. It's crazy. And some people
started to notice this a little while ago. Fred Wilson from USC had a great quote. Pretty much
privacy by being the default was the State of nature by the internet then it went away due
to technological change. Then people started to think what would it be like to go back to
the day when everything wasn't logged. A new generation of users every day. There's always
new people using the internet and they have a different perception of what things should
be. So I'm going to let the panel get started on what they do and come back to this stuff
later. Maybe start with Jon with Silent Circle and let him describe his application. >>
Sure. Thank you very much, Ryan. You can see up there is a screen shot of how things work on
Android and IOS. We started building the chat system that does silent text. As we were
building it and already thinking about this sort of thing, people that we've been talking to had
requests. One of the things I thought was compelling was that someone said that they had been
texting with a co‑worker stuff about work stuff. And the co‑worker says can you come over
to my office and talk about something. So they come over to the office and the co‑worker's
phone is sitting on their desk unlocked, texts up with someone else. And the person said, so I
can't really trust this co‑worker with the rude comments I might make about someone else.
Because, you know, we all say things that are intemperate. And texting makes it really easy to
sound a little more emotional than you are. And, you know, to have the tongue in cheek there
and just enough Emojis to get the right Emogian down. The request was can you make these
things go away. That's how we got to burn notice. We said yeah. Data destruction policy.
There's no problem with data destruction. It's one of those things that is enshrined in WA
and you make it so when you text there is a default delete on it. And there is, for example, a guy
that I do an awful lot of texting with who just started texting me out of the blue. And
I keep, like, a one‑day burn on everything. So that, you know, we talk about security and this,
that and the other thing, and I know that in general things will get deleted after a day. >> So,
maybe next, Nico can talk about Wicker. >> Sure. So I like that you brought up Snap Chat. A year
ago at this conference Stros Freeburg did a great assessment of Snap Chat and Facebook,
"poke". At that time, you could Google and find Snap Chat's masterkey online. Facebook
didn't have any security on there at all. Just looked like they deleted it, I guess, and
they left the stage saying indeed Wickr leaves no trace. We were really proud about that. We
were founded before Snap Chat had launched, but we came about it from a really different
place. And we essentially said hey we've made this seamless security protocol and we think
that everyone in the world should be using encryption. And so how do we get everyone to use
encryption? Let's give them something that they've seen in the movies, right. Everyone's
wanted self‑destructing messages. So that's how we got to that equation. Wickr is the
fuse from Mission Impossible and that's where it came from. I think its important to remember
here that the use case here is spy to spy. If you are sending a message spy to an enemy, I don't
care how good the tech is it's not going to disappear. That's kind of what's happened with
Snap Chat. There's a lot of education that needs to be done that this is about trusted
parties. Otherwise it's DRM. We all know how that is. It's more about betrayal generally happens
after the fact and more just about cleaning up your messages on someone else's phone is
really how I think about it. >> Great. Maybe now Elissa will talk about Glimpse. >> Glimpse
was founded when Pat Stickinson and I really just fell in love with the idea of Ephemeral
Messaging. We thought that it was really fun and we also really believed in the threat
model of, like, people you trust now. You know, like you trust people now but you don't
necessarily trust them in three months or in six months. You want things to disappear. But we
didn't trust Snap Chat. And that was proven out later with the hacks and the various, you know,
legal actions that have been taken against them. So they built Glimpse to make really
easy to use privacy. And we did it keeping in mind that Silent Circle and Wicker were already
in the market doing really, really solid work on encryption. Jon actually was kind enough to
take time and meet with me before we launched. Helped us craft our privacy policy and
were using Wicker to chat when along with Silent text and we were really just getting the
company started. We wanted to be in a really different place in the market that wasn't directly
competitive with them and was more competitive with the classic social media. So we're
really, really proud to be I think one of the only encrypted networks primarily used by high
school and sorority students. And they don't necessarily care that we're encrypted but they
care we're private in the ways that are meaningful to them. Their model is they're hiding
from their parents and teacher and from drama on Facebook. So we really work closely with high
schoolers and with people in sororities and other very tight‑knit college groups to
figure out features they really love. So we have upload from text which you can't do, I mean,
upload from camera which you can't do on Snap Chat. Like if I want to send a cute picture of a
bunny with his face in a tiny little shopping cart full of baby carrots I can't do that on
Snap Chat unless I have the bunny in front of me. But with Glimpse I have send photos of
bunnies and ghosts and all things that are fun to me in an ephemeral way. So that's the
been the engine that's really helped us take off with young people. They have a really low
switching cost. And something as simple as being able to upload a photo from camera and write a
full screen of text has been enough to get them to start using glimpse. What's up next
will be group messaging. So, like, really, really easy to use encrypted messaging. The one
other thing that is really worth mentioning, as you situate Glimpse in contrast to Silent
Circle and Wicker they are like spy to spy. They really are encrypted in this unique and
special way. With Glimpse we make security compromises they wouldn't make. So we're able to
have usability that wouldn't be present otherwise. So we don't encrypt your social graph. It's
not a secret on Glimpse who you are talking to. It is a secret the horrible thing that you have
said. (Laughter). >> And that's exactly right because we don't know who our users are. We have
no idea. You can imagine trying to talk to investors and giving them to give you money and
they're, like, tell me about your users. >> Similarly we don't require contact
information. Which is one of the interesting things we've talked about Snap Chat a lot. I tried
to get them to come. They weren't willing to show up. They don't really have a long history
of engaging with the security community. But they've done a lot of great things. You can
attack them for maybe making some mistakes in how they implemented things but they
really did move the industry from log everything again like the mid‑two thousands to
creating this new sort of concept or going back to very old concept of being able to
chat with people directly. For the users they have, which is sort of a weird bi-model
distribution of kids using it for evading their parents then people who should know better
using it for things they shouldn't really be doing, it mostly meets with the first
threat model. Maybe not so much with the second. So you can't pick any of these tools and say
they're perfect for everybody. You have to know what your prep model is. And maybe you are
willing to make sacrifices on security for convenience on certain applications. People
don't have 50 character pass code to unlock their phone every time. People. Maybe I do but
maybe other people don't. >> What I think is really interesting here too about it is
the kind of minimal viable product that's happening right now. And with Yo for instance
and Snap Chat and some of the others coming out, is I wonder if you can survive doing minimal
viable product when you are hosting massive amounts of very sensitive customer data. Will be
interesting to see as it goes on taking a longer term view here is you haven't ‑‑ to see who
wins in the long run. But I think we'll be left standing. I want to know if others will. >>
I don't think it's a minimal viable product issue with Snap Chat or Yo. The moment where
Snap Chat had that massive hack this past New Year's they had enough money and time because
the hackers had given them plenty of notice to have solved that. And they simply didn't
because it wasn't important enough to them. And with Yo people think that Yo is just a
really small app but actually Yo had gotten in front of Robert Scobal well before it got in the
mass media attention. And as anyone who has used Yo knows, Yo was subject to a hack where all
of your cell phone data ‑‑ it was subject to really awful hacks. I can't figure out how to
delete Yo from my phone like in a meaningful way, not just delete the app but, like, to
where my account is gone. This isn't because Yo isn't well funded at this point. They
raised a million dollars. This isn't because it isn't starting to mature as a company. It's
because they really don't care. The investors, the founders don't care. And, you know, where
does that leave us in the industry? >> I think that's an important thing. Because most of
the mistakes that we have seen have been they don't care mistakes. They didn't delete the
files. They didn't ‑‑ they renamed the files they didn't actually delete them. You got
told about a problem on your network and you didn't do anything about it. It is a
negligence thing not even a beginner slash competence thing. >> I think glimpse is a really
good example of what Snap Chat could have done if they cared. We had a much smaller team.
We've only raised $200,000 to date and we've had, like, four of us, three developers and me.
And we built something very similar to Snap Chat but not subject to any hacks they're
subject to. And it didn't take us all that long. Like, it took us about two to three weeks to
really securely build in the system that uploads your contacts, you know, and helps
you find your friends through contact. And we use rate limiting and also enable you to
be hidden. It's that simple. Snap Chat would have just improve their rate limiting and
allow users to hide themselves then Mark Zuckerburg wouldn't have had his phone number
leaked. >> It might be interesting to bring up some of the other ways to compare the
applications. Security is one and competence and negligence but there's also how you use the
things. The other applications like Secret, Whisper, Tech Secure, I mean, we can talk
about how those applications fit into some sort of category system in what you used
different ones for and what the characteristics of various applications. >> As a mom I
worry about secret and whisper. The whisper that's one of the top in the app store right now.
Because kids think that those are anonymous. And my daughter knows how to tell who secrets
those are. >> Which I think is perhaps part of the learning experience. They aren't
anonymous apps. I use both secret and whisper and I like them both. They have different
feels to them but they're un‑attributed. They aren't anonymous at all. And in both
cases, part of the fun is guessing who it is. >> Do you think they planned it that way?
>> Yeah I believe they planned it that way. Absolutely. >> Yeah? Whisper was started as a
suicide help. >> Yeah. >> There's something interesting of course how people behave when
they have anonymity as we've seen. If you go to any internet forum where stuff is essentially
anonymous or at least un‑attributed you see different emerging behaviors. You can have
some where people very civil conversations and just sort of the setting and the context.
It's not ‑‑ it might be informed by the level of anonymity and the kind of technology but it
seems to be a community driven thing as much as anything else. >> That's part of what all of
these have to do is figure out what sort of community they want. When I first started doing
collaboration apps, I spent a lot of time talking to Randy Farmer who is definitely one of
the real pioneers in this and knows more about communities than anyone else. It's
interesting on Secret they've now limited things so that only friends of friends can comment
on a thread. Anybody can see it, but you have to be one hop or two hops to be able to comment.
And they say in the little box that you type in "please be civil." So they are limiting the
amount of trolling that can go on. And creating a social environment where it's highly
likely that the person you are commenting on is someone you know. >> I think the community
that you are going after is really important and really what should define us. And I'm
founder of Roots, that's at DEF CON here as well and work a lot with kids all the time and
that was really one of the reasons that we founded Wicker. Was I felt like my daughters
deserve the same level of encryption that the spies were using. Because in my opinion
data brokers are way greater threat to my friends and family than Snowden. You've got the
worst data breakers out there like Experion that are selling lists of rape victims and
erectile sufferers and dementia sufferers for seven cents a piece. There's thousands and
thousands of those out there. And with our apps we've now, you know, my crypto team was killing
me because we made them add graffiti, and there are stickers in there. Why are we doing this?
Because my daughters say it's really important. Now I use all those features myself every day.
There's really something to it. It's part of what Snap Chat really did show is it is a
new kind of messaging and picturing and writing on pictures is definitely a new way
of communication that I've just learned myself. >> We'd be interested in bringing in the
audience if you have any questions for the panelists. Things we can discuss. We've got
more things to discuss so just as you are getting ready. >> We can chat all day. >> Yes. >> Go
ahead. >> Sort of a two‑part question having to do with not knowing who your customers are.
What happens when somebody who has perhaps used the service for a while decides or, you know,
they lose their credentials and they say, well, you know, I am really unhappy if you can't
reset my account. And you don't have an email address or anything like that. How do you
handle that? Also, the question of do you really not know who it is when you have information
about who their ‑‑ I haven't used your app so I don't know, but I presume there's some sort
of social graph there where you kind of know who these people have in their address books, if
you will, in your app. >> If nothing else you have the IP connection. >> Well maybe you
don't have ‑‑ hopefully you don't have the history with it being an ephemeral app. >> Yes.
>> I mean, in our case, what we want to do is to permit you to have as much privacy as you are
comfortable with. It's something that we have worked out and tested that you could go get a
gift card from a department store. You know, a $100 gift card will pay for one year of
the account and we'll accept that. And we test that to make sure it continues to work. So
you can create an amount of unattributedness that you want. We don't keep server logs on
those things. That's one of the things that is a commitment for us. Particularly because I
believe on the privacy end of things, the less that you as a service are keeping, the more
that you will get dragged in to fights that you really don't want to be dragged in to. So
your defense in these things is to make sure that everything is on the end points and you don't
have it. Creating something where people opt in is different. If you create an
account and you don't give me a contact email address and don't do anything and you lose your
password, I'm terribly sorry, you're stuck. Because you could have done things to give
yourself a safety line and you chose not to. That's part of the service that I am offering. Is
that I am giving you a coil of rope and you can tie a noose with it if you really want to.
>> I think that's right. I mean, users don't want us to give their accounts to other users.
So we have to take, you know, appropriate actions around that. With glimpse, if you want to set
up an account on a phone, a second phone, then we're only one phone per account right now
because of the way our encryption works. Then we say you can log in to this device
and you will lose everything from your old account or you can create a new account. And I
think that's important if people care about privacy they understand that comes with
certain usability issues around things like making accounts too easy to fake or too easy to
recover. >> I would say this is one of the beautiful things about having an ephemeral
messaging app. We don't have a password reset. That would be absolutely unacceptable on
E‑mail I think. That wouldn't work. But there's no password reset right now and what do we
tell people? You might have lost five days of messaging but just get a new account and start
over. There's a password reset, that means someone has your password. If someone has your
password, then bad guys and the FBI and lots of people can get your password. If we would have
had passwords when the FBI came to me and asked me for a back door I wouldn't have been able
to successfully say no. So as we move to the future and we'll have messages that live forever,
we're really looking at solutions there and how do we do a password reset and things like
giving people USB drive with their password on it. Legally speaking, if someone else has
your password they are not legally protected with it. They must give it up. That's
something that's really important to think about as a legal ramifications here. >>
Also something with the way that we built our system. It is a zero knowledge system. So it
took us a long time to figure out how to connect people together without us knowing who
you are. And I think my tech team came one a brilliant solution. Instead of viral
growth I say we've invented bacterial growth. So more like yogurt than a disease but it's
beneficial to society. What we do is if you allow us to, what we'll do is do a crypto graphic
hash of your address book to send up to our servers. If someone has you in their contact
book we'll match the two of you if you have opted in but we still have no idea who you are
and who is in your servers. Growth is a little slower this way because we're not forcing
everyone into our system and automatically uploading everyone's contact. So one of
the biggest complaints I get is I can't find my friends. But we think it is a better way to do
it but definitely makes things tricky. >> We do something similar at glimpse we hash the
user IDs. We do it for Facebook, Twitter and for contacts. We do the same thing where if both
parties have opted in and we can match you. But, again, we're really different from Wicker and
Silent Circle because we really do have the social graph. And that lets us be a lot faster and
do a lot of things we otherwise couldn't do. Like sending messages is faster. Again,
because on our app we're not hiding the social graph. I understand that metadata can be
really useful and important. It's not to say that metadata doesn't matter. But it is to say
that there has to be some kind of privacy space and privacy app in between Facebook and Snap
Chat and in between apps designed for spies. >> I don't know PC magazine just did an
extensive review of all the top messages in the world and we beat What's App and Snap Chat on
features alone because we have more filters, stickers I don't know why, but maybe it's because
we have more filters, stickers and doodles than they do. (Laughter). >> I don't think it
works that way. It doesn't work that way. I mean, you look at Yo and they went to a viral and
people loved it. It was just one click. I used Wicker and I like Wicker. And I respect you a
tremendous amount. But users want things that are easy and simple and if adding more
features was enough to make users more happy, then, like, Facebook and Snap Chat and all
those companies that have tons of developers, and money and research would just be more
featureish. It's not that simple. >> No it's just that we're a text messaging app. And
by the way we're secure and respect your data and don't abuse or lose your personal
information. >> Okay. Let's move on to the next question. >> Yeah. >> So this is I guess a
different type of technical question. You mentioned Snap Chat and these other companies
not fixing these potential leaks because they were negligent. But what if it isn't negligent but
rather an economic misalignment? They don't have the, sort of impetus to actually fix this.
How does your business model, your economic model create the drive to make sure that you
maintain your security? >> Well one answer is three letters FTC. >> I think that's a really hard
problem right. Like companies aren't properly incentivized to do security because it's cheaper
to just apologize later and because consumers aren't necessarily making choices based
on that. So I think you need to be really initiative driven. It's really obviously Silent
Circle and Wicker are mission driven. Glimpse is too. We find ways to make the business models
work really well. My perspective is this is obviously a problem. I'm going to are a long term
business model instead of a short‑term model. Here is one of the tricky things. We've got a
million dollar budget we spend on hackers. And the largest bug bounty in the world. I'm going
to do hundreds of thousands of dollars of pin tests constantly while companies like frankly
that compete with me instead take that million dollars and buy fake user downloads and look
like they have a lot more users and it pushes up the rankings and that gives them more users.
So it will be interesting to see in the long run which of those wins. But yeah there's a couple
of different ways of doing it. >> Okay. Next question. >> This has to do with law enforcement
security and privacy against those people. When I created the idea for the warrant canary I
was hoping that it would find kind of broad acceptance especially by internet service
providers, ephemeral, you know, service providers, and that hasn't happened. It especially
hasn't happened even in the companies that have adopted it in the sense that they've only
made sort of a broad blanket use of the warrant canary if they've received a warrant. Where my
original idea was it could be individually targeted so people could inquire using the canary
whether or not they were the target of a particular warrant or national security letter. So
my question is why hasn't in your opinion on the group really found a home or use? >> I have
no idea. >> I didn't hear it either. >> The warrant canary system where you post a posting
on your website saying I've never received an NSL >> We're actually the first company in
the world to do that. It was a really stressful day. This is when a lot Lavabit was having
its issues. We were wondering what to do. What if we get served with a national security
letter? Well we've got a zero knowledge system to nothing would really happen. We said
let's go ahead and put in a transparency report that we've not received a national security
letter and any other secret orders and we do not have a back door. Since then, Apple followed
us and now there's a 11 other companies they have identified that have done this. It's
unprecedented ground. Who knows if it will work or not. But it came from a really great place
which was librarians in the 1970s. The FBI was going and looking at book records to
determine who was subversive and who wasn't. Librarians take privacy seriously. When you
check out a book, when you are done, they get rid of your record. So what they did, they
started hearing that the FBI was doing this and all the librarians that didn't have a
gag order started putting a sign outside their library that said the FBI has not been here. And
it seemed to work really well at that point. Another part of that actually is after I started
Wicker my mom received notice that the federal government had accessed her library record. She
called me up and said I don't know, this is really strange and I just got this letter and I
wonder why that is. And talked to librarians. They said if you are checkbooks out online it is
not ‑‑ it does not have the same protection as if you are at the library in person. Good thing to
know. >> So there are a lot of things you can do like warrant canaries. The biggest thing you
do is don't keep any data. Part of that is also to make sure that you have servers set up
well. We have ours in Canada and Switzerland intentionally because of their history of
respecting privacy and having government officials who are there to help you do this sort
of thing. But having good relationships with them where you explain to them before they
get upset about something that this is what we do, this is the service we're offering. This is
the sort of data we have and no we don't have that is one of the ways that you don't get one of
those is, you know, they don't want to waste their time giving you a subpoena for data that you
don't have. So having a relationship with people where it's well‑known that you do
things a certain way means that you are extremely unlikely to get a request for the data that
you don't have. >> Exactly. And actually one of the things I've noticed with zero knowledge
systems is the amount of requests actually goes down over time. So, if you are seeing
transparency reports where the requests are going up over time, then that means they're giving
the data. >> Right. >> Exactly. >> I noticed when I ran an anonymous emailer for a long
time am I got a few contacts from the secret service and FBI. I told them what I had, exactly
what I could do, what couldn't be done technically and they were pretty friendly and they
stopped harassing me after that point. It was pretty much the right solution. So definitely
spend your money on technical solutions. >> And a lot of it's very simple. If you put up a
privacy policy that says, this is my policy dealing with disposal of logs, dealing with
this, dealing with that, and you can show that's what you have, you have a contract with your
customers that you are supposed to do a certain thing. Ironically the federal trade
commission that we talked about on the previous question would punish you for handing things
over or keeping those logs after you said you weren't going to. So this is also your best
defense. You've made a commitment to your customers that you will behave in a
certain way. And you are contractually required to do that. And that becomes your
greatest defense. >> I think that's right. I chatted with Jon when we were setting up our
privacy policy and it seems to be the best defense of your customers, right, if you have a
privacy policy where you stated your obligation to them and your server architecture that
supports that, then government officials, you know, there's only so much they can do. >> On
the other end of it, Snap Chat, Twitter, What's App, all of the services, Skype, if you read
their privacy policy pretty much what you are granting is the free transferrable worldwide
license for eternity to your contract. >> Snap Chat deletes after 30 days and there's
utility with that if they want to deal with moderation issues. I understand why they're doing
30 days and not zero given, like, their priorities and their customer base. But, you know, if
you are sending really sensitive material 30 days is probably too long for them to have your data.
>> Maybe the next question. >> Hi. So quick question. Hopefully. Have you found any
commonalities in user bases and conversely have you found any users that have surprised the
hell out of you? >> Jon and I don't know who our users are so they're very common. >> I didn't
hear the question. >> Commonality in user base. I mean, I know a lot of people who
use both Silent Circle and Wicker. I think we have a good deal of overlap. But that comes
from the people who are using it. The real people who are wanting the real anonymity are
actually few and far between. Remember these are communication systems that you are using to
talk to people that you know. And no matter how you set it up you are going to give yourself
some sort of identifier, slash handle and you are going to be telling that, distributing it,
whatever to people that you know. If you go down the line, Elissa is doing something that
is very nice because she is being upfront with her people and saying this is the way we
behave. We are making it so that you and your friends can create a social group where you can
chatter among yourselves in a way that is conducive to things that you might do if you were in
the same room. >> The other direction to go would be something like secure drop where
you've got people submitting anonymous content, focusing on anonymity too. A third party.
That's a totally separate kind of system. >> With regard to Snap Chat, there will always be
the analog hole where people can take a photograph of what is being sent. Is there any
technical solution for a screen shot on the device preventing those? >> I think your best
solution is really a social one. It's called plausible deniability. Because a picture
of a picture can always be faked. >> That's true. >> I, you know, there's no such thing as
plausible deniability. There is reasonable doubt. But there's no such thing as plausible
deniability. No. There is nothing there. You have to have a certain amount of trust of the
person that you are sending something to. Because most of us now are carrying around four or
five devices that's all have cameras and they can be pointed at each other. So really look at
it like a data destruction policy. Look at it like something else. A constructed,
fake looking message that somebody made and lied about that you had done might actually
be more believable than the real thing. >> I have a surprising answer. Just that users don't
care about screen shots. Glimpse built a tool that worked really effectively to prevent screen
shots. It was an animation layer that ran over your photo. So any screen shot would capture a
water mark on top of it. Because of the way the frames work, if you took a video of the
animation it was really fuzzy. Like the words were not readable and the image became very hard
to make out. But when you see the image on your phone using glimpse you would be like that's
a naked person that's a really interesting gossipy message. We thought we just built like the
world's greatest sexting app. We were so proud. And we were really surprised that discover
that users didn't really want this. It's interesting to talk about screen shots.
Intellectually interesting. Because I'm not sure ‑‑ it's, like, a feature people want to
use day‑to‑day. >> We use to have an anti‑tampering solution that made it really difficult to
take a screen shot because if you moved the pixel it would go away. And it worked really well.
But it was a usability issue and people didn't care. So we took it out of there too. It wasn't
that important it seemed. >> We took out our screen shot protection and no one noticed.
>> Us too. No complaints. >> Next question. >> I didn't know you did that. That's cool to
hear. >> So I'm actually not familiar with the three applications but from what I've
gathered from the conversation it seems that the development teams behind them are relatively
compact. So this is a bit of a layered question. I guess, well no I'll just jump right to it.
How have the three of you approached insider threat? >> Very good question. I think
again it comes down to, you know, the social engineering contest that happened here. It
is 100 percent of the target, 100 percent of the time. This is the number one threat we all
need to look at. You can't have any one person in charge of core code. We've got several people
that would have to change the core code to do things. Because for instance, you know, we don't
want the threat of someone kidnaps your child and says change this. Or let me give you
$100 million under the table to change this. Those are all very key threats you need to think
about. >> There's two simple tools that we use. Get and get hub. That our developers are all
checking things in and we know who did them and periodically we take a snapshot and put it up
for review. So an insider who made a change would end up going through internal review and we
know who is working on what. And ultimately it will end up where anybody can go and see it. So
the idea that an insider can do something insidious is greatly limited. Well do something
insidious and not get caught is greatly limited. And so publishing your source is what I
would say. >> So the counter argument to that, of course, would be for instance true
crypt. I am not saying there have been any problems but, of course, how long has it been
before somebody decided to go through a major audit of that code base? >> That's a very long
other debate. And, you know, it's a very interesting one. But it's not clear that it has
anything to do with insider threats. Which is what you asked. >> Right. >> Thank you.
>> Thanks. >> All right. Just going to ask a question related to the previous one. Are all
three of your applications open sourced. >> The EFF would say they're not open sourced though.
>> Depends on what you mean by open source. If you mean, you know, if you mean ‑‑ there are
people who think they own the word "open" and my source is published under a variant BSD
license that says you can do anything with it except make money. You can compile it
yourself. You can use it. You can give it to your friends. But, you know, you can't build a
competing system. This is not an OSI compatible license. But you can download the source and
compile it and do whatever you want with it except make money. >> I think that's what glimpse
is going to do. We're a really baby company. You know, it's actually like I'm really honored
to be on stage with Wicker and Silent Circle but we only launched in March and we're only
available for IOS. It's going to be a good three months before we market ourselves as a security
app. We just need to spend more time on that first. So we've been thinking about how we want
to handle this. We are not open source but I think following those models is what we'll want
to do. >> We're wondering about that saying do we do part open source and part not. The main
reason we haven't opened sourced our code is we don't want a bunch of copycat apps out there
that have done interesting things with it. There's also a threat model there. But it's
something that we continually think about. But I think it's important, I think within this
community a lot of times people equate open source with secure and closed source with not
secure. And that's a dogma. And something that I think, you know, there's a lot of ways to
add trust and transparency. And I think that's what we all need to get better at every day. >>
Well you can do code audits right. >> Just today we actually announced two more code audits
from I tech and aspect. So we've had the best groups of hackers in the world. And months and
months looking at our source code every day. And two of them today verified that indeed we
use the strong crypto that we say we do. It's been properly implemented and they indeed
found no back door. >> Let's try to get the last two questions. >> As a developer, do you have
any advice for someone that's looking to build ephemeral communication apps or at least
applications that have some elements of this type of communication? >> Advice? Well
the first bit of advice is actually care about what you are doing. Because really the things
we've seen that have gone wrong, everybody makes mistakes. Fix your mistakes, look at what you
want to be your threat model. Look at your privacy policy. Look at how you are going to
handle some of these things. And genuinely live up to what your own ideals are. That's the
really big one. The technology is relatively easy. It's the execution that's hard. >> It is
a really crowded space. When I first decided to do this it was a year and a half ago and Snap
Chat wasn't on Android and Facebook hadn't yet started to get into the market. And line
which is IPO in Japan is going ephemeral. Facebook wants to do this. It's becoming kind of
normative. So I think if you want to do an ephemeral app the question is, okay, like,
everyone is ephemeral now. How are you different? >> There's a communication sub strait company
called Prodia and they let you do a lot of programing in Java script and they have a how to
make ephemeral communication system there. It really is normative. >> Could we have the
last question? >> So if everyone's ephemeral and we aren't protecting screen shots,
what sort of features do you think these apps should have that they don't currently have
and what are the most important? >> In our apps? Right now. Sorry I didn't understand the
question. I'd love to find a way to do password reset. >> I think community is what is really
interesting now. When I look at new apps that come out. Because there's so many communications
apps out there and what can make an app different surprisingly is like what is the ethos on there.
What kind of modernization is on there? Who else, you know, which friends of mine are on there.
That's actually what's most interesting to me right now. >> So talk to me about password
resets. That's easy. (Laughter) There are ‑‑ the idea is what do you want to solve? What sort of
communities do you want to support? What sort of communications do you want to
support? There are a lot of things that a bunch of people are over thinking. And if you
don't try to do everything, say, in the security layer, you do it in the user layer, are a lot
easier than if you try to prove that you can always do these things. I mean, for example with
ephemerality as we've said you are not going to get 100 percent. You are going to
get something that is completely and utterly usable and solves 99.99 percent of it and that's
actually easy. The last nine, you are not going to get that. >> I'd like to thank the panel
for contributing and working on these great applications that I use myself and there's a lot of
people that use. And I'm really excited to see where they're all going to go in the feature. >>
Thank you, Ryan. (Applause)