Privacy Talk with Christopher Gorog, CEO BlockFrame Inc and Chair IEEE Digital Privacy Initiative : Why did you start to work at blockchain and privacy?
“This interview recorded on 20th April 2023 is talking about privacy and blockchain.”
Kohei is having great time discussing privacy and blockchain.
This interview outline:
- Introduction
- Why did you start to work at blockchain and privacy?
- What is the trust on the blockchain?
Kohei: Thank you. Hi, everybody, coming to the Privacy Talk. So I’m so honored to invite Chris at this moment as interviewee. Chris is leading an interesting initiative, IEEE Digital Privacy. So we are having the conversation about this move today through the interview. So thank you for having Chris at this moment.
Chris: Thank you for having me on. I appreciate the invite.
- Introduction
Kohei: First of all, I’d like to introduce his profile. Chris is CEO BlockFrame Inc, Chair IEEE Digital Privacy Initiative, Chair IEEE Blockchain Initiative Security & Privacy, Published Author, Inventor, Co-Founder of Blockchain Development Community, Founder of International Alliance of Trust Chains, Blockchain SME to the State of Colorado Legislator, the Host of the New Cyber Frontier Podcast, and Research Partner with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Arizona State University, University of Colorado, University of Denver, and Colorado State University.
Mr. Gorog is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional by the International Information System Security Certification Consortium and Certified Project Management Professional by the Project Management Institute and has over 25 years in industry designing cryptographic applications for cyber physical embedded systems and has worked to secure supply chains for several leading manufacturers.
He is an ex-Navy Nuclear Engineer, who has also spent several years in Academia as a Director for Cybersecurity programs at Colorado Technical University. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, Master of Business Administration, Master of Business Administration, Masterof Computer Science in Computer System Security from Colorado Technical University.
His PhD work in Cybersecurity Engineering at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, engages several community groups and international organizations in support of research for the State of Colorado to enable security and privacy for government records.
And again, it’s very appreciative in having a conversation.
Chris: Thank you for having me on.
Kohei: Thank you. So yeah, let’s move on to the agenda today. I’m so excited to have a conversation with you because you have been working on a very interesting space, especially for blockchain and privacy. So could you share about your careers? Why did you start to work at the blockchain at privacy at this moment?
- Why did you start to work at blockchain and privacy?
Chris: Wow, it seems like one of those things where I almost fell into it. And security in general for many, many reasons for many years working in industry, security was that black box that people and I myself almost ignored a lot because it seemed too complex.
And I remember the first time I got pulled into it, it was under the terms that it was something else. I was trying to fix a problem where they had a mechanical fire in a piece of equipment because somebody had basically hacked in across the network and turned on something physical that started a fire.
And they asked me to make sure that couldn’t happen again. And we didn’t even call it Cybersecurity it was the Mine Safety protection agency in the United States that wanted to make sure that that physical damage couldn’t happen again.
And at the time that was so long ago that we just unplugged the network and didn’t let the equipment operate on the network. But that isn’t a problem we can just do anymore because everybody’s so interconnected.
So, working into security was kind of the start, how do you secure equipment, how do you and privacy has always been like this bolt on to security just like security is often a bolt on to a technology operation.
And it wasn’t until literally probably five or six years ago, I got pulled into privacy because I was implementing the security around government systems for the state of Colorado. And I kept asking my state-side representatives you know, I would tell them okay, we know how to secure this or make this information public or make it private, but help me now, which information do I make public, and which information do I make private? Nobody knew.
So I kept asking the questions around what I have to implement with my security, to get privacy for these citizen records.
Who was making the decision on a driver’s license or a health record. And as for the state, it’s going into your database, who’s going to tell me what I need to secure and how I need to do it.
They didn’t have anybody to answer those questions. So I started moving into privacy because I had to ask and answer those questions myself. And, and looking at that, which tools to use?
Blockchain kind of came to the top as a distribution of trust. If we can use the tool to distribute trust, can we use the tool to distribute the extraction of trusts and thus the confidentiality as well as the ability to show that it was enacted.
So we were looking at using the tool of blockchain for both of those to implement proof of operation but obfuscate and have confidentiality around the operation itself. Thus, we’re implementing privacy for records and that’s kind of how I came into it just as a technologist and actually implementing it and then now I share the Digital Privacy initiative, and literally got connected to them for my work in Colorado.
I spoke at a couple places and they came to me and said, you know, Future Directions committee, FDC, one of their representatives said, can you lead this Digital Privacy, we want to start off because we don’t have anybody else that’s really working in the area that comes from a technology background.
And that’s how I got to where I’m at with Digital Privacy.
Kohei: Thank you for sharing your interesting story. I suppose the blockchain is still one of the interests in a technical field and that involves protecting privacy.
So why did you come up with the idea with the blockchain? Are there any signals you decided to bet on the blockchain as a technical background?
- What is the trust on the blockchain?
Chris: I don’t think I bet on the blockchain as a solution. Blockchain is just another tool. Um, I was for years, I helped implement security and cyber physical systems.
And there was a very limited number of operations that we actually do in security, identifying data, verifying the data and change, so integrity, authenticate actors, set up sessions, you know, and then encrypt data for transport or rest.
There’s very few applications. They’re just done a thousand different ways. And what was always missing for years was the distribution of trust, which we, in the security industry, have used certificates, hierarchy, certificate authorities.
We don’t trust somebody else’s certificate authority. So it didn’t work as a distributed trust between people that don’t trust each other. Now, when we looked at the tool for blockchain that came in, you know, the 2009 paper produced by Satoshi Nakamoto that said, hey, I can make a currency.
And I said, but what they’ve looked at is a distribution of trust. So it added that tool to our security palette that says, “We should be able to take this tool and distribute trust in any way we need to”. Now we just need to build it out so it’s operational, and that is apparent to be the hardest part is making it operational because the first applications weren’t scalable, very well.
That’s the big part that we’ve looked at for the last five, six years is scaling blockchain and make you know, we understand now how to use it to distribute trust. But now can we scale up to the size needed for a state program.
Kohei: I agree that the blockchain is very typical features that they have it and we can should increase the kind of the these moves to implement it into the societies in many ways. So I would like to explore the role of your work at IEEE Digital Privacy, as you mentioned, that you’ve been founded and as co-chair of this new initiative, so could you share your role on the IEEE Digital Privacy?
Thank you for reading and please contact me if you want to join interview together.
Privacy Talk is the global community with diversified expert, and contact me below Linkedin if we can work together!
