Privacy Talk with Shlomi Dolev, Rita Altura Trust Chair Professor in Computer Science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev “Blockchain is the next Internet innovation?״

This interview is talking about privacy technology and blockchain for future business development.

Kohei is having great time discussing with blockchain and security expert Shlomi Dolev.

This interview outline:

• Department History of Computer Science
• Why Blockchain innovates the security architecture?
• How can we establish trustworthy network?
• The secret of Israeli entrepreneurship education
• Message to the listeners

Kohei: So thank you for the listeners to join a privacy talk. I’m very honored to be invited to Shlomi from this time. So, yeah, let me start this very great talking about the future privacy space. So, first of all, let me introduce about Shlomi. He is Chair Professor and founder of the department of computer science of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, served as faculty of Natural Science dean, chair of the Board of the Inter-University Computation Center (first ISP of Israel). Currently Computer Science Discipline Committee Chair in the Israeli Education Ministry.

Over three hundred publications in computer science, distributed computing, networks, cryptography, security, optical computing, brain science, quantum computing, nanotechnology and machine learning. Author of the self-stabilization book published by MIT Press. Welcome Shlomi. This ties. So, thank you very much.

Yeah, it’s very honored to be with you. let’s move on to today’s interview topics. So first topics about your university’s career and then you started.

And you’re working on the Department of Computer Science of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and I made some read your profiles, you had established since the 2000, which was a very brilliant history for me. So please, tell me about your history in the background why you start established, computer science?

• Department History of Computer Science

Shlomi: So, what happen[ed] in Israel and in ,other parts in the world, the Department of Computer Science which [was] [a ]relatively new discipline, [a] young discipline came from electrical engineering, or mathematics. And what happened in Israel, that when I joined the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science in Ben-Gurion university, there was one department for both disciplines.

And just when I was [put] in charge of computer science, it came out that this is a natural thing to separate them because computer science became so important in the University. And then I was the first chair, and we got all the approvals, and we got the approval to give a degree in computer science.

And this was a big major step [from] thirteen or so faculty members to now more than forty. So, we now have many students, something like 10% of the students in the University are computer science, and they are the very best of them.

And this is the engine of High Tech, and you know all the activities in Israel and economy are influenced by this [kind] of growth in academia for computer science. And I’m very happy that I had the opportunity to do it. Certainly been lucky in this. I grew in the Technion and I was in Texas A&M and came after [my] postdoc to Ben Gurion University, and then I was involved in creating all [these] influential steps, which is, you know, [fortunate] .

Yeah. So this is what can I tell, of course, many things to tell about this process, but we have other subjects so please.

Kohei: I understand that’s pretty amazing. I saw that you have a remarkable number is their ranking in computer science. I saw that it’’s taking law in 2015, you got the remarkable numbers in the ranking of computer science worldwide, right?

Shlomi: Yea,150 of the best departments in the world. So this is a very young department, only [started in] 2000, already established itself as one of the good departments, we are very happy with this.

Kohei: Thank you. So maybe in your class, you are teaching about blockchain and security, as well as you have started some blockchain related project for the divisions. So, what kind of the project are you working on this moment?

• Why Blockchain innovates the security architecture?

Shlomi: Computer science is a young discipline. So, you still have a lot to say, in many facets in this evolving discipline. There are some cases when you look at machine learning now, or big data, before [were looking into] sensor networks. So it’s a very very exciting field.

I grew in distributed computing, but then distributed computing has some kind of a built in security because there are faults in the system like Byzantine faults.

In fact, if you take cryptography, the perfect cryptography of information theoretically secure is using some kind of, for instance, Byzantine agreement. This is one example for this.

But, you know, I had the opportunity to work with big companies like Deutsche telecom [on] cyber security [which] we brought to Ben-Gurion university, and we get to work closely with IBM, with EMC, several big companies on security projects.

And this, enriches us in the knowledge and the state of the art problems that we dealt with. And of course, as I see it, blockchain is the next revolution. After you know the web created what it created from the internet. Now, people say that blockchain is internet three after web being internet two.

The blockchain is in fact a distributed replicated state machine, which is in the core of distributed computing, and how to do it in a way that is efficient and quantum safe, This is something that I am looking into in the last years. And we came out with a very exciting system, which is a quantum safe blockchain by design.

It’s not that we took some blockchain and made it quantum safe, but we design upfront from the very beginning, the system to be quantum safe. Because of this, we get this very high performance of 170 thousand transactions per second in a benchmark that the blockchain are using, which is the fastest, in LAN , and WAN 20,000 TPS, which both of them are very competitive with what industry has now, like VISA needs 60~65,000 transaction per second, and 170,000 is much more.

And all this is ready for being, you know, alife after quantum computer will break Diffie-Hellman and RSA, and all these signatures that are based on discrete log and reveal all, the transactions that are made now, with health care who is [as] finance, which are very important to keep private, and will be revealed soon, you know, maybe in seven years or so, who knows, but you still want to be ready for it now. NIST looks into [these] regulations to make this quantum safety into blockchain.

So, we look at what we accomplished with SodsBC, this is the name of our system. And it can do very well in the scope of finance, scope of health care, or scope of IoT and many others, and it’s based on, some innovative idea of using the blockchain to help it’s creation of its own next blocks. So this is something that never appeared before. And it’s very useful.

Kohei: Yeah. Once I heard about this idea there was pretty amazing to solve data issues TPS is the one of the very big challenges for the blockchain projects. To make any useful and the efficiencies to transactions in between the highly rates of the realistic approach, so maybe those technology is brilliant.

To make a faster to solve the problems of the industry, cause I had a talk with some companies that working on the IoT payment. Those will be very small amounts, but this, they are need more transactions, so this is the benefit of that ideas. So there was amazing.

Shlomi: And there is no gas involved, no overhead involved, like energy because it is based on Byzantine fault tolerance and some multi party computation schemes, (Kohei:I see) so it makes it free of charge.

Kohei: It’s pretty good. So, yeah, I want you to move to a question in accordance with you are those topics. I think multi party computation is very important approach to protect the data privacy for the users, especially IoT or those device is a correct in a too much data but it’s very hard to make an explicitly consent to get the data from the users.

So do you see any good use case too much computation in Israeli government or Corporation at this moment?

Shlomi: What we feel now about these technologies, that there are some banks that are interested in this. So this is, you know, finance transactions. Just think about Bitcoin what will happen if quantum computers will break [the] security of Bitcoin.

What happened to all the coins. So it’s now the time to make sure that we move to quantum safe blockchain. Also in Ethereum, [it] is the same, all cryptocurrencies need our technology.

There are several verticals that are interested in what we do. So we are happy. Hopefully we become part of [regular] life for some places at least, so it will be very nice.

Kohei: So, when it comes to the sharing the data in between the some parties, I guess the one other issues, who is a trusted parties on the networks. They will be open into the anybodies, may be done trusted party will join in this cases. So how do you envision the tip or the technical solutions, and the why, there will be realized with your approach, is there any ideas?

• How can we establish trustworthy network?

Shlomi: You see, I just look at consortiums like Baseline of E&Y and Microsoft and others, and Libra of Facebook and others, or R3. All these consortiums can run our blockchain and the additive trust in them it’s not a single bank, it’s not a single entity, the additive trust in them is the trust that you get, which is, you know, important, and I think that it still leaves the maintenance and professional checks with big companies that want to keep their trust, and overall the trust grows. So this is how I view it. Of course, we can take it to permissionless, but our go to market is first with permissioned, maybe even of a single bank with its branches.

So just make sure its branches , you know, are not erasing some records, and you can trace what is going on forever. So there are many cases where there is a single entity that has its own benefit of doing it and I think hyperledger is one example that is doing projects like this.

Walmart, in the chain of the products, and so on. And there are also consortiums like baseline your know like R3 or Libra..

And, there is also permissionless, maybe in the scope of Bitcoin or Ethereum that can be quantum safe. All of these verticals are for us, you know, an opportunity to help using SodsBC.

Kohei: I see. Great to hear the answers because the trusted party is that very big discussion for us for this moment, not only for the blockchain but also decentralize the cloud system.

So how we can provide enough trust for the users, the stakeholders so the very important discussion of this moment. So you all have another story is the Secret Double Octopus.

It’s a passwordless new challenge. It also got invested from the Japanese Corporation investors. I had saw this, they are trying to support the Japanese deployment as well.

Regarding this topic, we have challenging this moment the user verification and authentication hybrid.

Because it’s very hard to provide it efficiencies. Once you make it verified yourself, you go to the bank office and you prove yourself, which is very annoying for us at this moment. So that’s a lot of the FinTech companies that try to use app, instead of doing that.

But the problem is right now in Japan, we have some leaks to hacking incident through this process. I think you will project seems to be one of the alternative solution to provide for those banking or financial services. So could you give me a brief, how it works, the passwordless service new technologies?

Shlomi: So, I co founded the company in 2015 and what we do, we just have better security, that doesn’t involve users’ passwords. For, you know passwords of users are very dangerous. And if you have an attack, an attack can scan the users until it finds some admin123 as a password and then get into the system.

So, instead of this we change the way the industry will work. If you come to be an employer in some new enterprise. You don’t bring with you your key, and your cylinder of the door. So why should you define your password.

The same, the keys [are] in the hand of the enterprise and they are responsible for just defining it and maintaining it over time keeping it secure and fresh. So this is an important new thinking. And we also have[] some quantum safe technology that will just replace the usage of a Diffie-Hellman and RSA when [the] time comes, because we use several channels, that are independent and we get much more security.

Kohei: That’s good. So do you have any intention to work with the Japanese corporations, why they decided to work with you there?

Shlomi: You know it’s a global problem, we work with the US, in many continents, and Japan is one of the leading technology countries. So of course, why not Japan. We are very happy with this.

Kohei: I see, that’s pretty good message. So to the next topic is about education..

So previously we see a lot of Israeli education from Japanese medias. They encouraged entrepreneurship startup mindset to produce a new technologies, or services from scratch, there was a very inspirations for the Japanese new young entrepreneurs.

I’m aware of them. So I want to know about any startups acceleration program to you, seems to be a part of that. What do you work on that and encouraged new startups in Israel?

• The secret of Israeli entrepreneurship education

Shlomi: So there are two topics, about education, what we do is — we learn from Japanese. We put robotics as part of the education. I was in Japan, I saw all the stores for robotics. So in this sense, we just brought from (Japan robotics approach to) Elementary School for fourth grade, a new program, that [a] pupil will study robotics and computer science [from the beginning], and they enjoy it. It’s like a game for them, but they learn so much because you have to think about logic and planning, and you get so much beyond the computer.

So, this is a new program that I was lucky to establish. And there is another thing that I’m doing is the faculty startup accelerator in the University. When I established the department, a professor from Stanford came to give the main lecture, and he said, every faculty should have a start up in computer science.

I told him you know we have to do publications, teaching, training PhD students, masters, and let us do the academic stuff. But eventually, if you do what Stanford professors are doing, and Silicon Valley around them. It’s much more enriching. And, you know, expose you to real problems, and you know, you’re more directed to the goals that you can achieve.

And this what happened here around Ben Gurion University, now we have a “Silicon Wadi”, with many leading companies like Dell EMC, and we have Deutsche Telecom and IBM. All this was created near the University. There was a vision of the president of the University Avishay Braverman he wanted to do it and eventually it was done, and of course [he] couldn’t do it without computer science and we did deliver what should be done. And now, I’m just trying to do this training [for] other faculty members that have no clue what is the process of creating startups and how to do it. And I think that this is also something that influences the area, and the prosperity of Be’er Sheva, Israel, and the IT in the world globally.

So I’m very happy with this too. Some of my students are in some leading companies like IBM, Google and others, so this also have influence on this ecosystem in Israel.

Kohei: Hmm, yeah, that’s pretty great achievement. So is there any national strategies, the government is to support those activities, such as provided subsidiaries, or any facilities to take actions or any pipelines, the ones who graduated to go to the government or any specific support? Is there anything that?

Shlomi: The government does support new startups. They have matching for some money that you get from VCs. They have some programs that take academic ideas into startups. Many programs to help the hi-tech technology growing in Israel. This is important because if you have IT growing then the incomes from taxes eventually are very important to the country.

Manpower is the most important thing that we have in Israel, we don’t have gold or diamonds, or oil, so we have to have our education good. And also, we fight with so many enemies that we must have the leading technology in cybersecurity, computer science, so this is a some kind of a must that we didn’t choose that that it [will] happen, so we must do it and we must do it good to survive, now [the] army is not only tanks and Air Force it’s also cyber security, it’s part of it. You must be good in this field too.

Kohei: Thank you for such an insight. So lastly I’m very happy to share the your thoughts to the Japanese listeners. So could you give us the message from society the listeners not, maybe not only for in Japan but all over the world who are also this interviews.

• Message to the listeners

Shlomi: Yeah, I think that blockchain is the next stage of the Internet and it can solve many security problems at once. And I know that you are doing blockchain, and I am just happy to speak with somebody that believes the same. So, thank you very much for inviting me here.

And, you know, it’s not only that we believe in business we also have fun. Fun meeting very smart people, you think about the deep mathematical problems and algorithms.

So everything is also part of what we do. And in this sense we are lucky, I think, to do some innovative next steps and to see how it becomes a reality. I work with Japanese [colleagues] in several projects, and I enjoy [working with them very much].

So, it’s a [lot of] fun, I visited Japan several times. And plan, after the Corona, to visit more. Let’s finish this Corona surprise soon.

Kohei: Thank you for Shlomi to join, today’s interview with a very honored to have a great discussion with you. I also am very happy to share. Though the listeners can contact this team, if they’re interested in that, please feel free to message me. Thank you for coming in today so yeah, see you then. Goodbye. Thank you for having.

Shlomi: Thank you. Bye bye.

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