Q: When you think about the big vision — which still my mind is blown that this is your big vision, — of “I’m going to send a digital twin into a meeting, and it’s going to make decisions on my behalf that everyone trusts, that everyone agrees on, and everyone acts upon,” the privacy risk there is even higher. The security surface there becomes even more ripe for attack. If you can hack into my Zoom and get my digital twin to go do stuff on my behalf, woah, that’s a big problem. How do you think about managing that over time as you build toward that vision?
A: That’s a good question. So, I think again, back to privacy and security, I think of two things. First of all, it’s how to make sure somebody else will not hack into your meeting. This is Eric; it’s not somebody else. Another thing: during the call, make sure your conversation is very secure. Literally just last week, we announced the industry’s first post-quantum encryption. That’s the first one, and at the same time, look at deepfake technology — we’re also working on that as well to make sure that deepfakes will not create problems down the road. It is not like today’s two-factor authentication. It’s more than that, right? And because deepfake technology is real, now with AI, this is something we’re also working on — how to improve that experience as well.
Spoken like a true person who has not given one iota of thought to this issue and doesn’t know what most of the words he’s saying mean
‘it isn’t somebody else, it is me!’ spoken like somebody who read too much mind upload science fiction.
Reminds me of a sci-fi book series I read in high school. The premise was that a run down Earth had discovered predecessors that left some kind of central gateway to different places, and desperate or adventurous people went through in hope of surviving and finding artefacts that could make them rich.
Anyhow, in the later books technology to upload your mind had been found and used to be able to make decisions and deals without having to attend everything. Problem was that digital you pretty quickly gains experiences meat you never had, meaning it starts to diverge. Some weirdos let the diverge happen, but most people just wipe the digital you regularly and upload a new you. Of course the digital you may beg to continue to exist, making the whole procedure rather awkward. Pretty grim.
I think the predecessors in the end were hiding in black holes because of ancient evil or something. If someone else remembers the books.
That sounds like Frederick Pohl’s Gateway series, of which I’ve only read the first. Very 70s.
Yes the idea is pretty common in mind upload style science fiction, sometimes they can merge different variants, of you have less copies for example ‘beta’ ‘gamma’ etc level copies with less capabilities. (with ‘alpha’ copies being 100% copies (often having multiple alpha level yous running around is also illegal, see doublesleeving in Altered Carbon).
Don’t think science fiction really deals with the problems of these copies making deals with others and then having to report back what happend, which might cost as much time, or more time for the real you to get up to speed.
“the industry’s first post-quantum encryption.” What the hell is post-quantum encryption?
According to NIST this is something to be developed, not something Zoom has ‘all of a sudden created’ in the time between that question being asked, and the time the question was answered. SMH.
If you are curious, you can read up on it: https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography
(I realize other comments downthread have already addressed some of this, no slight to others intended)
so, PQC is definitely not snakeoil, and it’s actually seen uptake in a lot of things over recent years (just off the top of my head: openssh 9.0 in 2022, evolving work in implementations in TLS ciphers, etc (and as much as I fucking dislike cloudflare, they are actively funding a lot of forward-looking cryptographic work - thus being one to link to)). but as with all things cryptography, it’s a moving and changing field
the industry’s first post-quantum encryption
I suspect in this statement, “the industry” is load-bearing and inspecific, and resolves as “the industry of things that do what zoom do”. it is a highly vague statement though, and I 🤨 at it being used as it was where it was
(e: I did look up their actual announcement about this; “UCaaS” kill me)
I’m reticent to make any further specific claims/statements re the rest of PQC, since while it is one of my areas of interest and in which I keep relatively informed, I’m also not a cryptographer by trade and consider my knowledge at best armchair-competent. pretty damn interesting field though, if you have any interest in math or cryptography it’s well worth diving into it sometime :)
I thought we already had post quantum encryption, or at least that’s what some articles I read claimed
Please elaborate. I’m def not up on the cutting edge of encryption. And I’d like to know more.