Thank you so much. So my name is Amira Bougera. I am a cryptographer and security engineer, and I come from a mathematical background. I work in the blockchain field since almost two years right now, and I started a project called Hellhound with my co-founder, Sajida. The project Hellhound is about an off-chain computing network that allows decentralized applications developers to implement privacy by design in their applications. My name is Sajida Zouarhi. I'm a French from Paris. I'm engineer, and I did a research in computer science for APG for three years. I worked on critical data transmission and complex system. I got into blockchain in 2015. At first it was mostly with hackathons and meetups, so I really wanted to get a sense of the community, and I started organizing events and sharing knowledge, and trying to find people with common interests. I co-founded a project called Hellhound with Amira about privacy, and this came from some of my research topics around how to do computation on data without disclosing them. That's why in 2015, I started a project called Kidner which aims at scaling kidney paired donation. So the idea is that using blockchain, we can actually create a network of hospitals that's going to help people get a kidney transplant faster. So this is how I can link blockchain and social impact. How did you conceive the Hellhound concept? So why Hellhound? Why we started this project, and why we wanted to work on privacy and also this computation over encrypted data? So for myself, when I was studying cryptography, I was always interested in everything related to data privacy, to data confidentiality, and I've worked starting from 2015 in a research lab about homomorphic encryption, and homomorphic encryption, it's a way of doing computation over encrypted data without disclosing it. So I worked on those projects mostly for research for several months. Then after that, when I finished my studies, I started being interested in the blockchain because I was introduced to it in a course at school, and I wanted because I came from a background that's more related to privacy to security, I wanted to work on these topics security with the blockchain. So I started doing smart contracts, security audits, and also everything related to cryptography, and that's how I met Sajida. So I met her at a hackathon that she organizes called Blockfest in France. That was 2017, and then she introduced me to her project Kidner, which is as she mentioned it allows people to do kidney transmission without disclosing personal data of patients and donors. We started thinking of a way to allow people to do that by using this homomorphic encryption method, and that's how we started working together in a non-official way, and then she joined ConsenSys. She told me about it. At that point, I was in a difference company called Stratum also working in the blockchain field in mostly in traceability. Then she told me about her project she was working on at ConsenSys called Linnia, which is a data protocol also allowing people to share private data to allow permission, to access private data, and also to do computation about private data. So we joined both that project, and then we started having an idea of how we can create this platform that allows to do computation over encrypted data, and then this is how it started Hellhound. What is Hellhound? So what is Hellhound? Hellhound is a protocol that we're developing in order to enable developers to have privacy by design in their architecture. We know that it is not easy for a developer or for someone that has no mathematical or cryptographic knowledge to use those tools, to discover them, and apply them properly. So sometimes people, they just don't use it. Sometimes when they use it, they introduce vulnerability, and so that's something that we want to avoid. We know that those techniques have been around for decades, but they are less used, and they are not used for the benefits of the end-user. So today people are very used to just give away their data and lose control over them, and we believe that another paradigm is possible, especially with blockchain, we have a second chance at rebuilding the web, at designing application. So our idea is to say okay since we have a window of opportunity, let's offer protocol that is user-friendly, and efficient, and secure, so that's developers use them now, and so that application of tomorrow that will take over what we know today are private by design are respecting these guidelines. So Hellhound is going to provide protocol that enables nodes to communicate in a safe and secure environment. So what that means is that we're using encryption everywhere. Nothing is disclosed in the Hellhound platform. So the nodes performing the computation, they never have the real data, the plain text data, and so that's our engagements. You send us your data, encrypt it, we are able to compute on them with different approach, we give you back a result, and you do whatever you want with that result. So we're dividing the tasks. We don't believe in the fact that because you're have application and you're offering a service and getting paid for it, you have to get this double bonus which is also getting the data. So now an application can come to us, deploy a computation algorithm on our network, and the user of this application send their encrypted data, and Hellhound is the third actor in this. It's going to compute this data without knowing them, and then the application is still there and can display it to the user. So everyone is still here. No one is cut off from the value chain, but these things are more fair. Kidner is a good example of that. So the idea of kidney paired donation is that you have to found matching pairs of donor and recipient that are incompatible. So I'll give you an example. You come to the doctor and someone from your family is willing to give you a kidney, but then you discover that you're not compatible. That's a pity because it's very hard to find a compatible donor. So what we do is we offer them another option. They can join a pool of incompatible pairs, and the algorithm can match them and find cross matches. So by scaling this to a bigger scope, then we can have more and more occurrence of this compatibility, which means more and more transplants opportunity, which means a reduced time on the waiting list. So the blockchain helps us here because we can have a governance that is completely fair for the hospital. It doesn't mean that because you have a hospital in France and a hospital into US participating in the Kidner service, doesn't mean that all the data has to go to the US, or be centralized in France, or be centralized in India. So we believe that blockchain here on the technical level but also in a governance level is enabling new services that couldn't exist before. But we still had an issue how to get to those data and how to make sure that hospital agreed to send patient data because that's very precious to them. So that's why Hellhound here for Kidner but for so many other application is very useful because we can take the Kidner application and use Hellhound in the architecture to do this match that I was talking about. So it means that hospitals encrypt patient data. They send them to the other nodes, encrypts it, and our matching algorithm, Kidner matching algorithm can go and run over Hellhound infrastructure on encrypted data, and is going to disclose you like a Boolean, so yes or no, there is a match, and the application is going to notify the doctors and say, "We found a match. Now it's your turn. It's your job to get in touch." Then they follow the normal guidelines of transmit. So we're not in the medical field. We are in the information field. We are discovering new information without disclosing critical data and creating new opportunities basically. Why is cryptography important? So why we think data privacy is so important. I think I'll go back to the story of Snowden about that. So something that he said and I truly believe that when people say, "We don't care about private information. I don't have anything to hide." He said if you say that, it's the same thing as if you say, "I have no opinion about this. I have no opinion. I don't want to participate, for example, in choosing who will be our next president or who would be representing us, or anything related to actually." Or I don't need curtains, I don't need a door because I have nothing to hide. So it's the same thing people right now don't actually understand the importance of privacy because they don't understand the circumstances that would come afterwards if they reveal information. It could be government spying on people. It could be different corporations using this private data such as Facebook, for example, Google or others that's using people information to create algorithms that would have a doppelganger, which we call an online doppelganger, which means that you actually create from different type of informations about the person, you create a profile of the person. So in a way, you say, "It's okay. I said on Facebook I'm traveling this place." It's fine people know I traveled there. Then they would see on your Instagram where you were with this person, and then they would see on Twitter that you talk to this person. So if you can combine all these type of information, you actually created a profile of the person. Now why would that be scary is that you can start manipulating people, that it could be used in a very malicious way. So I'm not saying that everyone using it in a malicious way, but I'm saying it's just possible, and we don't want that to be possible. We want to be the owners of our own private life. We don't want to be controlled. We don't want to be told what to do or not to do. We don't want to be said, "You cannot have, for example, medical," what we say. Medical service. Yeah. Medical service just because they know for example that this person took drugs, or this person had this HIV, or this person had this and this, and because they know that these type of information about people, then they will not provide them help. Or credits, or job or any kind of services. The more you know about a population, the more you can use this information to discriminate and say, "These service is just for this people etc. But when you don't have this information, you just don't know. So that's a freedom that is very dear to us. Obviously, it's not just black and white, but that gray area is where we want to put a line so that people can at least know and decide when they share and when they don't, and today it is so complicated that everything is shared by default, and everything that we read about confidentiality, and we're talking about Facebook with so many user changing their term and condition for being more respectful, it's bullshit because at the end of the day, people they just don't understand those terms. They don't even know that there is an API. They don't even know that I can just pull all of their tweets for the last year. They just don't know that. So when you don't know that something exists, you cannot fear it, and if you cannot fear it, you cannot protect yourself from it. So there is a lack of education here, and that's where Hellhound is also trying to help. We do not intend to only do technical tools, obviously that's all core. We also intend to do education and make sure, and this is why we're here in an escape room, make sure that people understand what is cryptography. It's not a scary thing. It's not a complicated thing. It's something that can help you, and so we're trying to get there. What advice do you have for new blockchain developers? So our advise to new developers and people interested in cryptography is to pursue this interest. Cryptography is getting, how to say, like it's trendy again, and I think it's thanks to block chains and all the hype. Hype is sometime good because now people are rediscovering literature. We have academic background, and so we are like a bridge between the developer community and the academia. So what we see is that things have been around for some time, but they're getting rediscovered, they're getting implemented by developers. So we believe that there's a lot of jobs, a lot of opportunity, a lot of new protocols to be implemented, new things to be discovered, and it's a great field to go, plus for people that are interested into that, for me, it's also a field that can help people. For me that's important to have both things. So it's technically and intellectually challenging, and also it has a real impact on the world. We also think that we're trying to help these developers because so many of them, actually they do have an interest in privacy. They do have an interest in cryptography. It is just that since they don't have the right background, they cannot actually use it. So we have seen so many developers trying to understand zero-knowledge protocols, for example, and read in so many articles, but it just doesn't help just because they don't have the right background to actually implement these things. Maybe they do implement them. Who says it's the right implementation? Who says it doesn't have vulnerabilities? So that's why we're here to help them. So what Hellhound provides, it provides a recommendation engine as well plus this computation network. So our recommendation engine actually is here for developers to help them choose what is the right cryptography libraries to be implemented, to be used in computing their private data. So for example, they only give us the criterias, what are the restraints for them, and this algorithm, it will choose for them the right libraries. So I'll give you an example. So the example of interaction. So sometimes we have an interaction between the person needing to do computation and the other one providing the computation. So this means that the person has to actually stay online and participate in this computation. This way, it would make it go faster. It would make the computation faster just because two or more people are participating in it, but it also means that this person, the user has to stay online. So if the user which is the developer is not ready to do so, then they would answer on different questions and they would answer this. So we do not propose to them protocols which do such a thing. Also we respect their time restraints. If there needs something we refers, if they if they do not have any time restraints, they can wait, for example, and many other criterias. So to recap, maybe the main features. We have in Hellhound a recommendation engine. The goal of the recommendation engine is to decrease the complexity of choosing the right cryptographic methods and the right cryptographic libraries. We don't expect people to know how to get them, so we're doing that work. So Pythia is our recommendation engine, and it has a knowledge database, and this knowledge database has a list of all cryptosystem with their attributes. So then on the dashboard, they're able to play with criterias depending on their use case and get back the recommendation that fits their use case. The second module is the Cerberus. Cerberus is the friendly module of Hellhound. It is public-facing, it is what's going to be on the client side or the user, and it's going to help the user gets into interaction with the Hellhound nodes. So we consider the Hellhound nodes to be in the underworld. That's the universe. So Hellhound nodes, they just don't care about what's going on on the user side, they just gets the information, they run the computation accordingly to instruction. We have verifiable computing, so we do verification. Digits can not cheat. But on top of that, we have an incentive mechanism so that if anyone cheats in these actors, even the user, their stake goes away. So they'll lose money. The Hellhound nodes they have an incentive to work, to run this computation because they're going to earn tokens, money by running heavy computation. So the last piece is the Styx. So the Styx is like in the mythology, this river where the trapped souls, and we consider souls to be data. We just said that for us, if you have enough data about someone, you can recreate that person virtually. So it's like the soul, and so basically what we are doing is protecting the souls in the underworld, and Hellhound are the guardians. So the Styx is the smart contract suit that is going to trap critical information, proof of calculation, megatris, anything that's we need to make sure that everything went well accordingly that's the nodes that are not malicious, well-rewarded, that everything runs smoothly in the decentralized way. So the Styx has a several smart contracts in it, and so the idea that we have is to run all the computation of chain which is the best thing to do, but still use a public blockchain to store, to anchor the critical information that are needed. So we don't consider our self to be a central part. We're just going to provide this open source. We might be also Hellhound at some point and run this computation, but this is a gift that we want to offer to the community, and we hope it to be used, and we hope to have more application using these tools to have privacy by design.
