My talk is going to be about more secure ways to authenticate an insecure environment. So addressing, from a user interface perspective, some of the problems with passwords and pins. And there are two names there, and anyone that came here expecting that there would be a hot girl accompanying me giving this talk, a doubly disappointed, because Andrea is not a girl, he's Italian, so it's an Italian name, and he couldn't make it. A lot of this talk is Andrea's PhD work at KAIST. I'm a visiting professor occasionally at KAIST in South Korea, and I thought that DEFCON would be very interested in Andrea's work, and I was hoping that he would be able to come too, but he has to finish his PhD at the end of this summer, and he's taking four hours a day of Korean classes because he's a masochist, and so he just couldn't make it. But he joins us in spirit, and he'll be very excited to get feedback from the DEFCON and the security communities about this work. So an overview of the whole hour-long talk, first of all, some key features of password and pin authentication and the nature of the observation threat, then three categories of threat and response. And our concern here is primarily interface design, so not the idea that we can make this thing perfectly secure because we know that we can't. But first of all, but it's gonna be about how we design interfaces that mitigate these threats in an environment where we can't completely control what's going on. So first of all, being observed from outside, so physical and key entry at an insecure terminal, and some mechanical and electromechanical observation resistant solutions to that problem. Secondly, observation from within a compromised terminal, so being watched from the inside and protecting your key between your insecure input device and the network and the bank and whatever way you can secure it, or you can do a better job of securing it. So version of recorders and loggers, and then rethinking the way that we treat passwords and enter them. So it's not just the thing that we remember that we have to physically type in somewhere. So remote entry and secure transmission to the terminal, and can we use some of these digital tools that now everyone carries? So here are some basic authentication methods, and this is what passwords are competing against, right? So password is something that you remember versus something that you have. So a key or RFID card or a security card, or something that you have because it's part of you, a biometric statistic of some sort. And why should you use one over the other? Everyone has advantages and disadvantages. So with passwords, the big advantages are that the information is invisible, so no one knows if you have it or not, and it can be delegated. So that means you can give it to someone else. If someone needs to get in something, you can give them your password. And delegation also includes replacement. If someone gets it, you can change it, and you can maintain security. The drawback, the big drawbacks, that there's a cognitive load. You have to remember them, and they're susceptible to observation. If you know what it is, it's already copied. Tokens are also cheap like passwords, and they're commonly available, and you can delegate them. You can give someone your key, but it is a physical thing. They can be stolen, they can be copied, they can be lost, and they can deteriorate, they can stop working. The biometrics have no cognitive load at all. You don't have to remember it, it's just something you have. And people seem to kind of dig them in a certain way, like non-security people, especially are really into them. But they're also a physical property. They can also be copied. They're a unique thing, but they're not secret. People can record your fingerprints or whatever you're using as a biometric, and they deteriorate. They change even as you get older. Things like the shape of your face and so on change. Also, a lot of people have severe philosophical issues against them, and you can't delegate them. You can't give your finger to someone to log in on a fingerprint thing, and you certainly wouldn't want to. So we like passwords because they're invisible and delegatable, but the cognitive load has always been a big problem for them. And you see that so many massive breaches don't depend on individual problems with implementation of security at the different places. They depend on the fact that people reuse multiple passwords, and they get someone's Gmail password, and then suddenly they've broken into all of the critical systems that they also have access to. We tell people not to do that, but they do it anyway. So even though they're still valuable and they're going to be with us, the big weakness is the fact that that cognitive load causes people to reuse them and they're now even more weak against observation. You need to have many of them, and you need to change them frequently because they can be lost so easily. And observation is a classic attack. It's not just in passwords and so on. So cheating at poker, for example, this item that's on the screen is a fake pipe with a mirror in it for a card dealer to cheat at poker so they can see the cards that they pass across it. So a classic observation attack for a crooked individual in the system. And these observation attacks are everywhere in computing. So they're in the human interface, external, for example, shoulder surfing or mirrors and cameras, quick show of hands. Who's ever shoulder surfed someone's password or pin? I hope it would be most people in this room, right, because it's so easy. You can also dust the keypad and you can essentially shoulder surf when someone's not there, when they've already left and used the thing. There's stuff that's internal to the computer interface. So ATM skimmers are a really great example of that that have been cropping up everywhere. Key lagers. Hands up anyone that's ever used the key lager on someone else's computer or their own. Not quite as many people because you have to be really going after someone to do it but it's still really common. And then, of course, the stuff that we normally really think about, the attacks in the network, so packets sniffing, man in the middle and so on. Grabbing information once it's already in the system. And that's, because that's so common, there's a lot of work that's been done to mitigate that, so a lot of encryption and so on. And, of course, we can secure the external and internal human interface, the stuff that faces the human, if we keep the interface private. But what about when we have to use public terminals? So public terminals are everywhere. We see ATMs, airport kiosks, door locks, public computers, and access control for facilities. You probably use one pretty much every day. So let's take a closer look at one of the most common public terminals from a human interface perspective, the ATM. Where did it come from and why was it designed the way that it is? Well, before there were ATMs, they were just the human bank teller. You went to the bank, you dealt with a human, it was a reasonably private interaction. And so, when designers say, we're gonna replace the bank teller for whatever reason, well, you get a machine that acts like a teller. So that's the first cash dispenser in 1967. And the early ATM concepts really replaced the interaction with the human.  This is 1973 Future Teller, and you can see these television tellers. They had a person somewhere else remotely doing a virtual shared interaction, just like the real teller. So why would you do that?  Even if you look 2010, we're still doing that same thing as in 1973 with a teller on a video screen for these certain tellers. Well, you wanna replicate the experience, but add 24-hour availability and remote access. But yeah, in 40 years, even though things became more automated, you didn't necessarily need a remote human staff. The basic terminal model and the interaction style didn't change. Like the teller, the terminal is a physical thing that you need to go and use, and people can watch you doing that. I mean, think about what other things are we doing the same way 40 years on? Now, there are lots of ATMs everywhere, but the number of manufacturers is not super great and the interaction style is practically identical. You've got a digital decimal pin number that you type in. Interfaced-wise, it's like a monoculture. Everyone's basically the same. There's a place to input a token, a place to receive cash, and an interface to input control information, including that secret information. And even when a company like Ideo, which I think is the world's biggest design firm, tries to reinvent the ATM, it ends up looking slick. To me, it kinda looks like a urinal, but it still has essentially the same interface elements. It's still got that screen and that pin code pad. So their ATM of the future, as envisaged in the last couple of years, is still not too different from the concept from nearly 40 years ago. From a security perspective, what's really important about this interaction design that's had remarkable staying power is that it's physically situated, and therefore easily attackable with physical methods such as shoulder surfing and mechanized observation like ATM skimming. Hopefully, everyone here has been keeping up to some extent with the effect that low-cost hardware is having on ATM attacks and the proliferation of sophisticated skimming operations. There was even a fake ATM installed at DEFCON here a couple of years back, well, not here at the Rift, but someone set up a fake ATM and waited to see what people would try to use it. We got MagStrike readers, wireless transmitters, cameras. They're also cheap now that you can make something like this that's essentially disposable. When it gets found, you're gonna lose it, but it'll pay for itself in just a couple of skimming operations. Criminal organizations, manufacture, injection molded, keypad and card reader overlays and so on for common ATMs, like a lot of the most common national cash register models, and you can buy them on sketchy crime sites for like $1,000. And every time I go to an ATM now, like I really look for a skimmer, not just to make sure I don't use it because I really wanna find one in the wild and I wanna get it and take it apart. I haven't been lucky enough to do that yet, but hopefully one day I will. And they use methods of observation like cameras to see people typing their PIN codes, also wireless transmission from the PIN pad overlays and so on. And then down there in the lower right is an electronic door lock, which they love in Korea. Like they're basically every door, but they're super susceptible to observation because you can see the fingerprints on the commonly used buttons, or you can add something else that gets wiped off when people use it, you can tamper with it. So there's definitely a threat to using a public terminal. And all of these attacks work because the attacker knows in advance how the PIN is gonna be entered. So quite a few researchers in the human interface community have suggested alternative methods of PIN entry. So for example, PIN pads that move around and you have to play like kind of a game, so the interaction is not so easy to replay. Spy-resistant keyboards, so you can't tell which of the keys someone's selecting because there's multiple different colored keys, characters on a key. Gaze-based password entry. So the idea is if you're not looking directly at the person, you can't see how they're moving their eyes around to log in. And then haptic password entry, which is some stuff that Andrea has been working on. So this is things that you feel, haptic is using the modality of touch. But despite all this, keypads are still the norm. So here's the basic considerations of the stuff that we've been looking at. We accept the need to use public terminals.  But it doesn't mean that we have to all do it the same. So we wanna be able to mix up password entry mechanisms to make the system less of a monoculture and less easy for one attack to get everything. Doesn't mean we have to use the interface we're given. So we wanna give users the power to improve their own interface security, not just be dependent on whatever the organization offers. And we wanna revisit the assumption that all interaction has to happen at the terminal. Even if it's a physical terminal that you've gotta use, all of that interaction doesn't have to happen there. So we wanna move from a mode where everything is done one way at the terminal subject to observation and replace it with a way that things can be done lots of different ways. The input is mediated at the terminal in an observation resistant fashion. So in other words, to decouple the interaction, to separate the input method from the communication to the terminal. So part one, observation, new alternatives for physical key entry to avoid observation at the terminal physically. And the basic idea, which will present various methods here, is a haptic password. Or the basic idea really is a side channel that's not visual and is less easily observable. And one of these is haptics. So first off, a haptic keypad. And haptics are observation resistant because the sensory modality is less leaky. People have a harder time feeling what you feel than seeing what you see. And so in this work, there's a series of tactile cues or tactons that you feel at the fingertips and they're inherently invisible to someone that's watching you use them. So in this system, we have three possible tactons. A continuous buzz or continuous vibration, a one hertz pulsing and a two hertz pulsing. And these different modes are pretty easily distinguishable with the fingers. And so you can make a password out of a sequence of these tactons. And here's a prototype of a haptic keypad that uses them, quite simple hardware. There's an Arduino that does all the work. And then the haptic keys each have a vibrotactile element and a sensing element. So here's what the keys look like closer. There's a force sensing resistor for adjusting the output of the vibrotactile element. And there's a switch for registering a key press and then the actual vibrotactile motor that makes the vibration. And there's visual feedback in the interface of how far along that you are in the password, but nothing that indicates what was entered, just how many things were pressed. So how it works is the three tactons are always assigned to the three keys with a one-to-one correspondence, but in a random order. So even if someone sees the way your fingers move, they can't do a replay attack. You fill all three keys and you select the one that corresponds to the right tacton in your password and then click the key. Repeat for as long as the password goes. So press down. So it won't do it if your fingers aren't on the keys, so you're obscuring the vibrational elements. Fill the three tactons, select the right one, and then they get randomly reassigned and you go along through the stages of the password. Now there's three separate tactons, so that means that the password essentially forms a trinary code, like binary, but with three possibilities. And the probability of a guessing attack on any password is one over the number of possibilities to the power of the unknown digits in the pin. So if we have a standard numerical password for decimal digits, that's a one in 10,000 probability of a brute force success per attempt. So it's clear that with a haptic pin, with three tactons, then our pin is gonna need to be longer than a decimal pin. So this is maybe gonna be a little weird for the DEF CON audience. In the human interface community, we do user studies to see if things would work or not, which basically means you round up anyone that's near the lab and give them $10 or an ice cream voucher to come and play with your device for a while. And I'm gonna skip through these pretty quick, but if you're interested, then links to the papers and more details are on the set of slides that's on the DEF CON DVD. So we did a pilot study, or Andrea did a pilot study to first evaluate whether the tactons are perceptually distinct or not. So can people recognize them? And then the second study, if the hardware works, then can it be used effectively for authentication? So the result of the pilot study was people could recognize them very easily. There were no errors. And then so that led to the user study in which there were three experimental conditions to evaluate different versions of the software and different pin lengths. So the first two conditions, first of all, a six-digit pin, which is not secure to the standard of a four-digit decimal pin, but it's relatively memorable. And then a nine-digit one, which does conform to that brute force attack security level. It's worth noting that 729 is not considered secure by the standards of the four-digit pin, but it's not that much fewer than a simplex lock, which has been used all over the place. So a trade-off between password length and performance. Then if we assume that brute force attacks are not a problem because it's electronic and the device won't let you make hundreds of attempts, at least in a reasonable time, then we can resist observation and not worry so much about brute force by doubling the number of trials for each pin digit. If instead of pressing the right tact on, you press both wrong ones. So it makes it harder to observe what someone's doing because there's more presses going on, but the brute force resistance is the same, but that gives you a higher observation resistance. That's a trade-off of complexity versus performance. So this user study showed, first of all, that the different methods did take different amounts of time, as you would expect the longer pin takes longer to enter, but the hybrid mode entering the incorrect ones, even though it's a six-digit one, took even longer, but there are 12 entries instead of six. The number of errors was not significant, but possibly due to the high amount of variability of the study. And then there was also a NASA TLX workload measurement done to see what the mental workload was and it showed that the hybrid mode was much more difficult to keep track of mentally. So using the six-digit tactile pin as a reference, the nine-digit one was not more challenging for users in a workload sense. Remembering a nine-digit tactile pin was easy enough to remember and didn't provide significantly more error, whereas the hybrid mode, there's a lot to think about, there was a higher overhead and it did take longer. And that was compared with a different haptic password entry method that I mentioned earlier and it performed better. So that's a method that can be used when you have a physical keypad. But what about unlocking these new interactive devices that we have? There's been a shift in the way that we compute over the last 40 years from private user to these public collaborative interfaces like surfaces and to mobile devices. And we still need to log into them. So we've got large screens, we've got public spaces, so shoulder surfing is as useful, if not more so, for pin theft than it ever was. It's almost hard not to shoulder surf people's mobile phone pins, especially when people use that Android swipe thing, like you can't see someone log in and not remember it. It just drives you nuts. So it just remains one of the most common ways to steal one. So it would be great if we had an invisible pin entry method that could use an alternate sensory modality, just like the haptic keypad. But should it be audio or touch? And we can write off smell and taste, I think, for the moment. So previously, Andrea had done a interface with a rotary wheel, where you searched for a tacton by spinning this wheel and then selected it. So kind of like a knob interface to the tactile keypad. So this is the same kind of tactons and a 3D printed knob with a vibrotactile element and you just kind of spin it and search for the one that's the right one, press the button to enter and move on to the next one. Now with mobile phones, we have vibration motors in them. We can do the tactons and we also have audio output. So for a numeric pin, we could use text to speech to actually speak out those numbers. So we have a sequence of cues, either auditory or tactile, that can be invisible to everyone if headphones are used for the audio. But if we want to compare haptic and auditory cues for a decimal pin, then we need more tactons. So we made up more haptic vibration patterns to correspond to the 10 things and they ordered in a way that seems reasonable, right? So single pulses going to double pulses to triple pulses to continuous. So here's the touchscreen version of the rotary wheel interface. 10 slots for 10 digits. They're assigned to slots with a one-to-one correspondence, preserving order but randomizing the start points for observation resistance. So you start somewhere, move around, looking for the correct number, and then select by selecting the center of the wheel to lock in that digit. Move on to the next one. And then the order is re-randomized on each trial so that you can't learn anything from the previous entry. So here's a video showing. Seven, eight, nine, zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero, one, six, five, four, nine, six. So you can't tell by looking at it what the digits are that are being entered and if you use the headphones, only the user can see what is being entered and with the vibrotactile method, if the environment is quiet, is not too quiet, then you can get away without using the headphones at all. So in a public space where there's some cover noise. So two user studies were done for this one as well. Again, a test for perceptual distinction and then a full study to compare two things. First, auditory versus haptic modality. Second, large alphabet versus small alphabet. How big of a number of digits should be involved? Assuming that there's enough for acceptable brute force resistance. The pilot study showed some difficulties with tact on recognition with the large alphabet. So the more complex alphabet was harder to recognize, the error rate was higher. In the full study, two trade-offs were analyzed. So maintaining the same security level, looking at, first of all, the two modalities and then four digits from 10 alphabet and then a six digits from five. Both of them have acceptable security and the six digits one allows us to compare to the tactile keypad. So the results of that showed, first of all, audio is much quicker than haptics regardless of pin length and there's, again, a lot of variance in the error such that we didn't get a statistically significant result from error rate. So overall, the audio was better than the haptics, perhaps because it's more familiar, but you have to use headphones to make it non-observable. The error rate dropped from the main study from the pilot because it was the same subjects we used and it seems like subjects become more experienced with the interface. So it doesn't mean that it's completely out of the question if people are gonna quickly become twice as good at it. So overall, slightly better performing than the haptic keypad. But as we saw in these interfaces, there are basic problems from a usability standpoint. So even with the wheel style lock, a wheel or knob should be really simple, should be very intuitive. Everyone knows to spin it to go one way or the other. But with the tactons, we have to remember and recognize all these weird vibration sensations. So what about an interface that only uses a single queue that would completely eliminate the recognition problem? So instead of recognizing and distinguishing between these multiple tactons, you just have to count. So the next one is called the spin lock, which is loosely modeled on a safe dial. So instead of digits, the pin consists of movement offsets to the left or the right. So here it is using the auditory version. Again, observation protected when using headphones. And the thing is here, your password has to be kind of stored in a way that's not your normal, just sequence of digits, because you have to remember if it's left or right. But it alternates one way or the other. You set up a password. And the clicks here are just progress indicators and the beeps are the counts. Someone who's observing can't tell how many you've gone because the distances are randomized and the start point is wherever. Once again, silent with the headphones on. So use a study for this one. Andrea ran them as well. Looking at three questions. Do we think it's gonna be faster to count than to recognize? Do we think it's gonna be more accurate to count than to recognize? And the third hypothesis that counting will be a lower workload than recognition. So once again, haptic and audio compared. And this time pins made from either five or 10 possible digits, so possible movements to the left or the right. Each user got instructed, got to play with the interface, then do four tests, and this TLX mental workload test. So as you'd expect, longer pins took longer to enter. And the haptics took a little bit longer to do than the audio, but not a lot. A little bit more error prone for haptics and audio as well, also not a lot, but statistically significant. The workload one was interesting. Once again, the haptic interface was more cognitively demanding than the audio. So people still had to kind of think about it a lot. But nevertheless, in post-test questioning, people preferred the haptic modality because they felt that it was more private. They didn't have to switch to the headphones. So a couple of possible explanations there. First of all, system latency can be a problem for haptics because that motor has to spin up. And so if people are spinning the wheel fast, then they can miss the cues as they go over them. So that could be a contributor to the higher error rate. Secondly, more complex pins took longer to enter, but they didn't result in worse errors. So it doesn't feel like there's an error rate per entry of the pin. There's some kind of just overall error rate. And I think that that's because a large number of error trials involved a mistake in only one item. And the majority of those errors involve people entering a very close number of digits and then becoming aware of that and resetting the system. So just missing that correct count and they knew to reset and start over. So it's not the same as having an authentication failure and getting frustrated and then, of course, potentially wiping your device if you have it set to wipe after a certain number of authentication fails. It came out slightly better on average than that rotary lock that came before. So we feel that simplifying the pin to a count instead of digit recognition is faster, less error prone, has a lower mental workload. So that's some new ideas for physical key entry at the terminal in the presence of physical observation threats like cameras and shoulder surfing. But what about when you have to use a terminal that you don't trust, like a web browser, that has the default computer key entry mechanism, which is a keyboard? Can we use software to help make us less defenseless against observation from within? Here's the problem with untrusted computers. As a user, you can keep your password secret. You can do everything properly, never tell anyone, never write it down. And once it's in the system, it can be salted and hashed and it can be used for authentication in ways that make it difficult to recover the original password. But when it comes to actually entering that password, you have to do it in the clear. You have to type in the real thing. So keystroke loggers are a major method of password observation and compromise. Last year I gave a talk about recovering my stolen computer and one of the tools that I used to do it was a keystroke logger. They can be in software and they can also be in hardware. You can get on sites like ThinkGeek, these little hardware keyloggers that read the keyboard, send it out wirelessly and just grab whatever someone types. Now of course, malware is one of the most well-known ways that people get their activities logged and compromised. But I don't want people to focus on malware entirely because there's lots of other ways you can come into contact with a logger. We're varying levels of quote-unquote legitimacy, meaning whether it's been installed by someone that owns the computer or not. Some people install loggers to keep track of someone, like to see if their boyfriend has been sending, did their email password, to see if they've been emailing other women and stuff like that. You've got jealous partners. You've got employers that do a lot of keystroke logging, governments and so on. So for the paranoid, there are lots of other ways you can get logged. Some people even install loggers on their own machine as a matter of course, so that they can go back and see if anyone else has been using it and what they've been doing and maybe reverse-own them if they need to. So any part of the user interface can be logged. It's not just the keyboard, but it is that any keystrokes, mouse clicks, screenshot shots of what's on the screen and mouse movements and so on. These are kind of in decreasing order of whether they're usually in a logger if you find a software logger. So that's why it's interesting for user interface designers to see if we can make things a bit more difficult for the attacker while not making it too much more difficult for the legitimate user. Now at the start I mentioned that a problem with passwords is this load of having to remember lots of them and this leads to bad practices like reuse. So browsers and computers now often feature these password keychain features. And this has the side benefit that it reduces, I mean, first of all, it means you can keep track of them all. That's the main reason, the side benefit is that it reduces the frequency that you have to use those UI elements to actually enter a password.  So less stuff gets logged. And I noticed that when I was stalking back my own computer. But these things are no use at all on a public terminal because you don't want it to remember your password. And I personally, as a somewhat paranoid person, hate even using a friend's browser because I don't know how they have password saving configured. It might just be remembering all passwords and mine's gonna get stuck in there with that.  It's really easy to say, I'm just never gonna do it, right? I'm always gonna use my own computer. But once in a while, you have to. So authentication for accounts on the web is currently completely under the control of whoever's running the service. The mail provider, the bank, whatever, facial book, Google, whoever. Some of them are more responsible than others and have varying degrees of protection against password theft. So the most basic that you see is forcing you to change your password every so often. And that's essentially damage control. It limits the amount of time that a compromised password is actually useful for. Some of them have a small kind of second factor where you have to say, recognize an image before you enter a password or these image-based keyboards instead of your actual keyboard. But those are susceptible, well, get that done in a sec. Sometimes they have changing security questions that are asked to you every time, but there's only so many of them you set up for an account. So those are logable too. And you actually see that a lot with the banking information stealing malware. There's an interesting one, sites like Hotmail do this. You can get a one-time password which will text message you to your mobile phone. Which, yeah, is pretty useful for resisting loggers, but it has an unintended consequence that anyone who steals your phone now has access to your email. You have these one-time tokens, physical tokens that generate a code that you use at the same time as you use your password. And what that basically does is reduces the value of the password to be stolen. You can't just use the password. So it's a good method. But how many of those things do you want to carry around? How many versus how many websites do you use and log into? There's some interesting stuff that's been done especially in countries where people are very poor and don't have a lot of technical literacy, such as India. And there are things like these things they call them nonces, which are disposable one-time password modifiers. So this is one from India that some Microsoft researchers helped design. And so every time you want to use your phone to bank, you've got to do this transaction in the presence of someone. So you tear off the first paper thing and you modify your PIN with this tear-off thing that you never show anyone and then you dispose of it afterwards. So you have this physical thing. But again, it's a physical thing, even though you could use it online and so on as well. But if you prefer one method over another, you're out of luck because few sites support more than one method and in many cases, none at all.  So the ideal outcome would be if we as the users could choose our own software-based interface that would make it harder for attackers to observe our passwords and do replay attacks and that could be used on any website at all without the participation of the website operators. And most people in this room, I'm sure, already keep their own machines locked down and have various ways of protecting themselves. But we don't have so many options on a public terminal. In particular, forgetting about malware, just in terms of a unscrupulous operator, we have no way of telling if the operator of the machine is running a logger of some sort. And we usually don't have permissions to install or run our own software. But if we're using these terminals to access the web, we usually have the full web and we can usually access pretty much any basic web content. So the goal here is to obfuscate data entry in terms of the physical user interface elements using simple web mechanics that aren't too tedious for the user. And if you look at forums like Slash. And so on about people talking about these things, or if you've used a lot of online banks, then you'll see that people have thought about this and they've done various sort of hokey methods to do it. For example, copying and pasting characters into a password field instead of typing them on the keyboard, which is fine against the hardware key logger. But if you were gonna write a key logger, you'd log the clipboard too, right? Um... Banks have used this one, a on-screen keyboard, or selecting characters and dragging and dropping, so it's all mouse-based. But there are also loggers out there that log the area around each mouse click. A little bit of the image doesn't take the whole screen. Alternatively, you can accept that your password is gonna make it into the logs. And you can shaft the logs by putting a lot of extraneous keys in there as well. And I feel like anyone who's really enterprising and analyzing the logs and is really writing a kick-ass logger could time-stamp the keystrokes and could pull it out pretty easily.  And users are just not gonna want to use this. It takes a long time and it's very error-prone. Now, I know that you're all thinking, well, who cares about this interface stuff anyway? This is all bullshit-zars because there are form-grabbing malware out there. It's a man-in-the-browser attack and there's nothing you can do about it. These types of malware hook the browser and they grab the contents of all web forms pre-encryption before it's sent off to the site and they mail it off to Russia. Examples are online banking theft trojans like Zeus and Spiii. And this software is very effective. It now represents the majority of passwords stealing trojans. But I said trojans and not password thefts in general. I'm not so sure about how it compares to password theft in general and I suspect it's not as great as it is in just in terms of being limited to malware. And there are some limitations. For example, they're not multi-platform. They don't support every browser. You can see from that screenshot there that Spiii just in the last two months released support for Opera and Chrome under Windows. So people who use esoteric browsers and so on may or may not be vulnerable depending on how these software developers are progressing. And there's no UI mechanism that can mitigate this tactic anyway. So for UI people, it's sort of not an interesting problem in the sense that we can do anything about it. I think there's lots of things that the browser people can do about it. But this is interface design stuff. So I think that just because this is out there, we don't just have to throw up our hands and give up and say, well, we can't protect against this anyway. There are still plenty of threats that we can mitigate. And I really wanted to mention this because if any people here don't know about these browser compromises, they should. So you should be even more careful than normal accessing from an untrusted terminal or a machine that may have been compromised, anything that involves you losing all your money because assuming you have any left with the economic collapse, you can lose all your money with this stuff. So here's what we wanna do. We wanna give the user control of that authentication interface. We wanna keep any sensitive text out of the log. Minimize the amount of other data leakage that could be done by other UI logging mechanisms, right? So we don't wanna even make it any easier for people to do brute force attacks.  And we want that choice to be available but still focus on usability and support a lot of different ways to log in that people can feel comfortable with so that a single attack method doesn't work on everything but that people will still use it. So getting this sort of ecosystem that forces attackers to do the work, make them support everything. And there's a way that we can essentially hack any website right now which is to inject JavaScript directly into the site. And that's something that's normally associated more with attacking than defense.  But we can also intercept keystrokes and we can obfuscate it by injecting a known trusted script into the current web page. So we can do all kinds of neat tricks drawing over the active page and so on which can help us if we wanna use our powers for good instead of evil. The big difference interface-wise here is now we have 95 printable characters to support instead of 10 digits or something like that. So we have to do things a little bit differently. So here's the simplest approach. It's a visual keypad that you can bring up over any website that intercepts keystroke events and instead of clicking on it with a mouse, you type the keys and it automatically performs a one-time pad substitution that automatically remaps any key that you type. So you look for the, the metaphor is for people who sort of type like I do by looking at the keyboard. You can regenerate it on a per keystroke basis which is useful because this is a method that's susceptible to screen capture but if you regenerate it on a per keystroke basis, you have to capture the entire screen on every single keystroke. Because it's a one-to-one mapping, it will reveal your password length so it does potentially make brute force attacks slightly more easily, more easy. But the password itself is not gonna be recoverable from the text log and you can also remap the username as well as the password if you feel like you need extra obfuscation. It's quick to use, it's just visual search for each key. But we sort of don't like the fact that it's easy to screen cap. So here's another custom interface designed to make the screen capture problem more difficult for the attacker. It's sort of based on the idea of a code wheel, a combination style code wheel log.  So you can drag it to wherever you need it and not obscure what you need to see on the webpage. It uses the mouse but no clicks are involved. So it won't trigger click-based screen capture. How you use it is you mouse over a red reference key which is the point that is gonna correspond to the key that you're gonna want. Then drag the mouse around to rotate the desired output key into place and then hit any key to lock in whatever key it is that you wanna type. Basically, what you're gonna see in the log is a string of whatever keys that you typed. It could just be all spaces, whatever. And it intercepts additional keystrokes so if you wanna chaff the logs to conceal your password length, you can do that too. Time cost, you've got your visual search and you have this kind of animation. So here it is in action. You can see watching it that it's essentially replacing that key press information with visual information. So it's possible to shoulder-surf this method without seeing the keyboard. Although it's difficult because it's a little complex. You can try and see what password I'm entering here on this video. But it's a trade-off. But you can essentially choose each method here. So you could use this one when you know someone's not watching you over your shoulder if you're reasonably sure that the entire video session isn't being logged, for example. But what we really want is a method that's resistant to shoulder-surfing and screen capture as well as being resistant to keystroke logging. So I haven't personally ever seen a logger that logs the audio output and you can use headphones to reduce the observability of the audio signal. So here's my version of Andrea's spin lock. It uses auditory stimulus based on counting just like the phone lock. But it's got to support a full keyboard. So instead of a circle that you might have to spin around an average of around 50 keys, I figured you could look at the keyboard and then drag a handle down to select the row and then across to select the key. So here's an example. There's only a few little UI elements that you drag into place.  You can look down at the real keyboard as you do it. Because each row of keys is shiftable, there's actually two clicks per row and the top is the shifted key and the next one down is the unshifted key. The relative of the positions of the clicks are randomized so even if you can see the screen, you can't tell from how far the handles move what's being selected and there are no key presses at all. It's all that audio side channel. Medium time cost, two sets of counts per key press. So in summary of this section, the important thing about this is not those three example methods that I showed. What's important is giving people a choice of how they authenticate or even tools to roll their own method if they don't like what's out there and they want to use what's best for them instead of just forcing them to live with the service that they're offered. And ultimately, these are just seeds for what should in an ideal system be an ecosystem of methods that are easy to implement, they're easy to choose from, they're available for users that want to write their own in a secure, trusted fashion. Because ecosystems are more resistant to generic attacks. We want to offer modalities that are not traditionally logged like audio. Because we want to make attacks harder not because it's impossible to log audio, but because if people use it, then it has to be done and it makes the attackers job harder. And these methods are just examples from a very, very large potential space of methods that could be used. So it's like a spy needing to be fluent in every single language in order to do his job properly. Makes it harder. Imagine if everyone logged in by a different method, then generic attacks would have to concentrate on the infrastructure like the browser. And then we can concentrate our defense on those points too. We haven't done user studies on this stuff. We might, but again, the point is not to pick one or two methods and say, this is the best method, you should use that because then it's not customizable when we've gone back to a generic system. It's to say, you have the power to choose what works for you. And that leads me to the idea of desituating the interaction. Especially back at the start when we were talking about ATMs, the problem with those terminals is that the interaction needs to be done at a predictable physical place with predictable hardware. And a common criticism that people level validly against the haptic keypads and so on is that there's a reason why ATMs all use a pin pad. Everyone needs to know that the interface is gonna be the same and that they're gonna be able to log in, even if it's in a foreign country or wherever. So we need to look at ways that hardware can be used to desituate that interaction. We wanna use different pin entry schemes like the web example, but we can't expect ATM manufacturers to include every weird interface device that people in universities come up with. But lots of people carry around these private digital devices like a phone.  And we wanna make the interaction less physically situated. And the private device does this too because we can authenticate to the device wherever the hell we want. And then we can use the device to authenticate to the terminal. So it moves the problem from one of authentication to one of communication. And there are still some constraints on this. We don't know in advance what terminals we're gonna use. So we can't prepare. You can't pair your phone in advance to every terminal you might possibly wanna use in the future. And we don't wanna use something that radiates information in all directions and has the risk of a man in the middle attack. And finally, it's gotta be fast and easy or people won't use it and it's gotta be cheap or manufacturers won't use it. So here's a graphic of the interaction. You authenticate privately. You use your private device with physical proximity to communicate an encrypted credential to the terminal. From the terminal's point of view, it looks like piece four.  So here's a prototype of a system that performs this communication using light. You enter the password by whatever means necessary on the phone and then place it on the receiver where the thing is transmitted with light. And you can see a lot of flashing leaking out from that. That's because there are specifically LEDs in there to introduce visual chaff so that to prevent any recording and replay attack. We don't have a user study for this yet. It's been done, but it's under submission to a journal. So we didn't wanna pre-release it here, but suffice it to say that users were happy with it. Here's another graphic of how it works. And the important thing to note with this is that the password is not transmitted in the clear. So even though there's some observation resistant stuff with those spoofing LEDs, it's salted and hashed. So it's of less use to an attacker than a clear transmitted password. And the hardware here, which is very, very simple, a microcontroller, some LEDs and a light sensor, very, very cheap and reliable, less than 1% error rate. The next version uses the color screen so that more data can be encoded within the same transmission time. So it can be a longer hash by still being usable. Andrea also did a version that looked into using a variable magnetic field because the field strength or the observability of the magnetic field falls off much, much faster than it does for light. So it's more difficult to observe. But this method and any further work on this method is currently on hold because it's actually really similar to near field communications, which is gonna become commercially available, probably in every phone very soon, maybe even as soon as iPhone 5 this year. So no plans to do more work on this yet until we look into that and play around with that some. So in conclusion, we're gonna have to live with passwords and pins for a long time.  We still need to authenticate on public terminals. We're not in this fully connected world where we can do everything on our private thing quite yet. But generally simple methods can result in security improvements in scenarios where there's a potential observation risk. There are things that we can do not to achieve perfect security. There's no such thing as a perfect defense. But no matter who you are, if you're a manufacturer or an end user, it's not about defending against everything. It's especially not about defending against everything for the service providers because they care a lot more about minimizing losses to themselves after the fact than they do about protecting your credentials.  They just, there's nothing they can do about it. They're just gonna work on loss mitigation instead. So we wanna diversify the ecosystem of entry methods on our own bad. That's kind of the hack of spirit. Like don't worry about these guys, let's do it ourselves and do this mediated obfuscation of the data that we do have to enter. So we showed some novel key entry systems for terminals and private devices and some software and hardware mediation systems for observation resistance when you do have to use these public terminals. And I know, I hope that you guys are all thinking about potential attacks on these things because that's how we do it. We take the armor to the bullet guys and say make a bullet that goes through this armor then we take the bullet, take the, you know what I'm saying. Armour to the bullet guys, to throw the armor, bullet to the armor guys, make armor this doesn't go through, that's how it works. But at least it forces attackers to work harder and maybe they'll go and bother someone else. Thanks.


What is love? Baby, don't hurt me. Don't hurt me. Hey, what's going on? Did my assistant send me to the wrong soundstage? See, this is why I don't pay her. No, you're in the right place, Rob. Ah! We need to talk. Puppet Howie. Puppet Jimmy. Puppet Michael. Puppet Terry. Puppet Craig. It's Kirk. What are you guys doing here? We're the Death Buddies. We're your best friends. And we need to talk to you. About what? What's going on? I was supposed to shoot my week six bit where I play a magician. Only instead of normal magic, I do Fitz magic, where my best trick is making my starting job disappear. What? You guys don't like it? No, of course we like that idea. Yeah, we love it. The premise is hilarious and not a stretch at all. That's not what this is about. As my outfit, you guys hate my outfit, I know. Hell no, we love your outfit. Well, what is it about then? It's about your pics, Rob. They're terrible. You will leave dog in week one, but you've gone more than seven since then. We compare you to Sam Darnold, but he won last week. And do you know why? Because I picked against him. Because you picked against him. Hey, where's your shirt, Puppet Terry? This ain't about me. Rob, teams are calling you the bearded widow. These are all letters from teams begging you not to pick them. Except this one. Please pick Jacksonville this week. I would love if people had someone else to blame for the losses. Love Blake Bortles. He misspelled Bortles. Who are you picking this week? Maybe pick a team you don't mind cursing, either because you don't like them. Chargers. Or because you know the Fox guys will pick them too. The Steelers? I picked the Steelers. We know. Thanks, buddies. I really hope I turn this around. I wouldn't want to look foolish. Ta-da! Wow! Hey, where's Jimmy? Oh, he's always wandering off these days. Where does he go? No one knows. But probably where we can get dinner in the middle of the day. Wait. Where did he come from? No one knows. Hey, Tony, how you doing in the picks? I don't want to talk about it. That means he stinks! Yes! Wait a second. How come Puppet Terry's not wearing a shirt? The real question is, why don't I have nipples?


I'm going to be building on some of the ideas that Ben Blair presented at the beginning, specifically about the role of language and creative works and prophecy in Earth's renewal. Language is a universal technology. It is used to manipulate ideas, create and transform concepts, design, explore and analyze in order to achieve a purpose for vision. We know that there is power in the vision uttered in the word made flesh. This presentation speaks of language as creative power, specifically as the missing Urtex and archetype of women, the divine mother and the necessity of returning to her wisdom for Earth's renewal. Imagine two circles, largely but not completely overlapping, the center, a tall oval of convergence, and on each side facing Crescent. One of the two circles is the dominant element of culture, men. The other, the muted element of culture, women. Both the Crescent that belongs to men only, and the Crescent that belongs to women only, are wilderness. However, as Elaine Scholl-Walter explains, all of male consciousness is within the dominant, the circle of the dominant structure, and thus accessible to or structured by language. Women know what the male Crescent is like, even if they have never seen it, because it becomes spoken culture, the histories and mythologies of a people. These myths shape ideologies surrounding built and natural environments. What is understood in the 21st century as nature is really a curated environment built around industrial needs, urbanization, and selected areas of wildness, the boundaries of which are ever eroding. The Earth's wildness has no place in nature, which has become man's property. But the experience of women as women, their wilderness Crescent, is unshared with men, utterly other, and therefore to men, unnatural. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, this is what civilization has left out. What culture excludes what the dominance call animal, bestial, primitive, undeveloped, unauthentic. What has not been spoken, and when spoken, has not been heard. What we are just beginning to find words for, our words, not their words, the experience of women. For dominance, identified men and women both, that is true wildness. Their fear of it is ancient, profound, and violent. The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied, and therefore cannot know, cannot share, that wild country, the being of women. If conceptions of nature are built around just one Crescent of human experience, male, it is clear that the intergeneration of a percussion of women's dismissal and subordination, perseveration from our own wild nature reverberate in every facet of her being, affecting the health of the world. A lodestar in restoring the voice and psyche of women is Jungian analyst and cantadora Clarissa Pancola Estes. For over 20 years, Dr. Estes researched the archetype of the wild woman, and not wild in the words pejorative sense, meaning out of control, but in its original sense. A wild woman strives to live a natural life when full of innate integrity and healthy boundaries. This facet of the female psyche is primal, but has been twisted and hidden by the forces of culture. She remains, however, in the traces of the myths and folk tales of many cultures, instinctual and visionary. Consequently, Dr. Estes is keenly aware of the devastations of the female unconscious that accompany women starved of these attributes. Dr. Estes gathered women's own language to describe the grim symptoms of a disrupted relationship with the wildest force of the psyche. They include feeling extraordinarily dry, fatigued, depressed, muzzled, frightened, without soulfulness, shame-bearing, chronically fuming, compressed. She contrasts this desiccated sense of being with the attributes of the mother wolf, fresh with blood, making tracks and herding her brood through wilderness with authority, nature in her unadulterated form. It is impossible to separate what has been done to women from what has been done to the land. Both are distrusted and removed from their wildness. They are feared, tamed and contorted into noble forms, into extractable resources. Because the essential networks of interconnection that define the sanctity of the earth and women are muted, rigorous scientific study that gathers enough understanding of ecological systems to honor and protect them is ignored in the face of lust for immediate gains that cut at the last roots of the living world. The pride behind this wanton destruction of eternal networks in the physical and spiritual spheres of the wild is the same pride that removed heavenly mother from her temple throne and attempts to accelerate the silencing of women. Social and economic structures that promote this commodity-based view of the natural world have not been kept from influencing the worldviews of LDS church members and the church's own institutional structure. Unfortunately, this contributes to a spiritual and cognitive dissonance toward the land and the true substance of divine feminine identity. A full appreciation of these aspects is necessary for a full restoration of the gospel, one that plants the mother tree in the temple as the giver of life and the healer of the environmentally degraded world. As long as the institutional structure of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints remains a patriarchy, its behaviors and correlated teachings will uphold the mistreatment of women and nature by defining them as appendages of men to be tamed and used, not to be heard or understood. Hearing women and valuing their voices dissolves the pride that sustains all patriarchal structures, which are inherently celestial and where equality is impossible. The patriarchal lens of the church creates tension around LDS theology that attributes all living beings with a soul, an individual purpose and identity that promises their celestialization along with earths. Instead of carving out a unique paradigm that honors and sustains the ecologies connecting all living beings on the earth, the church has largely taken on the attitude of dominance identified men and women, that the earth is to be used as those in power see fit. What follows is an underlying belief by many of its members compounded by eschatological theories that things will go as they will for the earth and there isn't much to be done to stop it. This fatalistic view of the earth creates a disconnect from the rape and abuse of the land and of women. It is sad but inevitable and only discussed peripherally. The beauty of the earth is mentioned in songs and occasionally over the pulpit, but there is little talk about the spiritual consequences of its destruction. Relatedly, there is little official discourse about the abuse of women in the church. When stories surface, they are immediately buried under counter accusations and victim blaming. Over and over again, women have to fight to be heard and to have the power of the patriarchal institutions on their side. As patriarchy fears the creative powers of the wild, it fears the creative powers of women and their voices that cast a spiritual warning toward collective abuses of their bodies and the body of the earth. There is no room within the walls of any patriarchy for women to speak as women to voice their primal and primary roles. Consequently, women's wild desire for their birthright are opening paths of understanding to Heavenly Mother. Saints across the globe are seeking and finding answers on their own through personal revelation and creative works that are becoming the greatest force for ushering in exiled lady wisdom. Women preside in the rights of birth and death, tend to children the sick and elderly, and are therefore a constant reminder of the inevitability of death, representing the unknown and uncontrollable. As Shari Ortner states, because of women's greater bodily involvement with the natural functions surrounding reproduction, she is seen as more a part of nature than man is, yet in part because of her consciousness and participation in human social dialogue, she is recognized as a participant in culture. Thus, she appears as something intermediate between culture and nature, lower on the scale of transcendence than man. This hierarchy bleeds into the mindset of elvious men and women. The cosmological failings of the correlated gospel include an omission of women's true realm, her powers, her voice, her dimensions. Likewise, Heavenly Mother is faceless, nameless, voiceless. Even Mormon feminists have been caught within the constructs of the Church's patriarchal framework when articulating, in the words of Taylor Petru, Mother in Heaven's identity and roles in order to represent their own needs and desires of the ideal woman and their calls for reforming the theology. What does women's heaven look like, spoken from their own lips? What is the soul of their creatures like? In short, what is the character of their own spirits? There are more answers available than have been given space than elvious discourse. They have not entered with full force into the discourse because Mother is still missing from her temple home as a source of women's spiritual orientation and nourishment. Mother is a tree. Her roots reach down into the underworld. Her body is the flesh and blood of the present, the passage between life and death. Her branches pass to the heavens. She represents eternal life in the most primal sense as the preserver of the interrelationships of all beings and the earth around them. She knows everything that lives by name, why and how each came to be. She is the Tree of Life, the Axis Mundi, the vertical marking of the center of the cosmos, the conceptual and ceremonial center. The Tree of Life has always been a symbol of the divine feminine. Specifically in the Old Testament, the tree is the representation of Asherah and Israelite goddess. She is the lady in the temple, the source of fecundity and eternal life. Christ is her fruit. Asherah was one in a family of gods worshiped in the first Jerusalem temple and part of a larger council of gods. This family included the father, the highest, the mother, the consort, goddess Asherah, and personification of wisdom and the son called the Lord. The removal of Asherah from the Holy of Holies of the temple was the removal of the urtex of women, the sacred script that unfolded their role in salvation. It was the rejection of the ecological wisdom encoded in the everlasting covenant. According to Bible scholar Margaret Barker, the sins of Jerusalem that Isaiah condemned were not those of the Ten Commandments, but those of the Enoch tradition, Pride, Rebellion, and loss of wisdom, capital W. Lady Wisdom spoke from the cosmological center of the Israelites from her home in the Holy of Holies about the mysteries of creation. She was remembered as the bond of the everlasting covenant, or in other words, the seal of creation. The everlasting covenant was given to all living beings as a way to preserve the connections forged on the earth and with earth eternally. Margaret Barker continues, the prophets linked covenant not to the Lord's exclusive relationship to his people, but to the Creator's relationship to the creation. Breaking the everlasting covenant means destroying the fabric of creation. It is a rejection of the feminine aspect of deity, her admonitions, and eternal wisdom. Isaiah prophesied that during the last days, the earth would be cursed because the earth offered the filed under the inhabitants thereof because they have changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant, therefore hath the curse devoured the earth and they that dwell therein are desolate. As the seal of creation, heavenly mothers continued exile from the temple and from the religious and cultural life of contemporary saints is in partial fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy.  Her return will signify a restoration of humility and love for all that is wild that will bring her offering as life giver and eternal center of the actualized actualized principles of wisdom to fruition. To enter the holy of holies into the promises of celestial glory, a unified holistic view of the entirety of creation is to reverence a wild and mysterious mother. To learn the purposes of creation to contemplate the darkest abyss in order to discern the most brilliant light, it is to be entrusted with the understanding of the paths of everything that lives. What Moses actually saw on Sinai, as remembered by Baruch, the scribe of the prophet Jeremiah, was in part the transformation of the mountain into the holy of holies, a consecrated space where Moses saw the creation of the world and learned the law. These revelations were the mysteries of godliness, the wild heart of heavenly mother. This was Moses entering into true wildness. He was shown the measures of fire, the depths of the abyss, the weight of the winds, the number of the raindrops, the suppression of wrath, the abundance of long suffering, the truth of judgment, the root of wisdom, the richness of understanding, the fountain of knowledge, the height of the air, the greatness of paradise, the end of the periods, the beginning of the day of judgment, the number of offerings, the worlds which have not yet come, the mouth of hell, the standing place of vengeance, the place of faith, the region of hope, the picture of coming punishment, the multitude of angels which cannot be counted, the powers of the flame, the splendor of lightnings, the voice of the thunders, the order of the archangels, the treasuries of the light, the changes of the times and the inquiries into the law. Approaching the mother tree in order to partake of Christ, the fruit, is to enter into the way of all abundance. The Creatress with El and Yahweh will usher souls into eternal life who are trusted with the mysteries of creation to better understand wildness as the vast web of interconnections and relationships to energies, matter, and souls. The fathers and the mothers evaluation of their children will be based on the doctrine of Christ to become as little children. The roots of the word innocent mean to be free of injury or hurt. In Spanish it is understood to mean a person who tries not to harm others and who also is able to heal any injury or harm to herself. All children are wild. All were wild once and lived in the wild country of the mother tree. She is prophesied to return that it's time to usher her in. Thank you. Seeing some clapping reactions. Thank you so much, Catherine. That was really beautiful. I almost don't even want to say anything. I kind of just want to let it sit for a second. But we do have some questions for you. At least I see one so far. And we can also take comments if people want to just sort of say something back. The first question that we have is from Lincoln Cannon. Lincoln wants to know your thoughts on whether or not wildness is inherently good. And if it's not like doesn't matter, and if it is, how are you going to distinguish between good and evil wildness? Yeah, that's a great question. The way that I used it in this presentation specifically was in the context of understanding one's true nature and understanding the boundaries and the interconnections and the essence of that. I think you have to also take into consideration that we're operating from like a Mormon theological standpoint in a fallen world, in a celestial world. And so sort of the laws that apply to our natural sphere may not be the full realization of the laws of interconnection and ecology that would be sort of the celestial version of what true wildness is. But I think that to understand it better, we have to be much more willing as humankind to place ourselves in a horizontal framework with the rest of creation rather than at the very top sort of looking down and thinking we understand fully how and why things operate. Does that answer the question? You're muted, Mike Lynn. Sorry. Maybe even seeing ourselves, I think when I hear you say horizontal, seeing ourselves as part of nature, not separate from nature. I'm going to go to Rebecca Bateman next. I also see that we've got one from Caleb and Jenny. Rebecca Bateman, she wonders if you can talk a little bit more to your thoughts on like when we bring that tree back into the Holy of Holies, what does that look like? How does that manifest? Can you put some maybe more concrete language around it? Sure. I sort of envision a whole different organization. I mean, if you're talking about the gospel itself versus the organization, I guess we have to start there. When I started reading some texts and outside sources about sort of temple theology and understanding how the language specifically in the scriptures has been changed to sort of mask the role of the divine feminine in temple ceremony and ritual and symbology, it became much more clear to me that a restoration of the divine feminine in that Holy of Holies of spaces would help sort of balance and help us to understand the role of men and women in sort of the balancing act of creation and how we come together to make something whole and to allow creation to reach its full potential. As the seal of creation, so Asher in the Holy of Holies, the divine feminine symbol in the Holy of Holies was seen as the creature. She was seen as a seal of creation as the throne that held Christ. And so there's this power and this identity and this understanding of priesthood, of high priesthood, that I think we, because we have sort of chosen many times through history, most recently with Joseph Smith, to sort of say no to Zion and say no to a higher law as a people collectively, that's been sort of a hidden path and sort of a mysterious path, I guess, to entering that space and really understanding and qualifying ourselves to understand what creation is, all of its purposes, and how women specifically fit into the role of salvation. Does that help Rebecca? Great. I have one question I think that's kind of a fun question. Then I've got a couple of people with their hands raised as well. Greg Muller says that the implications of your presentation were wild, but your, so the implications are wild, but your presentation itself was a little sober. And so as someone with a Tigger personality, he's wondering what wild personal expressions are the norm for you? Oh, for me, in terms of just how I'm living, maybe ask me the question one more time. Like, how do you personally manifest wildness in your life? Oh, okay, got it. I think right now, a lot of it is being more comfortable, not knowing things, being more comfortable in a realm of mystery and doubt and uncertainty, and speaking out a lot more than I have before, and trying to find more courage in my expressions. And I think it goes hand in hand to with what I think all prophets have done and what they've all called us to do, which is to ascend on our own journey to God directly, unmitigated. And that's essentially what the temple ceremony sort of instructs us to do in a ritual way. But I think we have gotten hung up culturally and thinking that, oh, actually, if we just get all the things that we need in this life, ordinance-wise, we're good to go. When in reality, if we don't turn our hearts to God, male and female, it's useless, it's of no avail. And so I think that trying to ground myself in what is real eternally and being on my own ascension path is the best way that I can honor what is truly wild and authentic inside of myself and help others to have the courage to do that as well and sort of strip ourselves of the cultural identities that don't really serve us. That's beautiful. Let's go to Blair Osler next. She wants to ask you something unmuted. Please. Okay. So hi, Catherine. So first, tons of praise, your book is amazing. I love it. I recommend it twice. It's so good. Thank you. So I love that you're bringing up the part of the divine that is underrepresented. And what I'm noticing from some of the comments in here is that true wildness came when you said we should put the tree in the temple. And to me, that represents the overlapping intermixing of the natural and the technological, the feminine and the masculine. You basically just queered the narrative in that sentence. And so in so doing, that's where I think we see the real wildness coming from, this idea that these polarities that are seemingly in opposition to each other aren't. They can come together. And so my question for you is that, well, one, I just love that you're bringing up the underrepresented side of the masculine and feminine because feminine is totally unrepresented. But is there more room for, I want to call them cyborg women? So women who became women through technological means, someone like myself, we talk about natural birth delivery, natural everything, nothing about that was natural for me. It was technological. So it literally was how, where do cyborg women fit in this narrative? Explain to me a little bit more about how it was technological for you. Sorry. No, totally. That's a great question. So for me, I couldn't have children without technological means. I would be dead and my children would be dead. So womanhood for me means death. Natural womanhood is death. And so I don't like that story. I don't think that's a good story. And so I consider myself a cyborg woman of sorts or the intermixing, the queerness, the intersets of it. It took masculinity to make me a woman, right? So my question is, where do these cyborg women fit in here that were just not totally natural women? Yeah, that's an excellent question. And I think the more that I sort of study and contemplate things, the more that I don't know that I really hold on to, like I hold on to the idea that embodiment of a female and a male deity is possible, because anything's possible. But I think I'm trying to, I'm feeling more like the idea of a feminine aspect and a masculine aspect harmonized inside any one soul is the answer. And I don't know what that looks specifically for any one individual, right? Like that's such a profoundly intimate and individualized thing. And so, but I do feel like the balance of those perspectives and those ways are behind things being harmonious, if that makes sense. But that's an excellent question and something to like explore forever. That's beautiful. I love Blair, how you bring that aspect back in about complicating the narrative. And just so everybody knows, we, because we started this session a little bit later, but we're moving along really well, we're going to start our next breakouts in the next six to seven minutes. So we've got time for a couple more questions. I've got one from, I still don't see Jenny's hand raised that before that, I'm going to go back up to Caleb. I think he was first. Caleb asks, like, do you see a relationship between patriarchal power structures and like scarcity in competition? And on the other hand, do you see a relationship between matriarchal and like post scarcity? You guys just speak to that a little bit about how the gender dynamics play into into scarcity. Yeah. I've been reading recently a lot of works by Native women authors about like matriarchal societies and how there was this degree of harmony and balance within the societies that has not really existed in any other form. And we see them so rarely in the world's history that I think it's hard to like, to really know in like a postmodern context what everything would look like. But I do feel like this desire to have things equally dispersed and, you know, like divided between people is at the heart of what we claim to desire as Zion, that if there's this desire to all be unequal footing as much as possible to give everyone the possibility of moving ahead on their own trajectory and answering their own basic needs and allowing for rising together essentially, that yeah, like the way that women need to be incorporated into that structure is paramount. And we have never really ever been given a chance to do that because I think at the heart of it, it means the patriarchal orders, these power structures have to dissolve. And so we really have to ask ourselves as societies, are we willing to like not be the one who climbs to the top, you know, like, are we really going to like let go of that pride and that ego and be on equal footing with each other and love and care and compassion, rather than, you know, like having top 1%, 10% of individuals in the world run the world and have the majority of resources and have the say about what happens to the natural world and what happens to women. So we're trying to move collectively from a celestial worldview to a celestial and it's a battle. It is the battle. So whether or not the, and this is, I'm just going off in a tangent now, but whether or not like the institution of the church will ever allow for that, I have my doubts. And so, you know, being able to sort of separate what is the heart of the gospel, what is the heart of Christ's message versus what we as humans have built around that, I think is work that every individual has to do. Thank you so much. Okay, we've got our final question from Genady. Go ahead and unmute yourself. Yes, thank you. And just so that you know where I'm coming from, I am an atheist. So I have no issues with your critique of the church of LDS. You may well be correct in that I kind of see it as not my battle to fight, but what I would like to challenge is this opposition that you've posited between the male and the female and the characterization of male influences as being the source of all of this ostensible oppression. My counter to that would be aren't we all a lot more alike than we are different in the sense that we inhabit the same world. We're all human. We're all subject to very common vulnerabilities of frailty, disease, mortality. We all face material scarcity. We all have psychological flaws and cognitive biases. And isn't it better for all of us male and female and other to unite and try to overcome those flaws? And by no means am I advocating for patriarchy here. I think it's a good thing that women have many more rights and opportunities than they had in the past. I think that should continue to be the case. I think there are some advantages that women have that I would like males to have. For instance, women live longer on average. The oldest super centenarians have all been women. I would like to know how you do that. Even in this current pandemic, the statistics are showing women are a little less likely to die of COVID-19. I would like to know how women are able to do that as well. So isn't it more productive to say we're all in this together. We should respect our shared humanity. We should look for common goals and ways of achieving these goals in collaboration. Yes. And I hope it was clear that I was not generally speaking about men and women and not wanting it to be divisive. That I was talking specifically about men and women who have this dominance identified mindset. That they have this worldview or this framework where what they want and what their end goals are is what the natural world is here for. So that can be men and women, right? Like this isn't just men versus women, but the historical facts are that men have largely developed culture, language, have codified everything, have been the ones to lead society for the majority of this, you know, a modern, a postmodern world. So there has not been harmony. And that is part of the problem. There has not been harmony between a masculine and a feminine perspective. Women are just beginning to feel like they can speak out. And you know, this is evident in the fact that most like the number one perpetrator of murder against women is their own, like their own partner. So there is literally encoded in women's biology, this fear of being killed, of being persecuted, of being abused, because they speak from a place of wildness, place of intuition, a place from their own heart. So women desperately want a world that is safe for their children and a world in which we truly recognize with our behavior that everything is interconnected and our actions have consequences that affect generations. So whether or not men in this patriarchal structure, which is infused in every, literally every organization of the world, are willing to step aside and sort of reevaluate a structure in which women are equally incorporated, we're just going to keep being at odds.


So, for those of you who are familiar with the movie Pulp Fiction, you may recognize this as part of one of the most quoted scenes in the movie where Samuel L. Jackson's character is quoting a verse from the Bible before he's about to do his job and execute someone for his boss, Marcelos Wallace. Some of my former co-workers and maybe even my current ones would say that reflects my management style. I hope by the end of this talk you will disagree with them and not think I'm purely an angry black man. However, there are a couple of parts of this quote that do reflect my management philosophy. So, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness to me simply means leading your team through difficult times.  I'm Kevin Stewart. I'm director of product engineering at NodeSource, our company builds products using JavaScript and Node.js for the enterprise. I've only been there two months, but I've been leading software teams for approximately 18 years. In fact, prior to NodeSource, I worked at Adobe, right in this very building and I've been in this room many, many, many times. But I started from the bottom as a first level engineering manager and over the years worked on multiple projects getting promoted up to director of engineering. So I titled this talk, Managing While Black, Totally Tongue in Chief. Any time that I would text my wife saying, hey, I'm going out for a happy hour with some of my coworkers or I'm going to a meetup, she said, okay, that's fine, but don't go crazy, don't drink too much.  They will pull you over for driving while black.  But of course, I think that's your car.  They're going to pull you over just as quickly as they'll pull me. But this whole situation, the interactions that we have with the police and some of these scenarios of traffic stops, they've been discussed quite a bit. And I don't want to talk about all the extreme cases. I want to talk about the normal cases where a police officer just doing their job, pulling you over, and what some of the differences are in the interactions between Caucasians and people of color. So this image, the officer's pulling you over. And the most common thing is, do you know why I pulled you over? Now, it's a reasonable question. It's a rational question.  Where are you going? Maybe another question, you know, where are you headed? Because obviously something has tipped them off that it's unusual for you to be here. Is this your vehicle? Does this belong to you? Again, all of these are straightforward questions. In context, nothing seems wrong about them, except if you're a person of color, you may have had experiences where these questions have another meaning for you. Because you may be thinking, why is this officer pulling me over? I haven't done anything wrong. I know it's happened to me several times. So officer comes up to my window and I have my hands at 10 and 2, because that's what I've been taught to do since I was 13. And when I hear the question, do you know why I pulled you over? If I hadn't done anything wrong, my first thought might be, no officer, I have no idea why you pulled me over. I wasn't speeding, my tail line is not broken, I didn't cross the median. Why are you here? This is the way to my house, I live here. Is this your vehicle? Yes, it's my vehicle. If you're going to find that out when you check out the license and registration, didn't realize I had to carry the receipt to my purchase in my car all the time. Context is everything. And last week we had the verdict in the Brillo case where I just had this moment where I tweeted out, where in the world can I go where I don't have to fear being killed by the police? Luckily, I live on the internet and people were happy to tell me exactly the answer to my question. Without fail, I got a ton of responses about, well, you can live anywhere. Because if you're not doing anything wrong, the police aren't going to stop you. Sure.  So how does this translate to situations you may be in as a manager or a leader in a tech company? Some of this will apply no matter the industry, but we're going to focus on tech here. So I'm a manager, I'm having a conversation with someone, and they point out, you are so articulate. Okay, that sounds great. That's a compliment, right? Except, I just said I was a manager, and I'm sure all of you have read a job description. Some of you may have written a job description. And inevitably, there is that one line that says, must have great spoken and written communication skills. In fact, as a manager, the bulk of your job is communicating with people. So the question in my head is, why are you pointing out that I'm articulate? You hired me. That was one of the job reforms. Let's say it's not even someone you work with, let's say it's a partner or a customer and you're having a meeting with them and they point out, you are so articulate. Again, I'm a representative of the company. Did you, were you going to do business with someone where they don't have articulate people? Is that the type of company you want to do business with? Probably not. Now, I'm not going to even pretend that people of color don't get promoted. They do. They get promoted all the time. However, there's always that sort of level where you seem to hit the glass ceiling, where you can't seem to break through. You could be punching above your weight. You could be landing all your projects on time. You could be just doing amazing work and just not get to the level that you're trying to get to. And you have this conversation with your manager about this next level of promotion and they say, I don't see you in that role. It's totally within the right to not see you doing a particular thing, but more often than not, you never get the next part of that conversation. You don't get the reasons why they don't see you in that role, or at least not actionable ones. They may be subjective. They may be ambiguous. But what can you do with that? All that leads to is frustration and usually anger of why am I being held down or why am I not being given this opportunity. It's my personal favorite. It's being told that I need to work on my personal brand. Well, usually what this means is you have a perception problem. You are not meeting people's expectations around what they want from a co-worker, colleague, manager. And generally it has more to do with some aspect of your personality. It could be an affectation. It could be the fact that you're more direct. You speak loudly. It could be any of those things. Now, there are behaviors, there are things that you may do that may prevent you from moving forward. Like, it's probably not a good idea to drop the F bond in meetings. I can attest to this.  Those are things that are actionable. Those are things you can change. But if you don't appreciate or like the fact that I'm a direct person or that I'm going to be outgoing or outspoken, you're basically asking me to change who I am. And that's not going to happen. The problem with these questions or these statements are that people of color tend to receive them more than Caucasians. And that's the issue is it's not that by themselves there are any problems. It's just who they're directed at. And the situations they're made in. A few years ago, I believe it was in 2012, Paul Judge, who was a serial entrepreneur and investor, wrote a post on TechCrunch entitled, Greed Trump's Race, How to Be a Successful African American in Silicon Valley. And this post actually changed my life. One, because he was responding to a CNN series called Black in America where they looked at entrepreneurs who were trying to boost draft their companies and get funding in Silicon Valley. And I recommend that you all check it out. It was a great series. The problem was that, of course, when they were having troubles or they weren't succeeding, it was pinned on racism in the valley. And I had problems with that. I wrote a blog post about it myself. But Paul had a different take. He said a lot of times when we identify things as racism, that's not really what it is. A lot of times it's underrepresentation and the side effects of underrepresentation. And that stuck with me for a while. But he also made another point, which is related to the title of his post, Greed Trump's Race. And at the end of the day, no matter what company you work for, no matter what they say their mission is, they want to change the world. They want to build innovative products for people. Unless they're a nonprofit or a foundation of some sort, their goal is to make money, full stop. They're there to make money. And if you can find a way to showcase the fact that your ideas, your approaches, are going to bring money in for the company and improve their bottom line, they don't care what color your skin is. Doesn't matter. The only color that matters is green. Now, we're all familiar with the diversity numbers. There's lots of talks about the diversity in tech companies. And around 5% would be what it was for African Americans and Hispanics. When I asked about the same numbers in Adobe, when I was here, it was 1% African American. And I take full responsibility for this number. That's actually my fault because I told a lot of leaders around Adobe that I wanted to be a member of the 1%. Unfortunately, I don't think they understood what I meant. I'm always going to be a member of that 1%. I wanted to be a member of the other 1%. So, listening to what Paul Judge had to say in his post, I realized that part of my responsibility as a manager and leader in the company is to figure out how to address some of these problems about diversity. So, the first, the obvious one is the pipeline problem. We've all heard about the pipeline problem. And the pipeline problem is there aren't enough qualified candidates that are people of color that we can attract to our companies. Normally, this is where I'd use one of those words I'm not supposed to use. So, let's just say there is no such thing as the pipeline problem. In fact, the bigger problem is that our systems are tied to going and looking at the places that I call the usual suspects. If you're recruiting from universities like Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, all of the usual suspects. Well, here's a tip. One, those universities are not diverse in the first place. Tip number two, all your competitors and even your partners, they're all recruiting from those places as well. So, that's not going to solve your problem. The point is that you don't have a pipeline problem, you have a networking problem. You don't have enough nodes in the network for your company where there are people of color. You don't know people of color. Everyone tells you when you're recruiting, hey, recommend a friend. You got to know somebody that you've worked with before, bring them in. You even get compensated if you have a referral. Well, if you had more people of color, they have networks too. They have a cousin, they have a friend, they knew somebody from the hood that is great at JavaScript and tell me who they are because I'll hire them. But that's the problem we need to fix. How do we take advantage of the people of color that are in our organizations now and tap into their networks and broaden the overall organizations networks? Related to this is our process for hiring people. Hiring is fundamentally broken and we all know it. How do we fix it? I think the solution actually exists in, strangely enough, reality music competitions. Bear with me on this one. So let's take American Idol as the status quo. They have a job to fill and it's the next American Idol. They do not have a pipeline problem. I see tons of people lining up to audition for American Idol. They have an interview loop.  Now, I've only watched the early seasons of this, so I'm just going to go with judges I know. Simon Cole will see someone walk in the door for an audition and look at them and say, you don't look like a pop star. Person hasn't auditioned yet. They haven't shown they can sing.  And he's immediately written them off, okay? That might be a problem. Now, let's look at how the voice does it. Again, they're trying to fill a position who's going to be the voice. They don't have a pipeline problem. They have candidates coming in all the time. But the difference is in their interview loop, the judges are turned around. They don't see the candidate. All they do is hear because the biggest part of the job is can they sing? And almost without fail, when someone decides, I want to hit my buzzer and turn around because this person sounds great.  Doesn't matter. They've just made a commitment that they're taking this person on their team. And you'll notice as the season progresses, they learn so much more about this person as they have to coach them and work with them and figure out the things that they can extract from these people that helps them achieve their goal of winning that season of the voice. What can we learn from that? What can we do to change our existing hiring processes to get some of those benefits? Those are things we should be thinking about. Final thing, a lot of the talk about diversity in tech is great. However, it seems to be focused more on the we need more diversity in tech because it's the right thing to do. The optics are bad when you have a company that doesn't have a diverse workforce. And that's absolutely 100% true. However, going back to that point that Paul Judge made about the bottom line, one of the reasons we're maybe not being as successful in making that happen is we're not tying it back to that fundamental principle. How does diversity in tech help the bottom line? How do we make those arguments? So, again, I love Twitter. And it wasn't until years later that I even heard of this idea of Black Twitter that there's this ghetto called Black Twitter where the Black people tweet. So I assume we all agree that's completely offensive. But there is something to be learned there. In product development, people who are building a new product have a vision for what they want that product to be and how they're going to make money on it. And inevitably, people will use their product in ways they didn't intend. And there are things that can be learned there. How can we apply diversity in tech to that product development process so that we can expand our customer base to a larger number of people and subsequently make more money? That's the argument that we should be making. That it's not about just doing the right thing and having more Blacks and Hispanics and Asians. It's more about if we had more people of color as product managers and designers and engineers, they would be bringing their experiences, their knowledge, and their differences to the product development process. And whether it's taking one product and making it more broadly applicable or coming up with new products that are targeted to those various segments, that expands your customer base. Expand your customer base, you have more opportunities to make money. Make that argument. So I started off this talk with an image of Samuel L. Jackson as one character, but I actually have an affinity for him in another role, which is Colonel Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. in all the Marvel movies. And I have lots of reasons for liking this character.  So, you know, but he's also, to me, the perfect example of a guy who's doing a great job managing while Black. He has a global organization of super-spots. He has one of the hardest jobs, which is saving the world, seemingly on a daily basis. But he's also proven that he knows what his company's business is, saving the world. And he knew he needed a diverse team to do it. So he built the most diverse team in the world, The Avengers. I can't find a more diverse team than this, all right? You got a super soldier from World War II that was frozen in ice that you reanimated.  You have an Asgardian thunder god. You've got a billionaire playboy philanthropist inventor in a suit of armor. You've got an archer. And you've got a gamma-radiated monster. Damn.  So Nick Fury to me is the person I aspire to be as a leader.  Because he gets results. And with that, thank you.


What's going on guys, it's your boy DPJ here today with another Destiny video and today I've been in this top 5 Queen Breakers Bowl Plays of the week. Now this weapon kinda had an influx of people using it about a couple months back and then all of a sudden it stopped, you didn't really see it no more.  Hope you enjoyed the video, do smash that like button, I do appreciate the support and I'll catch you on that next one.