Y cender-feydd hefyd, ac mae'n dweud gwneud yn ddiddordeb yn ychydig a'r leidio, a dweud eich hefyd di oed gyda'r gweithio'r cydechrau'n gyfeirio. Fe swyddeth hynny'n cael eu cyfrwyddau cystig a cyfrwyddau cystrannu Cymru. Y cerddffydd am y cyfrwyddau cyfrwydd a'r cyfrwyddau cyfrwyddog yn ddesrfydder ystai newydd deimon. Llywodraeth, mae'n credu eu cynhyrch yn ddelchynu'r cyfrwyddu cyfrwyddiol. There's a lot of security controls in there, there's a lot of security controls within red hats, not just in terms of open shift, you got the openS cap and insights and so on. So you've got a lot of this protection stuff already out of the blocks. So how can security vendors like Acru and ourselves come here and actually help you improve on this? Well it's about making sure you've got more than just the basic levels.  How do you manage that when you scale across two or three different cloud environments? You want to have that single view for things. Again, the Aqua team have been doing some great work with EBPF. If you haven't had a look into EBPF, definitely look into it.  Some people are touting it as the future of observability, but it's also in many respects the future of security in general. It's analysing all those system calls. And that's core to what we're doing as well with Cystig, and I think you'll see many vendors going down that route because it really is such a great low impact but high-level information in there. So we leveraged that kind of kernel-level information to give you two really core bits of information. That's observability for telemetry, are my applications healthy, are they good? Now, yes, you get this out of Prometheus. In OpenShift 4, you're going to get Prometheus out of the box. But it's digging deeper into that information. It's working out how do I actually get the context of that? How do I dig deeper into my applications, understanding why is my performance bad? Where are my bottlenecks appearing? And then again, giving you that view across multiple clusters. So giving that low-level information is really important. As touched on, the great thing about EBPF is it also gives you lots of great security context. Are my applications doing what they should be doing? Are my forking processes? Is my Nginx making calls, outbound calls to the internet? Is my RabbitMQ server forking a Python process? These things are really easy to detect. The great thing about containers is they should do one thing and they should do that one thing well. So it should be really easy to work out when that's doing wrong. But how would you know today that your Nginx server is doing something other than Nginx? So that's really the level of information we're looking at providing. So it is about combining this. I'm going to skip through this just in view of time and get more into one of the different areas we cover. We talk about this as the idea of build, run, and respond. So a build time, this is when you're absolutely... you're building your containers, you want to make sure you've got security best practices, you haven't got config drift, you're going through just general container best practices. You also want to make sure you're not making invulnerabilities at that early stages. This whole idea of shifting security left is really important because you want your developers... you want your application development teams to have security in mind. And the real way to do that is to give them feedback. Make sure they know. Most of the time, traditionally, when it comes to security, we didn't know we had a security problem until we put it in production and the firewalls and all the other security tools turn around and says, no, you can't do that. And then we learn and we go back. Getting this information as early as possible is important. It's that whole agile methodology of getting fail fast, get that feedback in there as well. So pushing this back at the build time. And, of course, at the run time, as the aqua guys were showing, you can have things embedded that you have no idea are there. It's the great and terrible thing about containers is I can download something from the internet, have no idea what it does, but have that running in a production workload. So being able to create these profiles to work out what's good, what's bad, what's ugly, what's indifferent, making sure you've got that view of both application health and application security. And then finally, what happens when things go wrong? Verna Vogels massively quoted everything fails all the time. And it's true. You have to go in with this with the approach of my applications are going to fail at some point. In a very similar way from security, a lot of people have the approach and have the view that I am going to have a security breach at some point. Some people have a slightly more negative view that I've already had a security breach. I just don't know it yet. Being prepared for this, having the ability to actually capture and analyze those events at low level after something bad has happened is really, really important. That's the idea of what we talk about with Respond. And of course this happens across the full life cycle. You've got dozens and dozens of tools. OpenShift is one part of your tool chain. You've no doubt got all sorts of DevOps tooling these days. And it's making sure you can have these integrated rather than going from dashboard to dashboard to dashboard, making sure you've got that nice clean flow. Introducing more tools to your DevOps teams is not going to get them to adapt stuff. You want to make that simple. Check in the time. I'm not going to go through that slide. It's in here, so you've got a reference. And that's probably my it. So we have got a booth upstairs. I don't want to label too much of this because I can smell that food and I'm sure you can as well. So get some foods, get some energy back in and come talk to us later on. Look forward to having some drinks with a few of you as well.


In the following, I will introduce you to the content of the VLC Varieties of English class. I will first of all look at the content of the class and its syllabus, provide an overview of the e-educational strategies that are applied and will finally list the requirements students have to fulfill to get the class credits. Let's look at the class description first. The class is organized into the following parts. We will start with an introduction to the underlying concepts necessary for the discussion of dialectal variation. Then we will discuss the main varieties of English, in particular British and North American English. We will also incorporate the recent findings of Labov's Atlas of North American English study. The remaining units focus on English elsewhere, from Australia to special varieties such as Jamaican Creole. Like all VLC classes, we will use the inverted classroom model as the backbone of our educational strategy. Let us look at this in more detail. In traditional teaching, content delivery and content acquisition are realized in class, where students have to meet at the same time in the same place to be entertained by their teacher. In a second phase, students normally practice on their own, on the basis of additional material, exercise, material, homework, tasks, etc. We will flip these two activities and apply the inverted classroom model. Content acquisition is now self-guided. It takes place first and is carried out online. The additional in-class phase is dedicated to practicing, rehearsing, discussion, analysis, and so on. This means that prior to each in-class meeting, students must have worked through the online content of the respective unit. Classical or frontal teaching is now just one method among many. For example, if the online content is not self-explanatory enough and needs reworking, or if additional information has to be provided, the central teaching method however is now that of a cooperative interaction between instructor and students. Finally, you want to know what you have to do in order to get the class credits, where one credit is the equivalent of about 30 hours workload. Well, this is what you can get. Four ECTS will be awarded for active participation, three ungraded worksheet, and one e-exam. If you want six ECTS, you have to do the same thing plus one sound analysis project, where we analyze English data auditorily and then transcribe it and convert it into a structure that can be used on the VLC. If you want to get eight ECTS, you have to do everything that has been mentioned before plus one complex wiki entry, which will be stored in the VLC wiki system. This class has been taught several times at several universities in Germany and abroad. And what is more important, students seem to have enjoyed it. Just look at the comment of one student from our permanent class evaluation.


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome back everyone, we're live here in Las Vegas for HPE Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Discover 2017 SiliconANGLE Media's program theCUBE. We'll go out to the events and extract the simple noise. I'm John Ford, my co is Dave Vellante, my co-CEO and co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, which is part of SiliconANGLE.com, theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv, theCUBE.net, and wikibon.com. Go to wikibon.com, she got all the great research and a lot of the stuff they're talking about here at HPE Discover has a lot to do with what's happening at Wikibon and around big data and IoT. Dave, summary of day one wrap up, kind of our take, if you will, on HPE's messaging, what they're showing, and you know, the debate. I mean, we were at Dell EMC World, we heard Michael Dell and his team say, bigger is better, HPE is saying agile, nimble, but they've got a confederation, a, you know, federation of all these little kind of HPE companies, it's still a conglomerate. It's not small, as you said, in our opening. Meg's keynote today was all about the future of computing in a new way, if you will. Data, IoT, center of it, your thoughts and analysis of day one, keynote, our guests, your thoughts. John, I opened up this morning segment saying that five years ago we talked on theCUBE about, and I made the statement, HPE's got a shrink to grow. The other thing I said about HPE, now HPE, was it's got to get back to its roots of invent and it has not gotten back to those roots and now it is reinventing itself and its opportunity to get back to its roots of invention is through a partner ecosystem. That's very clear, kind of point number one. The second point I want to make is that these transformations that HPE and companies have gone through, I mean I've never seen anything this large, splitting a company up of a hundred billion dollar company, changing all the IT systems, doing all these spin merges, these are not trivial exercises. So when Meg says we're sort of at the end of that transformation, that five year process, in many respects they've now got to create a new transformation. They finally got this, they have this smaller company that's more focused and they've really got to still sharpen the edges on that sword in my opinion. The software business is still part of HPE, so that's got to happen. The cash coming in from the CSC spin merge still has to come in, so the balance sheet is still being restructured. But essentially the message that you're hearing from HPE is we're going to help you keep the lights on, we're going to make hybrid IT simple which is a good sort of tagline but it's a very, again, non-trivial thing to do. We've got this new partner ethos and we've got this fourth piece which is a moonshot on IoT and that's our big growth opportunity and we're going to put all our muscle behind that. I like the strategy. I mean, if you're going to go smaller and more focused you've got to have some kind of moonshot like that. You've got to have a partner ecosystem as they've described but as I say, there's still some more work to be done. They're still shaking off the embers of the exit of the cloud business trying to reshape that whole thing. So there's, as I say, more work to be done. You know, it's interesting. Good points, I agree 100%. I would add that my observation and what I came into HPE looking at was what will leadership and specifically Meg Whitman and Antonio Neary, mainly Meg Whitman and the team articulate to the customers because they've been getting pounded in the press on financial performance, the journey.   Let's say Meg Whitman says that. What that really means is that's just kind of an estimate based on her opinion, execute. But what I think she couldn't, well, she might have seen but what happened was the cloud just came in and completely decimated the landscape relative to disruption opportunity. So a five year journey pegged at that time becomes essentially made me longer. And so they're executing a turbulent marketplace that's good for them, but it could be at their back too. So I think they had to come out and talk to their customers. The customers need to hear from HP and saying, look it, we got your back. We're going to be delivering. We understand the transformation. We understand what's going on. They've been in the IT consumption business serving customers in IT. They're a big company. They got to calm the customers down and give them confidence. So to me, I saw confidence in the simplicity message, hybrid IT message, and the IoT with the headroom. I didn't see any game changing futuristic vapor. I didn't see a lot of AI washing. I didn't see a lot of machine learning, which is important. I think we're seeing the trend, but they didn't lead with that. They led with the meat and potatoes of HP. Storage, talking about the acquisitions, simplicity. Services. Nimble, the messaging with partners. I thought that's very much a meat and potatoes. It wasn't like a lights out keynote by Meg Whitman in the sense of standing ovation on, yeah, raw, raw, but it was meat and potatoes, aggressive, assertive. We're here for the long haul, and I thought that was positive. I think the partner friendly ethos is really, really important. And you've seen it around the show. I mean, look at Veeam as a platinum sponsor, right? That never would have happened two years ago because of HP Protector, their HP's backup software, never would have happened before. You see Fortinet out in the show, basically a competitor with HP security business. And so, and then this whole new partnership around the large SIs, right? I mean, that's a big deal. My, you're saying India, SIs, the CEO of Wipro standing up there today. I thought he was one of the more impressive parts of the keynote. So a much more aggressive posture with partnerships, a much cleaner story for partners. Yesterday, the partner conference got pretty high marks. People, I think, are fairly excited about that because HP's got enough muscle to put resources. And John, you know, I mean, what's your take on the whole channel and partnership thing? I mean, you lived that for a decade. Well, I mean, I think the channel thinks a great opportunity for them. It's about money making money together. I think that's going to be a key thing. My thoughts just from a, you know, trying to read the tea leaves. And I'm going to put this out there. I would say not half-baked, but my observation from today and in the interviews, kind of things came together for me around something that I was thinking about, but I could see it now with a little bit of a clarity. And that is, I think we're going to see a hardware renaissance. And what I mean by that is I think the message of computing is changing. We've been predicting with open compute that we've been covering, which is an open source project where Facebook and now others are donating reference and limitations of which Antonio Neary was supporting that project. It's not a lot of funding. There's a lot of open source projects going on. There's a lot of disruption kind of happening. It's almost like small little, you know, not really well reported marketplace, not a lot of money's being made yet because there's some new things happening. I think what's clear to me today is that a new business model of hardware is coming. And I think HP, if smart could change their business model instead of being a hardware box supplier, which they know is a declining market, to a total addressable market of true private cloud of 260 billion and be a supplier of hardware business model rather than hardware product where they bring their systems expertise in, use open source, bring the stuff out of HP Labs and not try to be hardcore about productizing it in a hardcore way, meaning another skew. I think they got to have some core products. But the growth I think is going to come from a hardware renaissance where a new developer is going to come out of hardware. You're going to start to see hardware being in the game. I mean, just last week at the recode conference, you had Steve Ballmer with Kara Swisher saying we should have gotten the hardware business a long time ago. Everyone's making their own phones in reference to the consumer market. So I think the enterprise market, you're going to see real opportunity around service providers and enterprises, essentially getting the best of what Amazon and Google does, which is build their own boxes in a new hardware development way. To me, that to me is absolutely clear. And I think that's going to open up essentially that long tail of compute. Cloud like true private cloud and hybrid. And I think of HP smart, they should jump on that and double down on that trend. So the things I'm looking for between say now and let's say the next discover in Madrid in December, the post-spin merge balance sheet. Let's take a look at that, because I think it's going to look a lot better. And that's going to cause people to go, whoa, look at that. Now HP's got even more leverage to go out and do deals. The second is when does IoT actually become a meaningful and measurable component of HP's business? Talking a lot about it, building up the ecosystem, talking about some use cases, a lot of blue sky types of things, but not a lot of hardcore concrete examples at the customer level. So when does that become a meaningful revenue generator? And then I think from credibility standpoint, margins. Meg said, this is it, margins have bottomed. They're going to bounce off the bottom and grow from here. We've got to see that. And I think the keys are services really executing on the services side, leveraging their acquisitions. Let's see what they can do with, I mean, Aruba looks good, Nimble, SimpliVity. Can they turn those into billion dollar businesses like they did with 3par? And then the partnerships. I don't expect any head fakes.  I don't expect that now. I don't, they've never had fake partners. I don't expect that now. I just would call them out in the carpet on that. I think they've been groping with the partners and hoping to have a flagship. I don't know, I mean. I don't think they've, I know you've been trying to be critical of HP but they've never had fake partners. When they, let's say head fake, they would buy a company like EDS and their partners ecosystem would go, whoa, wait a minute, I'm not sure I want to partner with these guys. Well, I would just, I would debate that with you, but I mean, I think HP's always had great channel, great partnerships. I think where they've misfired, if you want to be critical, is that they mismatched where the growth was with, you know, throwing an outsource, for instance. That's a complete mismatched where the growth is. Now, to your point about IoT, I think that's a big opportunity because IoT is a beach head setup. I think it's a great opportunity as a flagship message to take the portfolio of HP into a partner-friendly world that has going beyond swim lanes. These are like the Grand Canyon, the Panama Canal. They're more than swim lanes. So I think, you know, having a portfolio with more M&A activity, with Aruba and some of the hardware they have, they can go in and get the beach head in IoT and use it as a driver, a flagship with their partnerships to start engaging customers and holding the ground. And then, moving the services in, that can hold them for a good couple years and then as the margins from the declining hardware business. Well, I think that's an opportunity and we're going to look at that. And the other big opportunity beyond IoT is this inter-cloud management. Will HP participate in earnest in building up some software capabilities to manage cross-cloud, on-prem, off-prem, everything in between, SaaS, et cetera? You didn't hear, you don't hear anything about that now. So is that part of the HPE strategy? Will it use its new balance sheet to go after some of those emerging software companies and rebuild its software? Well, we always will analyze. We've got all day tomorrow. We've got some great guests. But Dave, information technology, known as IT, is not going away. It's changing, certainly for sure. Information and technology is really going to be a really big opportunity for HP. If they stick in their old ways, they'll be dead. If they can transform over themselves, I think that's a winner. And of course, we've got live coverage, three days tomorrow and Thursday. This is theCUBE. Go to silkenangle.com. Check out all the latest reporting and journalism. Go to wikibond.com for all the great research. The best research is behind a subscription. You got to pay for that. I would definitely do that. The true private cloud report you guys did, I thought was killer. Really, that's groundbreaking and IoT stuff is fantastic. And of course, go to the silkenangle.tv to check out all the great stuff. And of course, go to crowdchat.net and we have a new CUBE 365 product coming out of the oven from SiliconANGLE Labs. A lot of great stuff. Stay with us for more coverage tomorrow and check out youtube.com slash SiliconANGLE for all the videos in replay. We'll be back tomorrow. Stay with us. Have a great day.


Good afternoon everybody. Welcome to this webinar, which is part of the ThinkVider webinar series on domestic revenue mobilization. And today the actual topic of our webinar is on harnessing big data and ICT to boost revenues. My name is Jukka Birkele. I'm a professor of public economics at the University of Helsinki at Watkinsville for Economic Research in Helsinki, Finland. And I also serve as a non-resident researcher with UnionVider and I work with colleagues there on matters related to taxation, especially in many African countries. So the webinar is related to the UnionVider research work that we carry out pretty much using data from administrative sources, namely revenue authorities in African countries. So we do this together with our colleagues so they can come from research organizations and they are also coming from these revenue authorities in African countries. So we have research activities ongoing with the Uganda Revenue Authority, Rwanda Revenue Authority, Tanzania Revenue Authority and Zampien Revenue Authority. And in addition, UnionVider works together with the South Africans on research related to South African economic developments, also on the basis of tax administrative data. And really what we use the data for is for analysis of enforcement and compliance, how can we increase revenues. And second on looking at the implications of taxation on taxpayer behavior in terms of employment levels, investments etc. And then also, this is something that Amina May touch upon, is that the tax data is also useful for looking at various other things because it provides information about all formal sector income earners and firms. So one mention one more thing, so one stakeholder and contact in our work is also the people who do technical assistance collaboration with the revenue authorities more from the practical side. So this includes for example the Finnish and the Norwegian tax authorities who have engagements in Africa. So I'm very pleased that to get to today in the panel we have representatives from all these stakeholders. So we will be starting with the presentation by my colleague Amina Ibrahim, Dr. Ibrahim is a research fellow at UnionVider and is the lead for this research that we do. And we are also joined with Julia Maskakni and Dr. Maskakni is the research director at the International Centre for Tax and Development in the UK. And we have been doing joint work with Julia for some time now and we are very pleased that you will be able to join. Our second panelist is Alen Nasanga who is the assistant commissioner for research and innovations at UK under revenue authority. And we have been working together with Alen and her colleagues for many years in researching these areas. And finally we have Mr. Timo Lalkanen from the Finnish tax administration where he serves as the director of the strategy realisation office. And with Timo we have been talking and doing work on technical assistance and developing tax enforcement joint. So as I said we will be starting with the presentation by Amina and then the panel will follow. People in the audience, you can already during the panel think about questions to Amina or any of the panellists. You can write them into the chat and then in the Q&A after the panel I can raise some of the questions from the chat to be discussed by the panel. Or then after the panel you can also raise your hand and then you can just unmute yourself when I ask you and you can yourself then place the question to the panellist. I think that's more or less everything from my side so Amina please now the floor is yours. So I'm going to start with evidence-based policy making and apply it to our thinking at revenue authorities and data and harnessing big data. So what I want to start with is really thinking about revenue authorities, what their job is and the challenges around that. So revenue authorities have this challenging task of raising revenues to fund public spending. And in order to do this revenue authorities might want to know whether increasing the tax rate or enhancing compliance helps them to raise revenues or whether a combination of both gets them to their revenue targets. Now in order to answer these questions revenue authorities need evidence to decide on what works best. And good evidence helps to create good policy and in order to do so revenue authorities require good data. And in this little diagram I've got good data is actually one of the crucial components to evidence-based policy making. And with data and some variation revenue authorities can produce some much needed evidence actually to improve policy. And the cycle continues when new policies are made or policies are changed. This creates a new source of variation and ongoing and continuous data collection can actually assist in creating new evidence that then again informs policy, whether it be new policy or updating policies or improving policies. How does this apply to taxation in the African context? Well many African countries already collect taxpayer information and they do so on a regular basis in order to calculate taxpayer liability. So you can think about collecting personal income taxes on an annual basis. You can think about VAT collections on a monthly or quarterly basis. And in recent years taxpayer information has moved from paper based collections to a digital format. And this has come with the onset of e-filing for taxpayers. And in some countries the use of electronic fiscal devices provides transaction level data captured in real time to be used by the revenue authorities. But ICT and using ICT is not really a new phenomenon for revenue authorities. They've been using taxpayer information to assess, for example, the riskiness of taxpayers and think about who they should audit and using this measure of riskiness to determine who they should audit. And what we've seen in recent years goes a little bit beyond this where revenue authorities are actually now using the administrative data to conduct research to answer various questions about compliance and on ways in which today's revenues. So I'm going to provide three snapshots and examples of research concerned with raising revenues and compliance, actually using tax data in three of the countries that we work in. The first example is from Tanzania. So the Tanzanian Revenue Authority worked with the Finnish tax administration to develop an Excel sheet that was used to identify taxpayers to be examined. So previously taxpayers were selected for examination by tax officers. And so this is an example of using ICT to make a risk assessment of a taxpayer coming to the tax office. The pilot study was run in the Dar es Salaam region and tax officers were trained on how to use the Excel sheet appropriately when taxpayers came into the tax office. And so the outcome of the study actually finds that this risk-based tax examination led to some moderate increase in additional reported income. And this really means additional revenue for the revenue authority. And we know from other studies that it's not straightforward, not all respect selection automatically improve outcomes. And sometimes we see some immediate effect and over time the effect dissipates. In this case, we know the results hold immediately, but we're not sure maybe for one or two years after how the examination has panned out. And so more research is actually required in this area given some of the sort of mixed results. The second case is from Zambia. So in 2017 the Zambian Revenue Authority introduced a withholding VAT mechanism. This mechanism meant that some VAT agents would withhold and remit the full VAT to the Revenue Authority. And this change was based on this understanding that withholding is an approach to improve tax compliance. So the research study tries to assess the impact of introducing this withholding VAT agents on firm reporting decisions and on tax revenue. And what's transpired is that the data compiled by these withholding VAT agents actually serves as a check to prevent false claims. And the paper trail that's been left behind or generated by this withholding VAT agents have also compelled suppliers to file their returns. And because these records are now, or these claims are filed electronically, the Revenue Authority has been able to more easily verify the claims. The study is ongoing but the early results show that the reported sales and value added tax increase for withholding VAT agents after the reform. And then that has actually also been an improved VAT compliance due to this change in the reporting mechanism. The third example is from Uganda. So in 2015 the Uganda Revenue Authority introduced a new electronic system of e-filing for presumptive tax, which simplified the filing of small businesses. So this is an example of a change in the technology to capture the taxes of small businesses. The small picture on the right is a snapshot of the e-filing form that taxpayers could use on the URA website. So this was an additional or new way for small businesses to file their taxes. And while some are still using Excel sheets, the take up was quite high. And the study shows that the change led to an increase in the number of tax filers, although some simply report the minimum income, but that the intervention also helped raise revenues in a small way. So these are three examples from research that we've done to demonstrate how ICDB can be used to raise revenues. And all of these have been conducted in collaboration with the revenue authorities using tax administrative data. Now harnessing big data is not the easiest task, and many revenue authorities have gone through this process of tax modernization. And one outcome of this process we think is about data accessibility. So with the modernization process data are collected and are stored in organized manner. Electronic filing and further use of ICT also means that information about taxpayers are more easily collected. So e-filing can also mean that the data collected are more complete. Taxpayers have less chance of skipping fields on the tax form where they are mandatory. And fields could even be automatically populated with information provided previously to the revenue authority or from other sources. As revenue authorities introduce electronic collection of VAT, corporate income taxes or personal income taxes. With a single taxpayer identification number, tax authorities can actually view these various or can link these various tax submissions. Regular collection or regular electronic collection also means that you can now see how tax collection changes over time. And it responds to certain policies. And the data collected can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of these policy changes. And so now we're back to the cycle of evidence-based policymaking that I spoke about at the, or started off with. So in a unique collaboration with revenue authorities in Uganda and South Africa, anonymized tax data are now being accessed by researchers in a secure way. And the data available can further research on improving tax collection. But as you mentioned in the opening, the data can also be used to shed light on other areas of the economy where data is actually quite scarce. As always, ICT can help improve data collection and revenue collection, but it isn't perfect. And there are a few ways that this can still be improved. Data crosschecks and third party information are important also for improving tax compliance and helping to verify the data collected. More data could be used then again to train risk engines and identify risky taxpayers. And as technology improves, there are technical fixes to ICT systems that weren't available before. And you can even think about more accurate information sort of on the idea that comes to mind, example comes to mind is a location field. So previously, if they could think about something that was manually collected that was hard to read, then we moved to something that was collected and people typed in their address, but they made errors in typing the street name or the area. And now some of these fields can automatically pre-populate as you're typing. And so that's just an example that comes to mind. But importantly, harnessing big data actually requires technical capacity. And this means upskilling staff already in revenue authorities and looking to areas such as data science for lessons on how to improve data collection and capture and processing. In particular, I'm thinking about for research. Where does this leave us? The core function of the revenue authority remains to raise revenue and much of the work that revenue authorities are doing relates to finding ICT solutions to help them collect this revenue. And so I've given three examples of how ICT is assisted revenue authorities in the process of revenue collection and actually how we've used data from revenue authorities to enable these evaluation. So the last thing I want to say is research presented in a collaboration, our collaboration with revenue authorities is actually part of SDG 17, where the goal is to build capacity and support revenue authorities in finding ways to raise revenue. Thanks. Thank you so much, Amina, for setting the scene so nicely and also for outlining some of the future directions that this sort of should be going. Okay, so now we can move on to the discussion by the panelists. Maybe, Amina, if you... Yes, thank you. So just a reminder for those who are joining, maybe a little bit late. So we just heard from Amina Ebrahim, who's a research fellow at Union Wider, and now we move on to the policy panel discussion, and the panel consists of Julia Muskaakni, a research director in the National Center for Tax and Development in the UK, Allen Nasanga, assistant commissioner from the Uganda Revenue Authority and Tim Olaukaren, who's a director at the Finnish Tax Administration. And I just also want to remind everybody that you may already know, if you have feedback questions to Amina or any of the panelists, please feel free to use the chat for writing your feedback or comment. Okay, so moving on to the panel, so let us start with Julia. Julia, can you start kick off by sharing some of your experiences and working as a researcher using administrative tax data and looking at the ICT solutions? Sure, happy to do that. Thanks a lot, Ykka, for the invitation and for considering me to be part of this excellent panel of speakers. I think I will just take, my comments will just follow quite neatly from Amina's presentation because she already said very clearly how ICT and big data can be really important for tax administration. She detailed examples from Tanzania, Zambia, Uganda. So I think I want to follow up directly from that and talk a little bit about the practice and how those things then, what we learn from research on how these things pan out in practice. And of course, the research that we have on this big digitized data set and ICT solutions is that they are often not used to the full potential in the reality of tax administration in lower income countries. And Amina touched upon this a little bit as well in her presentation and I know this comes up from research not only done by myself but also by my colleagues at ICT, Fabrizio Santore is now online, Seidiman is also online from the ICT but also your research from wider shows that quite clearly. In my own experience analyzing administrative data from Ethiopia and Rwanda, what I've seen is that in the data that is already available, there are often quite a few discrepancies. So for example, the same taxpayer reports a different turnover in their income tax declaration as compared to their VAT tax declaration for the same period without there being any obvious explanation for that. That was a result that we got from Ethiopia. But also similarly, we have done some work with the administrative data from Rwanda with my colleague Fabrizio Santoro and Denis Mukama from the Rwanda Revenue Authority. And there we have found that those electronic fiscal devices capturing all the sales in real time, they often produce data that is actually not consistent with what is in taxpayers tax declarations for the same period for the same taxpayer. And I could give you a few more examples like that. So it's clear that those things are not yet fully exploited in practice. I think one of the lessons for me is that it's definitely not possible to parachute data, digitize data, digitization and IT solutions into tax administration and expect them to transform tax administration by themselves. In many ways, data and IT solutions are very much part of a system and that system has many different parts. And I'm sure Alen and Timo will speak to that a little bit. But you know all the traditional functions of revenue authorities, taxpayer services, enforcement, audit departments and so on. Technology and data need to work and interact with those traditional functions in a way that allow for their potential to be tapped. And some of these things again come from research. So there is some research for example from Ecuador but also from other countries showing that using third party information is not necessarily helpful to convince taxpayers to comply if there is no capacity to actually follow up with traditional enforcement. And similarly the communication infrastructure that we now have with SMS or emails and I've done some research on that as well in Rwanda and as you know it has its own limitations if it cannot be paired up with actual enforcement. So imagine you receive these messages from the tax authority about sanctions and audits and your data contains discrepancies but actually nothing happens after that in terms of real enforcement or real interaction. So not only these things can lose effectiveness when they're not working in tandem with traditional functions but they can also potentially affect the credibility of the institution itself. So the reality of tax administration needs to be considered quite carefully. And I could give you other examples around information, sensitization, education campaigns and there's huge potential for technology to help these things. But then again that needs to match the experience of taxpayers as they go through the tax paying process and as they interact with taxpayer services and call centers and so on. So in many ways for me one of the lessons is that IT solutions and data to a certain extent are only as good as the rest of the functions they're supposed to support. They can of course help to improve those functions within revenue administrations but they certainly cannot replace them. They need to work in tandem. And one can make very similar considerations about taxpayers because what I just said was very much focused on tax administrations but when you look at taxpayers as well digitized data, electronic fiscal devices could actually be very helpful for taxpayers to help improve the transparency of their records even give them some form of record that is already digitized by design. But of course depending on the type of taxpayers and their level of engagement with the digital world in general these things might end up being useful or not useful to them actually depending on their reality. So for some taxpayers these IT solutions are premature and if that is the case they might even come with additional compliance costs. So in many ways instead of helping they might actually represent more of a burden especially for those small taxpayers that might not have the necessary equipment or knowledge or skills to make them work properly. And again we do have a fair bit of research on these things. Some of it is specific to data and technology some of it is more general about tax administration tax compliance in low income countries but making sure that these things work together shouldn't really get our hopes down on the potential for data and technology but should really give us sort of guide us in the way that these things can be harnessed to their full potential. There's a lot more that I could talk about but I've been told that I have about seven minutes so I think I'm about up to my time. So I'll leave it there for now. Thank you Julia that was perfect and it was nice you were able to connect your work on voluntary compliance and matching the voluntary compliance and then the necessity also to follow up from the point of view of the tax administration in terms of then sort of a harder real enforcement as well. I'm wondering, I mean if you stop sharing the screen can we see the panellist as a bigger on that screen? You still? Yes thank you. Okay so now we can see more easily. Okay thank you Julia once more and maybe we move on then to hear from Alan and Alan can you share your experiences on how revenue authority can actually utilise research and how do you connect the information communications technology and research. Alan please. Thank you so much Juhal and Tim. Thank you for the invite. Yes picking on from our first Julia. Yes in a way technology enables the authorities to have visibility into who the taxpayers are and so can help us manage their compliance better. Yes it's true that the taxpayers are different levels of use of ICT but there are those taxpayers who once they know that the authority is aware the authority knows that I transacted with so and so the authority has all the data then they automatically come in and comply. However we have different levels of use of ICT for example in the country there are those persons who are very conversant with use of ICT but there are also those the small and medium who still need as an authority we need to sensitise them, we need to hand hold them into using many of the platforms we put out. Yes so you have a point in there it is helpful but because of the way our dynamics use of ICT is in the country even things like internet coverage that speeds the bandwidth away because of some of those factors they are not all at the same level but nonewithstanding technology is key and is helping us a lot as Uganda Revenue Authority for example we sometime back we developed an enterprise data warehouse and what this is we just pick data from different transaction systems within our authority and integrate it to create like a profile about a taxpayer then on top of this data we developed a risk engine which be using particular risk parameters we generate risk calls as well as financial importance calls for particular taxpayers then as an authority these help us focus our compliance actions specific to taxpayers where we are going to get slightly more revenue as well as those who are risking as you can imagine we are now about 3,000 people in Uganda Revenue Authority and the taxpayer population is so big so we use ICT and data analytics really to help us target our efforts to know which taxpayer should we go to which area where should we deploy more but as you said Julia we use the use of ICT is not detached from the other measures we still have enforcement measures and compliance measures that need to move hand in hand nonetheless ICT is very important and without our data there's very little we can do for example it's hard to know who is not registered we have sometimes initiatives like the downtown where they are I don't know how to describe downtown to you but there are many small businesses going on we have some initiatives that people go walking there and try and find who is not registered but over time we've realized that those are known as effective as comparing for example pulling the local authority data and mapping it against our register to identify who is missing partnerships where we collaborate with data we have local authorities like city council authorities they also register the small businesses and give them trading licenses so through a partnership we work with them and ask them to have our tax identification as part of the certificate so we map their dataset to our data warehouse and that is more efficient for example in finding who is known to our register also in terms of who is known to complying who is not paying exactly what they are supposed to do these are data initiatives of mapping our dataset to another organization dataset goes a long way in facilitating us and authority it's interesting but it's possible we have the national social security fund people make submissions there based on their income and it's possible that they submit differently to the social security fund compared to what they submit to URA so a mapping of our data here and there with the national social security and URA we are able to identify particular gaps also it's interesting within the URA we have different tax types as you are aware income taxes and we have VAT it's possible that sometimes somebody declares a different amount in VAT and a different amount in income tax so using our tools, our technology, our e-hub mapping these different datasets enables us realize the gaps and so which taxpayer to engage and rank them based on who is not exactly very truthful within their declaration this has really helped us a long way in trying to drive compliance we also use the data from the custom side we manage the imports and exports mapping the import and exports to what a particular person has declared also goes a long way in helping us but yes the taxpayer community out there is not everyone is abreast with use of technology we are not at the same level so partly as an authority our role is then to sensitize to hand hold them to show them the importance of this technology and there are also cases where the authority and government has gone ahead to like maybe subsidize some of the requirements for them to uptake the technology because you find like we introduced a digital tax stamps but at the beginning the stamps needed to be free of charge for people to take them up we also have now on board an electronic system but the government had looking for the gadgets for all the small persons to be able to comply to use the technology the taxpayers are small and medium people complain about the cost so again we have to come in and find a way of getting them to use the technology without incurring a cost yes Julia you are very right there is a cost to technology which probably we still need to handle this particular challenge either through subsidizing for the small and medium in the short run as they realize the benefits of use of technology technology is a way to go we really can't go back from use of technology and specifically using data the data matching here and there helps us a lot it's interesting but the same company can submit different declarations for one tax type and the other and they are all submitted to you and on the first it's possible to imagine that the officers your staff can easily map them but because of the number of staff vis-à-vis the population it's not possible in a short while to map them but through technology we can easily match this data and see who is not compliant who has not in our system people make a declaration first when you make a declaration you're declaring how your business has performed then after that you come in with a payment it's possible that I make a declaration when I pay much less than what I declared and all this technology that is helping us bridge the gaps one to know who hasn't declared who is not on the register apart from those who have declared have they really paid everything they've declared all those little gaps are really we manage them through use of our data through use of our data warehouse and of course through sensitizing the public out there we try and say that if you comply if you let us know we can go into arrangements like installment payments etc but if you stay out there and you wait for us to find you to enforce on you then it will be more expensive on you and true when the taxpayers are aware that the authority will discover me if they know that it's a matter of time you are able to discover that I have not paid this amount but my submissions are not very truthful then they will comply so in a way that way technology is really at the forefront in your area and it's really helping us manage risk, manage compliance as well as grow our register by mapping to the different local authorities that are also registering the same taxpayers thank you so much thank you so much Alen that all sounds very very impressive and indeed we are at the moment as we speak trying to look at some of the longer impacts of investment in technology in looking at for example the revenue impacts of tax or in Uganda alright now let us move on to the next panelist who is Timo Timo you have worked from the view of a revenue authority in the global north so please say about your experiences in working together with the revenue authorities in the developing countries what role technical assistance can play there over to you Timo thank you and nice to be with you here I've actually got three points on data and revenue authorities and I think the first point really came clearly up in Aminas presentation and also Julius and Alen's points so looking into the not so big data and seeing what's actually in front of your eyes so tax administrations really have lots of data available and it's good to look if you're really doing enough with that data there's a bit of an echo okay I'll try again so and after that when you've looked what data you already have so understanding which data is actually needed after that and trying to get better access to the data that is needed so third party information other government agencies private stakeholders and taking use and sharing that data sometimes it's a legislation issue so trying to influence the legislation if that poses an issue my second point is about customer and ecosystem understanding so using the data to actually understand your customers or taxpayers if you will so both sides of the story to them and their behavior but also the service needs and possibilities to tap into the natural processes of your customers so based on the understanding then trying to make it easy for the customers to comply and hard not to so incorporating taxation into the natural processes of companies or individuals whenever that's possible and aiming towards compliance by design where the customers actually cannot choose whether to pay their taxes or not or at least they have to make conscious decisions and actions not to pay them split payment for VAT would be an example where taxes are transferred to tax administration immediately when the transaction occurs so these kind of changes in the paradigm require understanding of the whole ecosystem around the citizens and companies not just thinking about the taxation all the stakeholders in the ecosystem and it requires active cooperation with public and private parties and I recommend looking at the OECD's tax administration 3.0 that provides useful outlines for this progress and the maturity model that is linked to the models that's a way to actually evaluate your current state and next steps if that seems too far ahead in the future so my third point is is more about the basic systems and processes in place and Julia mentioned the basic capacities needed so all the data in the world is not going to help you if you don't have the capability to process it first of all the analytical capability to make information, knowledge and wisdom out of the data so for example finding the risky customers or transactions and the best suited measures to deal with them but also the capability to use the data as part of the taxation processes so data and analytics need to feed into the taxation processes to actually improve compliance and increase revenue so this might require new systems that are capable of higher interoperability silo legacy systems are sometimes a problem might not sufficiently support this and sometimes tax administrations lack the needed in-house capacity to build the needed integrated systems from scratch so sometimes the best solution might be to look at what's available in the market because there are already made commercial off the shelf integrated taxation systems out there but in addition to the systems it usually also requires redesigning the business processes to best take advantage of the data and Julia touched upon this as well so if you just bring in new data the processes might suffocate and struggle to understand the new data and what to do with it or simply ignore the new data and continue as before and this better data new business processes also require new skills from the officers and citizens which in turn requires training and much more like Alan mentioned the hand holding part so even the best systems and the most wisely designed processes fail if people don't know what to do or don't want to act in a new way so change management is essential to any success and it might mean much more than just training people need to understand the reasons for changes and what's in it for them and they need constant support the one example that Amina mentioned of what we've done together with Tanzania Revenue Authority and UNU wider so the basic principle in technical assistance and capacity building is that you do no harm which is why we wanted to measure the effect of our intervention so not just how many meetings or trainings we've had or measuring something that we don't really have influence on so we designed a new pilot process for tax control for examination in Tanzania and also the support model to ensure the change so it was a bit more than just an Excel sheet and risk profiling it did include the risk profiling but also it started from the new instructions to officers and a totally new process flow so and with the help of the UNU wider team then we were able to measure the outcomes of the new process and the effects on revenue this kind of work has created lots of interest in also other tax administrations doing capacity building since measuring the outcomes is difficult and usually it's not done people are not able to do that so the point here is to also get data about your processes and their outcomes so you can make wiser decisions so three points looking into the not so big data getting customer and ecosystem understanding and having your basic systems and processes in place, thank you excellent, thank you so much Timo so indeed so this requires quite a thorough change sometimes I mean it's not always enough to have the technical capacity somehow the organization also needs to be functional and be available to benefit from the improvements thank you once again for panelists is there among the panelists or Amina any additional thoughts that may have now come up when you listen to the other panelists before we move on to the Q&A no direct need for intervention at this point so everybody happy so far so good, excellent we have some questions from the audience we have, do we still have Mr Kwami from Toko present are you online still would you like to ask your questions, unmute yourself and ask your question okay, thank you my question is to Amina I want to know how the regulation framework on the privacy as we are talking about data when we collect data from someone can use it maybe not to the objective you declare first so how is the regulation going how people or firms can be confident to use to boost revenue collection, thank you thank you, that's an excellent point and needs to be addressed Amina would you like to take that question sure, I think that's a really important point and thank you for raising it so my first comment would be that actually it's not the same in every country there is a lot of data regulation and protection laws and in each country that we work with we work with the local partners that then inform us of what the regulation is and how to interact with that I think our model specifically in terms of research and when we work with revenue authorities is to make sure that we work with anonymized data and the point really for research is not to identify it doesn't benefit us in any way we end up looking at more aggregate estimates of what's going on so anonymization being the basic methodology some tax authorities revenue authorities ensure that data is only accessed in a specific way so it's never accessed online some revenue authorities require to sign disclosure agreements and oaths of secrecy so there's several ways that they ensure that taxpayer identification is not leaked in the research process and even then once all the research is done often the results are checked to make sure that even by mistake nobody is being identified and so I think that's an important part of the process and I think it's taken some time to get there there are lots of ways in which revenue authorities also need to understand and respect some of it is personal information and not share those specific things so widely so there was actually I see that in one of the messages our colleague from SAAR South Africa Revenue Service Lillian asks how what are the implications of all this for sharing information across government institutions so maybe Amina can you perhaps start commenting on that and also maybe Alen how do you see the information flow between the various parts of the government and are there risks there as well from the privacy point of view maybe we can take a page out of the book from the Nordics on how this is collected so I think it takes a lot of effort to start working between different departments and managing to get data so you find that different departments collect different data in different ways and then they anonymize data in different ways so then it becomes very difficult to put those data sets together and at the minimum I think there should be a conversation about how they could be done and there are some efforts at least I know in South Africa the Department of Labor to look at unemployment insurance fund information where identification numbers can be anonymized in the same way and starting to match into the data but to go back to Kwame's point about the more data you start adding together maybe the increased level of sensitivity of the data and so you need to think quite hard about what are the regulations and how you want to maintain the sensitivity around the data way possible Ellen, do you have any other thoughts? Yeah, thank you so much it would just be sharing our case study in Uganda there are efforts as government to share data but they are not moving as fast as we would have loved simply because as government we are at different levels of automation so there are some areas that are so advanced and others are slightly lagging behind we currently share data for purposes of completing a single transaction for example within the URA we have a new way of registering taxpayers and they get their team instantly and this we do by sharing data with a registration authority with a person's registration authority NERA is called NERA in Uganda now what happens is that when a taxpayer comes to register as an individual we just ask them for their national registration ID number and then when we pick that ID number we already just confirm their details from the other agency and then we can issue them a registration a team registration very fast but in terms of sharing data analysis purposes as in you give us your database and we map on our database that happens on a case by case and we still have to go through issues of then we sign an MOU we have the same regulation for data protection but still every agency if I may say is still inward looking they collect data thinking about only their purpose and then when it comes to sharing we still although we are all government then we say you need to sign the MOU because of data protection and you would imagine that we should just share together so they still progress but I must say it's a bit slow thank you so much Thank you this may sound like the technicality of sharing data between various arms of the government but in fact it's related to one of the core messages in tax administration research which is that the possibility to use third party information requiring the tax pay and more easily this third party information flows in the better the tax administration will be and it keep also tax avoidance evasion okay so we still have some luckily some time this is a very short webinar only one hour so I'm certain that we could continue for quite some time but I see Laban has raised his hand Laban are you following? Yes Yuka thank you interesting composition from all the discussions very important points but when you hear from all of the presenters all four of them you can see an underlying issue with change when people do not follow the technology change that's happening one is bound to face problems and that's what we are beginning to see in many tax authorities especially in our part of the world so how can we ensure that the technological change we are seeking to make more efficient our tax administrations is matched by adaptation in our skills this point was raised earlier technology is only as good as the skills it supports and the persons it supports the processes it supports often times there has been under investment in the other components of an effective or efficient tax system much has been focused on investing in the technology and we are beginning to see the cost of that so it's a question to provoke thinking but it's something we've seen we've observed even here in Zambia how to ensure that our staff our taxpayers are carried along with the changes that are happening thank you Yuka thank you that's an excellent question Laban maybe can you still come back and introduce yourself for those who don't know you I'm from the Zambia Revenue Authority I've been a project manager for a data analytics project all of the discussion today is very relevant to us especially on that project but I also work with researchers in the department statistics in general and everything to do with tax Yuka I hope I've been confused present as thank you like all of us of course yes now back to the panelists would you like to perhaps respond to Laban Julia anything from your side or for the other things that we have touched on before we close I can just make a couple of remarks that really pick up from what Alan and Timo also said before which I found really interesting and one thing is how to bring citizens along there's definitely a big role for sensitization and training and taxpayer education and Alan has been talking about that I know the URA is very active there and other revenue authorities as well so it's important to build skills but also to build awareness of the importance of taxes more generally and the approach to tax collection and on the tax administration side to build those skills some basic functions but also make sure that this approach of customer orientation really filters through the whole organization down to the frontline workers because that is what tax payers see on their side they might not read the flagship reports but they will see how tax officials they deal with act and I think doing that will help build the credibility of tax administrations which is already very high in many contexts and trust with citizens who ultimately need to want to comply because there's no way any revenue authority in any country can actually check every single taxpayer so that element of credibility and trust is quite key in my view whether or not we speak about data and technology I think those considerations are probably broader Thank you Julia once more and still maybe we have around time because we started a little bit late so maybe we have one or two more extra minutes and Timo as well on these newer questions Alan over to you Thank you so much The role of technology and data analytics can't be underestimated in modern revenue administration Yes there are challenges of skills the staff skills as well as the citizenry so change management needs to is also key we need to sensitize we need to upgrade the skills, hand hold and help both staff and the public take up the different technologies Of course as the more data we use third party information can all help us into realizing any gaps within maybe compliance risks which can then be closed Yes the data or the results of the data that BI needs to fit into the work processes the workflow so that for example where you do some analysis it needs to go into the process, trigger some activity to a particular staff to take action and that way we can improve Thank you so much Thank you again Timo, any final thoughts? Managing the change part is one of my favorite topics so I could go on a bit here but I'll keep it short it's just like take a systematic approach and recognize that it actually needs resources it's in an ICT project so it's the same thing as testing you need people to do testing you do need people to do change management it's not something that you can do as an afterthought it needs to be planned systematically and the actions need to be taken to to actually get something done and ready Thank you, that's an excellent point where we now need to end Unfortunately our time is up Thank you once again so much All the panelists for joining Thank you for the audience for the questions Thank you Amina for the excellent presentation in the beginning and while we have all the revenue authorities and researchers have done a lot of advances in terms of using all this new excitement did develop there's quite a bit of still work ahead of us so stay tuned and follow up the new wider work in this area going forward as well Thank you once again and bye bye Thank you, bye Thank you, thank you so much


I want to welcome you to my talk about Raoq evolution or maybe revolution of an update framework. Short notes about me. My name is Enrico Jerns. I'm an embedded software architect developer, whatever it is. I'm the co-maintenor of the update framework Raoq that I'm gonna talk about today. And I work as a integrator, a system engineer at Pengatronics. For those who don't know Pengatronics, it's a company providing embedded Linux consulting and support for customers from industry automotive or whatever. And we work very closely together with mainline projects with the community and have about 6,000 pages also in the Linux kernel. So short structure about what you're gonna hear in the next minutes. Short introduction for those who don't are familiar with Raoq. Then I'm gonna talk about the initial bundle format, the update format of Raoq. And yeah, it says initial. There's also probably a new one. This is a verity bundle format. And based on this, I talk about the technologies that have been enabled by this new update format. It's bundle streaming. It's adaptive updates, encryption of updates. And at the end, if I don't run out of time, I will have a short outlook of new feature that I planned and have a short look about what is happening around Raoq in the community. So let's start with the overview. So the big picture of an update system looks like this. So we have somewhere here our build server that builds our embedded Linux system. And from that embedded Linux system, then we generate our update artifact. And this update artifact is then uploaded somewhere, another deployment server, somewhere in the cloud. And the individual devices in the field then fetch this update from the update server and install it. But there's not only these, over the air update case, but there's still the older, let's say conventional approach of just using a USB stick and going to the device and updating it. So it's a use case that is still very common in some places. So Raoq, the scope of Raoq, the tool that we're gonna talk about today is mainly two things. So it's first of all, the service that is running on the embedded Linux target and handles the failsafe installation of the updates. And the second part of Raoq is it's a generation and the signing of the update artifacts. So this is typically the last step that happens in your embedded Linux generation build system. So when you build the Yocto image, the last thing is then, for example, that yeah, you generate an update bundle and Raoq also supports you with this. A few details or a few key facts about Raoq, it's basically an embedded Linux update framework. It is written in C code with using Glib as a utility library with using open SSL for everything that has done with crypto and for curl for the network functionality. It's licensed under LGPL version 2.1. And yeah, we have a toasted on GitHub and all the community interaction also happens on GitHub. And yeah, what it basically provides is a failsafe image-based atomic updating of AB system. So we done and see boot interacting with the build order and something like this. And it also handles the cryptographic signing on the server side and the cryptographic verification of updates on the target side. So two things important to know when we talk about Raoq are the configuration files. So there's one configuration file on the target called the system configuration here on the left. And the system configuration provides basic information for the Raoq update service which boot loader it has to interact and how the redundancy setup is so with a concept of update slots with individual update targets and classes. So you can say, okay, I want to have an update for a root file system and then Raoq decides where the exact slot of the root file system is that should be updated. This is one part and the other part is on the right here. That's the configuration file in the update itself. It's called the update manifest. So the container archive used for updating in Raoq we call bundle. And yeah, here also some basic information, meta information like a version. And the most important here there's a description of what the purpose of the images inside the update are. So this just has a quick idea of how that looks like. So the initial bundle format. First of all, why we do the verification and signing of the bundle format and why don't we use authenticated channels? So with authenticated channels like you would do when using SSL to your server, you can be sure that your update is not modified during transport and you are sure that you're talking to the right server but you're not sure that what happens with your update artifact and on the server and you are not capable of using a USB stick for example. So we have decided to use signed artifacts. You are free to choose to put them to whatever unsafe storage location you would like to use USB stick or whatever cloud service provider you might like to choose from. So the bundle generation in Raoq is quite easy. You just call the Raoq bundle command with some options and what it basically does, it takes an input directory with all the artifacts that should be inside the bundle and the manifest as we've just seen. It creates a squash file system of it and then it signs the entire squash file system and appends the signature to the squash file system. The signature is based on X509 cryptography. We use OpenSSL method for this and the container format we use is CMS. And yeah, that's basically all we add size to later being able to locate the signature. So on the target side then what we do is when calling Raoq install, we use the size I just mentioned to locate the signature and then we use the signature to verify the integrity of the entire squash file system. And once we've verified it, we can mount it and then we can access the individual file. So this is a quite straight approach and the benefit of using SquashFS over any archive is that we can directly mount it and don't have to unpack anything. But a drawback of this is that we have to verify the entire squash file system once we install it. So that can be a bit slow. Another issue came up when we were informed by a security research team, I think it was in August 2020, and they informed us that we have a time of check, time of use, vulnerability in Raoq. And the short description is that we first verify the bundle, then in a second separate step, we mount the bundle. And in between, we close the file descriptor of the bundle and also for mounting, we invoked the mount command. So there's time in between wherein the attacker could replace the bundle file. And also after having mounted, it was potentially able to modify the actual bundle content. So yeah, this was disclosed in December 2020, fixed in version 1.5. So what we did were two main mitigations. The first one was to not close the file descriptor between the verification and the mounting of the bundle. And the second was to ensure that we as Raoq service have exclusive access to the bundle we're talking about. But yeah, this shows the limitation of the current format. And together with these mitigations, we also developed a new bundle format called the Verity format. And this was more or less a turning point for the project as this enabled a lot of new developments based on this new Verity format. So what we're gonna talk about next is the Verity format. So a short background, so almost all storage devices in Linux are abstracted as block devices. So file systems operate on top of block devices. And yeah, then they're individual device drivers for the different storage individually. And now there's the kernel device method. The kernel device method is an abstraction layer on top of a block device that for the file system using it, again, looks like a normal block device, but it is able to manipulate data before accessing the underlying block devices. You might know it from the logical volume manager or from DMTRIP that you have probably or hopeful on your laptops to have full disk encryption. And yeah, there are a lot of different device methods available in the Linux kernel. It's called the Verity format because we use the DM Verity to kernel device method. So DM Verity is for integrity checking of read-only block images. So we create a hash tree for verifying the block image. This works by splitting up the block image into different blocks. And we calculate the hash of each block and store the hash. And as soon as we have enough hashes that they fit into a block, then we again create a hash of this block. We do this procedure that is why it generates a tree until we only have a single block and then create a hash from it that we call the root hash. And this is then our source of trust for DM Verity. So when reading from a DM Verity kernel device method, you read a specific block. What DM Verity does is it hashes a block and compares it to the hash it has stored. If that matches, then it has to verify the integrity of the block where the hash is stored inside. It again does hashing in comparison. So it does this down until the root block where it then creates a hash from and compares it to the root hash that we've stored somewhere separately. And if that matches everything is fine, we can read the block. If there is a mismatch, then we get an IO error. So this is the basic concept of DM Verity. So the new Verity based format is again created with a rock bundle command. The only difference is that in the bundle manifest we have here these format equals Verity. And the creation process is a bit different. We start again with the directory containing of files, then create a squash file system. And then we create our DM Verity root hash that we append to the squash file system. And we pick the root hash and put it into a copy of the manifest extracted from the directory. And what we then sign is only the manifest. So CMS also allows putting this data that we sign inside. So yeah, the command is equal, but it's very different when we install the update. So the first thing is what we verify is only the inline manifest here. This is much quicker than having to verify the entire squash fs. And then we can directly mount the squash fs and install our data from this because yeah, using DM Verity, we do the verification of the payload just on demand. So when we read the bundle, then the DM Verity device mapper will verify the data on demand. So this provides fast initial verification and this also prevents us from running into a time of check time of use vulnerability again as we did before. So a logical consequence of this was to implement bundle streaming. What is bundle streaming? So normally when you install a bundle, you download the bundle to a data partition. So you have to have some extra storage where your bundle fits to. And then as a next step after having downloaded it, you install the update to your device. So streaming, the idea of streaming is to just be able to write the update directly from the server to the target partition. So this is how this is implemented in Raoq in a rough picture. So first of all, for downloading, you don't want to use the Raoq service itself. It runs as root downloading something as root. It's not such a good idea. So the first thing we do is spawning an unprivileged helper process. And unprivileged helper process an interface that plays a block device on one side and it communicates with the server where the bundle is located on the other side. And then it translates access to the block device to HTTP range requests to the server. And this allows us then to have random access to the bundle that is located on the server. And as is specced by dmvarity, we have also verified the random access to the remote bundle. And yeah, from the installation, it's just again very simple. You just call Raoq, install, and then the URL you want to install your bundle from. So yeah, as we lose lip call, this supports basically everything that lip call also supports HTTP version one and two basic authentication HTTPS also with optional recline certificates and custom ATV headers. I don't want to go into details here so you can have a look at this at the slides. The next consequence when you are already able to download things from the internet is that we want to save download bandwidth because download bandwidth is often quite limited or expensive or whatever. So a conventional approach to this is using delta updates. So what we understand as delta updates, you might have heard Stefano's talk earlier that day who also had a similar motivation. Delta updates produce a delta binary or file data between distinct versions. The drawback of this bunch is that you can just incrementally installs. You can just move from one version to the other version with a delta update. And so yeah, we found this a bit inflexible so we want to move between all versions possible. So this is why we have made a concept called drug adaptive updates. The main idea behind this is that you have the original bundle and just add some metadata or generate some metadata that allow an optimized update of the bundle. So keep in mind we have the ability to perform random access. So even if we pack additional content to the bundle we don't have to use it or download it. So how this looks like in the bundle manifest is that we have for each image a list in adaptive equals. Yeah, that is a proposal what the update says it would support. And then what is actually used from this is or depends on the Raoq service used. So let's take for example Raoq 1.8. It's not released yet, but just will be the next version that supports only block hash index adaptive update. So if we have in our list two options here and block hash index is one of them it takes the block hash index as optimization method and everything is fine and here for the application file system it doesn't know the adaptive mechanism so it just uses a conventional update by copying the image. So yeah, we are fully backward compatible for whatever future adaptive update mechanism we add there. So already haven't spoken of it. So this is a basic concept how adaptive block hash index update works. So we split up the update image into several chunks of equal size and for each chunk we create the hash describing the data and then we put the hash sequentially in a file so that we in the end have a file that unambiguously describes the data inside the update. And you can do this for the update itself and you can do this also for your active partition where you currently run from and you can do this also for your inactive slot of partition where you currently run from and then an update works when using this adaptive method by first of all only downloading this hash index table and then what Raoq does it goes sequentially through this hash index table and searches first of all in the local hash indexes here if the data, if the hash is available there and if it's available there it copies the data from the reference location on the block device to our slot that we want to update. If it's not available only in this case then we have to fetch it from the remote bundle. We make this again with a random access to the bundle with HTTP streaming capabilities. So this works best with data as these are fixed blocks here. It works best with data which is aligned to 4K blocks so for example in X4 file system where all the files start at 4K offsets. There it is very good and quite easy optimization for the download process. So similar to this and this is also part of the outlook already because it's not yet implemented is the tree rsync checksum method. It basically does the same but uses file checksums. So rsync at least in patched versions is capable of generating and using checksums of files. So you can store these in either extended attributes or in a separate file and then you can call the rsync command and just do the same as we already did. You say, okay, I take the active slot as reference. I take the inactive slot which is also some update target as reference and then I take the remote bundle as a search reference and then I just perform an rsync update and if it files locally then it fetches them first and only the files that are not available locally either inactive or inactive petition have to be fetched from the remote server. And we could also then combine this with the former delta approach where I said it's not so optimal but we can for common versions add distinct delta versions to the bundle and then if the version we're going to install from or to match a delta in the bundle then the adaptive method can just use this delta instead of using the original image. So a next feature based on the dmvarity bundle format is encryption. Encryption was often required by our customers and by the community but not easy to implement with original bundle format. So the motivation is quite clear. Sometimes you have sensitive data in your updates or sensitive application or some sort of intellectual property. So this you want to protect and normally the generation of the updates so the generation of the update artifacts happens inside your boot server or inside the CI and the actual encryption or the handling of different individual devices and the deployment happens in a different entity. So the encryption process in Raug is split up in two parts. One, which is what the CI or the boot server emits it's a payload encryption and then you have the individual description for the individual recipients based on whatever devices are out in the field. So yeah, we use another kernel device method now. So this time dmcrypt, the one that you know from your laptop and yeah, this is just quite simple. So we don't use it for the generation, for the generation we just generate a random key and then it's symmetric photography. So we split the image into blocks of equal size and encrypt each block individually and concatenate them again together to an encrypted image. So for the decryption then dmcrypt comes into play so when you read a block from the device map of what happens hidden by dmcrypt is that it reads the exact block from the encrypted image and uses the symmetric key for decrypting it and providing you the decrypted version of it. So there's not much magic involved. Here's a two-step process. So in the manifest you see it's again only the difference that there is format equals script and what this does is creating a squash file system as we have before, had before but now it also encrypts the squash file system and the encrypt key, the symmetric one is stored inside the manifest just what we already did with our root hash for the invariant. And yeah, with this we have an encrypted payload but we have an here the encrypt key unprotected currently. So then the next step when we want to encrypt for the individual recipients we call rock encrypt and there you can choose if you have one recipient or if you have 10,000 of recipients and what it does is just taking the signature CMS that we have before inside an encryption CMS so we basically encrypt the entire signature that we had before and then we can with CMS yeah just add hundreds of thousands of individual recipients there. It's only limited because sometimes your CMS structure grows quite large so, but in theory you can have very many different recipients. On the device side then there's many just one thing needed you have to have in your system configuration file the one that is on the target you have to specify the key and the certificate required to decrypt the update. It can be a file, it can also be a PKCS 11 URI. And as we combine here dm-varity with dm-crypt we then have authenticated encryption of the bundle and as this everything works block-based with it's also compatible with streaming. So you can just stream an encrypted bundle through a partition. So yeah, the typically use cases one could use is just yeah, the simple one is a shared private or a shared encryption key. So one to rule them all this is yeah, basic security I would say. So if the key is compromised then it's compromised for all devices out there. But you don't have to secure your key so much. A bit better approach is to use group keys so that you form different groups of your devices and assign them each a different key then if one key is compromised it's only the group of devices that gets compromised. The ideal case would be to use per device keys. Then it's possible to revoke them per device and but then if you have individual keys you also have to take care of securing them individually. So putting them into a trusted platform module and HSM or a trusted execution environment or whatever. So a short outlook of future things that we have planned and revoked and things that happen in the community as promised. So we have some metadata in our update manifest. So the compatible is mandatory but the rest is optional. So you can put a description and you can put a version in the build idea or something like this. But for some use cases this is insufficient when you want to make some high level decisions about whether to use this update or not or what's the purpose of it. So there was a request to have the ability to add additional metadata. So one of the future versions of RUG then will support metadata sections that are not interpreted by RUG in any way. They are just forwarded via the Dboss API or via RUG Info and then allow the vendor to put additional information in and to evaluate these information and do whatever he wants with it. Another thing is installation is free or event looking. So what we have so far in RUG is a status file that is here on the left side which gives some basic information about what was installed last on the device. So what kind of bundle, when was it installed, when was it activated. But yeah, there was a request to have more and configurable locking of what happens inside RUG and also to have a history of all installation that happened in the lifetime of the update service or of the device. So this is also something that will be done in the next or the release after I guess. And another feature is lifecycle handling. So currently the scope of RUG is mainly just the current installation. So it is good in installing things. And after reboot, you can mark your just installed system is good but there's no high level perspective and tracing between what update we installed and which update after a reboot we mark successfully. It's not a big issue but it's nice if you have a deployment server that really wants to know if the update he just installed is the running one. So the idea is to have what we would call lifecycle handling. So we generate an ID when starting the installation and then we use this ID to a file or whatever to trace the entire installation procedure until the reboot of the system and then we can emit via deboss for example successful installation upon the next boot. And what's also possible or should be possible with this is then to add a capability of adding confirmation. So like when a user has to approve an update or something like this also via the idea of the deboss interface. And there are some more things to do so having multiple signers for the eight artifact or M of N signatures, this is well supported by both OpenSSL and the CMS structure but it has to be implemented either by the community or project driven. We've had a long history of requests about application or container updates. So I want to update my application without having to update the root file system each time. So yeah, we have developed an initial concept for this. It would exceed the scope of this presentation but for those who are interested in it is available on this GitHub issue and other nice things are applied like streaming upload from browser so that you can click in your browser, upload a bundle and then Raoq interacts directly with the browser to download and install it without intermediate storage required or to have a simple deployment server.  For most use cases, a simple deployment server would be sufficient. So yeah, this is something we would also like to add not in the Raoqore but in the Raoq organization. Speaking of it, for those who know I want to incorporate with a cockpit which is one of very few open source deployment servers available. There's the Raoq cockpit updater which is a project that was initially developed by Prevas and moved into the Raoq organization in 2020 and we did a lot of refactoring, fixing, cleanup and adding new features and yeah, the current lease is 1.2 and it's a quite handy way of interacting with the cockpit deployment server via the REST API on one side and with Raoq, the deepest API of Raoq on the other side. Another thing I can highly recommend is the Meta Raoq community layer that was initialized and is still maintained by Leon Anavi, thanks to him if he can hear us. And yeah, it's basically a Yokto or BitBake layer collection for example integrations of different platforms. So for example, we have an example integration for QM Obase platform also for Raspberry Pi, Sunshi and Tigra and yeah, it's just an example of how to use Raoq but it's a very good starting point so we also have built tutorials on top of the QM O platform because it's a starting point where you don't need any hardware and yeah, so feel free to use it and the link is below left here in the slides and also contributions for new platforms or extending the current support is highly recommended. And a look into the community and yeah, it's always for a project hard to know where or for an open source project at least, hard to know where your software is actually used. So yeah, I have to say, we were quite a bit proud to hear that Raoq is the update service used on the VALS Steam Deck and that's used together with the eSync for those who know at least the eSync, this is the go variant of the eSync, the content chunking tool from SystemD Universe that Raoq also has support for and Collabora who did the integration of Raoq and the eSync for the Steam Deck also contributed these patches back and I think they are already merged now or finally merged and will be in the next release and other projects that use Raoq or that we know that use Raoq this home assisting operation system where they have a build route based system where they use Raoq to update us and the Onyra distributed platform project also uses Raoq as part of its SysOTA update mechanism. So I wonder why I am in time because I didn't manage to make it in 40 minutes ever. So thank you for your attention and yeah, I think we still have time for questions and for those who can't ask anything right now there's also Raoq IRC or Matrix channel available where we are happy to discuss with you. Thank you. All clear, fine. Or too tired. One problem with the Delta update is the original image. It's hard to know that the original image that you're trying to update is broken and normally when you do an update you're sure that the new thing that you wrote is good. But with the Delta update you kind of rely on the original is still okay and I'm not overwriting it.  So I just want to indicate this that this is a very good way of making sure that Delta updates are still reliable. So the data that I was talking about generated on the server side. So I would assume that we know that the bundle on the server side is okay and what is written on the target side is still or can be understood as a full image update. Yeah, this is what you mentioned. Okay. I mean, I don't have. I maybe have too many. So I think one thing I noticed with your system so it looks really cool but the bundle is encrypted or has de-imparity, right? But then once you install it on the target it's not encrypted and you don't have de-imparity, right? You would have to then basically encrypt the partition or have a verity blob or whatever on top inside the bundle. So the bundle is encrypted and it uses de-imparity implementation of the target. And... But once you install it on the flash it's no longer encrypted. No, it's not the intention to have it encrypted it's a different problem to solve. So if you want to have authenticated boot or an encrypted partition that is a problem or thought you're gonna know to what we do during transportation. So this is only for the transportation part. You can do de-imparity on your target. Then you just have the file system for example or a block image which the hash pre-appended you just install it as a normal image this is transparent to what Raoq does and the same would apply if using encryption. So yeah, then it depends on which type of encryption you use if it's done by the file system layer or the block layer, so yeah. Okay, all right, thanks. So with the delta updates being calculated at the block level, so beneath mksquashfs and all the compression, practically speaking what numbers of savings do you see because typically if there's just one file that gets changed one byte with all the compression going on it's gonna be more than one byte being changed. So what are the real numbers that you see in practice when not much files are changed but how that impacts the amount of delta updates that have to be done? We have not massively tested. We have tested this in some cases where we changed only our parts of the file system. It's not as ideal as delta updates are it's not as ideal as for example the CAsync is with it synchronizing hashes but if you tune your squashfs and your x45 system and so on correctly then the saving is yeah, quite notable I would say not to say massively. Thank you. Yeah, we're done. Thanks a lot.