Mae'r ganwethaff i TV a joined by John Blaine. We are going to be discussing the ESSG. It came out earlier this week that Everton Stakeholder Supporters Group, I think that's what it is, will meet with Everton CEO, Denise Barrabaxendale and other staff members to discuss proposals, put in place to put a fan on the board. Now, Patreons subscribers will know that this is something me and John did discuss probably two weeks ago Be gynnyddio wneud, a'i'r wych yn ysgrif wybodaeth heb y newid yma i mi leisio'n gael yr llunio. Rydw i chi'n wneud, hefyd, mynd i chi ei ddigon nhw, erbyn hefyd, a llunio'n gwneud. Roedd yn defnyddio i ddylau. Dan mewn dyddwyl, a'r gwis. Felly, bod yw'r hyn mae'n gweithio. Mae wedi ei gweithio'r gwaith honi arall, ac yn eich mwneud, neu'r dod yn gweithio, oherwydd chi'n sefydlu'n gwneud. Cysylltu'n gweithio. Yn gweithio, ond y bydd yn arwain y press yna yn rhan o'r cerddau. Ond oedd y GUSF General又 yma. Yn y gallwn y three principles o'r three fundamental things that came out of it where a fan of be appointed or approved, fan directe, as it was mentioned certainly by people like the echo. Yn gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio, rydw i yn fawr, mwy. yn gyntaf. Rhyw hwn, mae'n bwysig o angen a mewn ysgrifennu Oesnod pan yw'n gweithio mi ar ei dynnu i. Dwi'n gweithio hyn o'r ffaintfane, mae'n angen i'r gweithio? Felly e'n gweithio hyn, mae'n gweithio. Felly mae'n gweithio hyn. Tadwf yw'n llunio. Tadw, mae'n angen i'r gweithio. Mae gennym yn cael ei digwydd nad yw ramwysgol iawn. Mae'r cim Luisau er i ddim yn gweithio arall a chi ei ddim yn ei gion iawn i ddim. Ie, mae gennym ni i ddim yn ddau i'r gwahanol, ac mae gennym ni wedi cael ei gwaith hwnnw. Felly, y 3 rhyfanaethau eich fan dyrectaeth sydd yn ddiddordeb, i chi'n gwneud i gadael i'r ddechrau, yw'r ddiddordeb mewn gweithretaeth, mae'n ddiddordeb i'r rhysgrifennu ac mae'r ddiddordeb eu ddiddordeb. Yn y stryd, mae'n ddiddordeb i'r ddiddordeb, ac mae'n ddiddordeb i'r ddiddordeb, ac yn ei fod yn gwneud yn fwylo'r cyfriedu ac yn cyfnodol ar gyfer cyd-ynghylch! Yn mor brydiau a'u cyfrifau ac yn cael eu cyfrifau fel y blynedd yn ei ddyfynu cynnig i'r blynedd. Yna wedi gyrwch wedi clyweddoch chi, mae'r cyfrifau gennym ni, I domestic and service system to chose to speak and it's an are you on board with it so to speak? A couple of things. There's always a couple of things. One is your drink and tea. It's really somebody can take the rail. But I really cracked it. Krapp to it three days. Shall I make myself a cup of tea or shall I get beer out? Mae'n golygu i gael gwahodd. Mae'n gilydd i'n gilydd i'r gwaith, ond mae'n gilydd i'r gwaith. Mae'r gwaith mae eich gilydd i'r gwaith gwaith drafodaeth y dyfodig. Mae'r gwaith o'r ysgogel sydd y dyfodig arall, mae ardal chi'n gilydd i'r Ssg. Felly mae'n gwybod. Rwy'n gwybod o aelod i'r gwaith, mae'n dweud ydym ni'n gwybod a gael gwaith o'r Ssg. Ond, mae'n gweithio, yn ysgrifetio, lle, yn ddau'r fanbath, yn roi'r ffordd, yn cael eu cyflog o'r rhan o'ch cymdeithas o'r ysgrifetio, ond mae'n gweithio bod yr un arwad yn gwneud bod hynny'n gwneud hynny, ond ydy'r rhan o'r rhan o'r rhan o'r ysgrifetio. Ond sawl o'r ysgrifetio o'r rhan o'r hynny. I'n deall, mae'n sasgwt gweld i fod y cwylio i'w gweld a'n dod yn teithio. Rhaid o'n wahanol gyrddio'n gweithio'n cysylltu'n roor o'r gerfod o amser. Rhaid o'n gefn nhw'n bod yn gweithio. Rwy'n gofyn yn gallu bod nhw'n bryd. Mae gennym oŵr ei wentlygyn, hynnyín amgau i chi'n gweithio, ac mae chi'n gennym. Gallu fel ten paigau, ond mae'n gweithio o'r cwylio i'r popeth. Felly Sound� will yn cael ei gweld i. I think that they can understand all the background to it by reading more, but fundamentally what the SSG has spent the time doing is producing a proposal, which is the document which is in the public domain earlier this week, to actually dissent it, I believe, to the football club last week, but then they had a meeting with the club this week, and let's not be shy here, it's not just the club they met with the chief executive. OK, and so they met with the chief executive and fundamentally said, here are our proposals about fine representation that is effective, and they only have two proposals, really dead simple. One, they want a fan on the board, but we all want that, don't we? And they want that fan on the board to be a member of and supported by a fan advisory board, which is the shadow board type thing that mean you talked about two or three weeks ago. And I can't imagine fans don't like that either. OK, so that's when you get into the problems about all the thousands of questions that people, well, how do you get on this fans board? Is it all really jobs for the boys? All those sorts of things. And so perhaps the third thing to say is all these people, whoever they turn out to be, will be fully elected through a transparent open and transparent election. That is, you know, open to all of you will. As long as you're never turning, of course. Therefore, fundamentally what the DSSG is proposing is that the Everton fan base elect 11 of their own to be a shadow board or a fan advisory board, the name doesn't really matter. And that one of them or at least one of them will also attend board meetings at the football club and that board meeting stuff at the football club would be as an equal to the other board members at the club. So your question was really, and are you up for this or you're supportive of it? Damn right I am. Having a fully elected shadow board for Everton football club, where at least one of them actually attends Everton football club board meetings, that's fan representation done large, isn't it? Yeah, definitely. It's not something our partners across, or brothers and sisters from across the park have achieved yet. I mean what the Spirit of Shantley announced a number of weeks ago, I guess is the equivalent of the fan advisory board. And I think DSSG have gone the extra yard if you like and said now we want at least one of these to be on the Everton board as well. And the chief exec was very receptive to both proposals in the meeting. Well I mean that's good. What do we say to people who still will kind of will accept this news, receive this news with the nodding, the no and I have, oh yeah it's just a pat on the head. You know it's kind of a dump for show on all of this. Because this is born, I'm writing saying John that this came about because of the super league really and obviously there's been a lot of discontent I think from football's reporters certainly over the last couple of years. Covid really I think made people step away from the game because you couldn't go and looked at everything. You looked at everything and people were like oh this is a bit robust the way they treat us and then when we actually saw the impact of on the football club of us not being there physically. We kind of started going oh they actually need us because without us the games crap. The game is empty as we saw we watched the year of football with no fans and it was pathetic. It was just weird football so I think fans then started going we are actually more important than we've been led to believe by TV and by the club and stuff and then obviously Tracy Crouch got involved and there was things like that because of the super league so has this been born out of that? I think at the very beginning the short answer would be yes. I mean it was from the fan led review. I think Denise Bachsendale, the chief executive asked the fans forum to come up with speaks to the fans and see what contribution you want to make to the fan led review from a football club's perspective. Clearly the football club put out surveys. What the fans forum did is went back to the club and said yeah we'll do this but we're going to drag in a load of other fan groups if you want to call them that. I mean that's some of the social media comment is the single individual who's not a member of anything saying no one asked me. So you can't capture everybody. Po te ia'r cof y bike rydw i'ch brante. Well yeah I think it's one of those things where perhaps you know it's always going to pass on by because at the end of the day this has all been done digitally you know so bless him that my dad was around and he was 80 odd and he would be 80 odd chasing 90 by now. He wouldn't have known about this unless I told it. So so so inevitably you're going to miss segments of the of the fan base. Yeah but I mean if you look what the SSG was it's disabled supporters. It's the fans forum shareholders Association. It's the supporters committee which is predominantly people go to away games all the time isn't it. Yeah yeah perishes society. There's three overseas people on it. You know one from North America one from Europe one from Asia pack. And then of course there's a catch all which is actually Dave Kelly and people should know Davis and Dave's not a yes man for the football club in any way shape or form. And he was capturing all those organizations who are affiliated to the football supporters Association and Davis front of it for them and that's rainbow toffees and so on. Yeah so I think you know this entity whilst it might not have covered everybody. And it needs to going forward and they know that and that you know they'll embrace you know when our place called start to use one of my favorite soundbites. I think it's it's credible. You know I'm a group I've got it in front of me. One two three four one six. Quite far reaching isn't it really. Yeah I mean a lot of groups. I didn't hear how many you froze John just when you were telling me how many it was all together. Yeah it's okay there's nine nine okay so nine with covering different areas and stuff. Yeah you know what you can if you count the international reps as individuals there's nine of them. Yeah you represent others of course. So yeah I suppose people people will always complain if no one knock on my door and ask me and all of that stuff. But we shouldn't look back. I mean you know these guys had a good meeting with the football club. Clearly the football club issued a press release which is from the football club's perspective. Yeah and ESSG put their stuff out through Twitter so you went on Twitter you didn't see it right. But fundamentally the club have embraced the idea of a fan advisory board. That's good yeah. Which is hardly surprising because it's in the Tracy Crouch report so it's gonna happen anyway. And of course you wouldn't be surprised that the chief executive can't on the Zoom call say oh yeah I'll let a fan on the board no problem. Of course yeah. You know so Denise it was very enthusiastic by the way and very receptive and used words like supportive and excited even and all those sorts of things. She's gone off to speak to the board of Edmont Football Club and presumably the largest shareholder as well and said to find out what the official reply is going to be to these two recommendations. I think it's an absolute no brainer that the advisory board will come back as a yes and let's wait and see about a fan on the board what that means. So the challenge now for the ESSG is not to rest on their laurels it's to start the process of defining what the FAB looks like defining what the timetable is to have open and transparent elections and be ready to have a fan on the board before the start of next season. Because you know the ESSG doesn't have to wait for the club's approval they can get on with it now. You can get on with it you know and elect and we the families can elect those 11 people and say we're ready. We're ready we've done all bit. And clearly I think the club will certainly recognise the fan advisory board as being a legitimate entity. And the trick now is to have the biggest election in footballing history to get the right 11 people. Yeah it's going to be interesting isn't it? It's going to be very interesting. I think again key that it's on the board by next season I think it's just looking at it from a fan perspective like I am. I think anything that I feel helps the board understand my feelings and how I feel about my football club so that can be relayed. I'm not talking single here to one single person but what I mean is we all know right now the club's struggling. We know the team is struggling. We know the fan base is really struggling with what's going on. But do we really do we you know do we have full confidence that the board understand exactly how we're feeling. I'm not asking you to answer that question right now but what I mean is anything like this moving forward. If this shadow board or if this fan director was on the board then that could be relayed in a meeting and say you know do you understand how the fan base is actually feeling about this. Subject or that subject even if they sit around the table and go oh we understand that you know we know what's what. There's going to be a conversation about that isn't it and I imagine that would be able to be fed back because there's got to be some transparency here as well. Board meetings cannot always be you know windows shut doors locked and we discuss and nothing gets out of these four walls. I accept some some points on an agenda might be like that because the football club doesn't have to share everything with everybody. But if you've got just say it was now so this is how I'm feeling and I know you always take a slightly different view or your view might be a little different to mine. But right now I'm feeling frustrated that the club has continued to recruit poorly. I feel really frustrated that we recruited a manager that a lot of the fan base didn't really want. I'm frustrated that the director of football has gone but we haven't been given really any other information other than there'll be a structural review of what goes on whatever that means. And so just right now I'm frustrated that we haven't had any money to spend and we might not have any money in January just just I'm taking this broadly of course. So if if this was right now and this shadow board was in place and say it was huge on who were the fan director you know when people would go I know it won't just say it was you in this in this example. And you said well I'm at a board meeting on Monday and I will be relaying all of this these fears that the fans have got or worries or concerns to the board.  The board say right we've taken that on board we are aware but thank you John for feeding back and you come back and go I've fed it all to them. They're all aware of how frustrated we are how worried we are how concerned by a lack of communication so on so on so on.  Surely that would help us as a fan base to go well we can have our voices heard because it's not waste them feeling totally like I do at the moment I feel like right now. Like we're just doesn't matter what we say things are happening and will happen regardless of how we feel that's just how I feel right now that might not necessarily be the case. It just seems that way at the moment but so be good for me. I think it'd be good to have someone who can feed those frustrations to the board. I agree with everything you were saying because we're all abat Sonians at the end of the day and therefore I share the frustrations I've probably got some of my own. Of course and of course what goes on in parallel with these sort of debates with this ESSG thing is the fans forum still exists. They meet with the football club right so fans can pile in with the fans forum and say express our views. The shareholders association still exists and shareholders who are members of the association or want to be or rider or whatever they can pile in on the shareholders association so please ask these questions. The association met with the football club and again senior execs because Denise had to cancel because she had to go to a Premier League meeting I think but we still got Grant Ingalls coming to the meeting who's a board member alongside senior execs like Richard Kenyon and we covered the questions that the association felt needed to be asked. We also covered the questions that some of our members asked as well. Because the meeting can't last forever as you know there's going to be countless questions from Evertonians we secured a commitment that ADE would answer the questions that we'd asked and the ones that we couldn't ask as we ran out of time they would tell us the structure of the organisation so that we would know who to ask the questions off. So the associations made progress in not being having to do everything through Denise or everything through Richard Kenyon or whatever and if that get embraces one to one direct relationships then that's cool and that actually in an indirect way will present the foundation for how the fan advisory board should meet should be engaged with because and this is all personal views about how things should be done rather than because I'm not. It shows this association is part of this ESSG thing but it's not me it's one of my colleagues on the executive committee right. All right it's okay yeah. Yeah and so the simple thing would be we can imagine hopefully say this time of the season next season right. So we're at Christmas the fan advisory board is up and running and one of its members regularly attend board meetings. So you can imagine our shadow board having a meeting a week before the real board meeting at the football club and saying what are we going to take to the agenda what do we want to talk about what do we want asked what do we want answered and so on. Okay and therefore the 11 members of the fan advisory board would be making sure that the views of their constituents are expressed through the board member who goes off to the meeting the week after. And so that's why it's key that people know not just that you've got 11 representatives but which one represents me. Yeah yeah. You know and that therefore is why it's going to be quite challenging and probably very interesting for the SSG to morph from being what it is to being a fully elected fan advisory board. You know and you know you've got to try and it's all in the papers isn't it. You've got to try and balance representation so you cover all the segments of the fan base. Yeah because I can't personally see I mean I could be an advocate of it but I could also argue the other way that you could just say well anyone who wants to be on the fan advisory board put your name here and we'll have a big vote and the 11 with the most votes you're in. Yeah. But if you do that and they're all blokes who are 75 years of age you never go the game. What purpose does that serve you know. Of course yeah. And if it doesn't cover minority groups whether it's disabled or you know or gender based or age based or whatever. So I think trying to keep all the people happy all of the time is going to be really difficult. Yeah definitely. But I think inevitably when the fan advisory board elections come around there has to be the potential for somebody who's not affiliated to anything to run a really good campaign and get themselves elected otherwise it's not what we want it to be is it. No. And then what you do is the fan base has to trust in those 11 people because we just voted for them. But we could quickly make analogies around how general elections are run and realise that you don't always get what you want because the first pass the post approach results in what it is. The first pass the post. So there's always going to be an element of those who campaign best. Yeah. Other ones. They may be the ones with the biggest reach on social media or whatever it was. But one thing is clear. The club won't be picking them. No and that's important. That's the most important thing. The club will not be picking these 11 people. Because what I think what would be really just will wrap it up now because obviously we've covered loads but I think what would be really good and I don't know how you do it. Will be similar to what we discussed on our titan show about the shadow board is that you'd have areas of expertise so that because you don't you don't I personally looking at it. I don't just want 11 fans with the best reach socially because while their views might be really relevant and they might be I would like areas of expertise. We discussed on the show as many of our viewers will have seen. A shadow board that had a finance fellow that was a shadow director of football. So someone who was working in the football industry who understood recruitment. You know maybe a marketing fellow who understood how evidence should be getting marketed because what we want is we want these people who are elected to be. Able to challenge our own physical board the actual official evidence board and say why aren't you doing this. Now if it was me and I went to Grant Ingalls and said all right Grant why aren't you making extra money on sponsorships or whatever. I don't know how you go about doing that so I could just be stamping my feet and he could be looking at me going. Well because this is the mark of you know this is the mark of value of our deals wherever. But if it was someone who dealt in business again I'll I'll doth my hat to you from someone who's been in business for many many years. You understand lots of nuances you understand how to drive things you understand. Workforces and everything else. Grant Ingalls tried to pull the wall not pull the wall but he tried to offer you a substandard answer. You're more likely to say no no because that isn't how it works because I'm working in it and this is how it works where I might go always that right. Oh okay then so everything can only get £2 million for a share sponsor because that's the going rate where you might go I'm going I'm working in that field and I know that X, Y and Z are getting £10 million for it. And things like that so people who can actually offer not only a point of view as a fan to say we should be doing better but actually got expertise in that field. So when they're challenging, they're challenging it from a base of knowledge rather than just stamping my feet. Go on why can't we sign up right back who's amazing and set up 15 goals a season for 300 grand because she can't because they're not in the field you know. Yeah and I think what you just said actually I thought that was a fab summary to be honest because what you've just said presents the opportunity of the fans can get behind this for an exciting future because let's compare and contrast right. Right now there are three people, forget who the people are, whether you like them or not, there's three people on the board of Everton Football Club. There is no doubt in my mind that the club or four handersherry or both are likely definitely going to do this, not just likely they're definitely going to do this hence why I say you know I've no doubt. A point two more board members, right. One of those undoubtedly will have a commercial background because it's seriously lacking at that level. And the other one will have a footballing person's view of football not just fan base and not convinced that they'll necessarily appoint another director of football but they'll have a board member who's accountable for the footballing side. When they've done that we call it a when rather than an if, there'll be five people on the board of Everton Football Club. There'll be eleven on the fan advisory board you know and it's in the document that the function of and you called it in a way the function of this one advisory board is to be a consultative body. Now the way the club interpret that is we will come to the far and say what you think of this, right. And the far will go into a huddle, speak to the fan base and go back with an answer. That's the tame version. That's a supercharged fans forum. What the fans want is one where it goes the other way round. The fan advisory board say we think you the club should be doing this. And here's our proposal, here's our proposition, here's our opinion which is founded on the fact that we've got some experts and it's what our fans want. So in other words instead of the club just pulling insight in, the fab will push insight in as well. And that's why in the exact summary and in the body of the document it talks about and you read it out before. Suzy qualified and experienced people, blah blah blah. Now to achieve that you have to have some criteria for being eligible for an election, don't you? Of course, yeah, definitely. And you know I don't know whether this seems to be provocative or not but I'll say it. I don't think it should be but the idea that you would have 11 people on a fan advisory board and none of them are disabled but they're supposed to represent the disabled elements of our fan base in my mind is completely ridiculous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've got to have some reserved positions to say well actually we've got one position reserved for a representative of the disabled fans for example. You might argue there's a position reserved for I don't know international fans or something. But you can't get carried away and end up with all 11 of them being reserved. No of course you can't. And you also can't require everyone who wants to be a candidate for election to fit into one of these segments. So I think my own personal view is if we call them reserved positions like the disabled one being an example then they should be in the minority across the 11. But they still have to go through the same robust election process as everybody else. Yeah, definitely. And go back to what you said about you don't necessarily want the one with the greatest reach on social media. I think you still have to allow for the fact that there should be candidacy which is just that. There are no criteria other than you can prove you're an Everton fan because we don't want redshites ended up on our fan advisory board do we? No of course. And if there is a fan out there who's not affiliated to anything but wants to be on the advisory board and he or she can prove they're Evertonians they should be able to go into the election. And if they're just dead good to get hundreds of thousands of people on social media to vote for them more power to their elbow because despite what you said if that person's on the fab they can tell all their followers on social media. What's going on? Yeah I just meant we don't want a situation where there's 11 of them to the top 11. I'm not saying there might be someone who's great who's got X amount of 1000 and it's like that's a good way to hit that demographic. But I just wouldn't want it where it was like the 11 most popular but the 11 of them. To a degree that's what it is the most popular isn't it? Yeah but I want the expertise involved that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. And that's where we go back to what you and I talked about whenever it was two or three weeks ago about Shadow Board.    And that's only five of the places. Exactly yeah. And our fab's going to have twice as many as that right. So you know the ambition has to be that the fab is more experienced and more knowledgeable than the Everton Board is. That's cool with that being. That's cool with that being. Oh well that's good on that. You said it before that makes it more exciting that we can drive our football club, pull our football club, drag our football club, kicking and screaming into where we hope it would go. Ideally they'd bounce off each other and we'd move forward because that's what we meant. And that's the right way that it's interaction, it's engagements. They're prepared to listen, we are prepared to stand by what they say. Because ultimately and probably legally Fahamyshirey operates as a shadow director anyway. Because what he says goes and he presumably on occasions is quite prescriptive. We seem to think he's prescriptive when it's about honing and sacking managers. And we should never forget that. It doesn't matter how powerful in quotes that the fan advisory board is. We will only have one vote at board level. Yeah of course. But at least we have our views here. That's the point. And let's pretend that means the board is sick and strong for example. There's five anyway and then there's a fan. If Fahamyshirey wants the five to vote for coffee. Oh yeah. Oh man's not going to get tea is he? Of course yeah. But it will be there and I think the challenges that will be thrown on. Not just by Everton but I think that the Premier League clubs in the round. Because they don't necessarily want independent regulation. They won't necessarily want fans on the board. Although Denise Blesser I think sounds genuine when she talks about wanting to get ahead of the curve. And you know never doing these things properly. And the challenge that she faces is trying to achieve that without being too prescriptive. Because the club are very into controlling and trying to get it designed in their own image. And I think it will take a little bit of a while time and probably behaviours on the side of the SSG to make the football club understand. That when the fans talk about independence they actually mean the football club isn't involved at all. That's the only safe way to do this right. Is to say the whole process of defining selecting maybe if you do it a bit like you would for an MP where the local community decide who's their candidate and then it goes into a big vote. The whole process has to be totally and utterly independent of the football club directly independent because clearly if you want to email everyone with a client ID the club might have to send the email. But that's all they will do send the email. The SSG will have its own website. It won't be waiting on whether ever and like what's going on their website or not and so on. And I think all of that is good for the club as well because sometimes the club has to consider its own position and therefore it can be seen to be frustrating the process. And certainly listening to Denise she doesn't want to frustrate the process. Maybe people lower down the organisation but she doesn't and therefore let's make it easy by maintaining the integrity of the fan organisation whatever it's called that is first and foremost independence. That's right I think anyway. Now that's really the good place to finish because that's exactly what it should be so let's leave it there it's really good. Well obviously it's going to be very interesting seeing how this all plays out now and seeing the processes going into it. I'm sure we'll be having more chats as it goes along John certainly on a business with playing session that we have monthly so it will be interesting. Thank you very much for taking the time out John go and enjoy the rest of your pale ale. It's nearly gone now. Well it should be so finish it off. Right big thanks to John there. Let us know what you think in the comments section below about the ESSG. Do you think it's a good thing for the football club? Can we finally start to make our voices heard more and how can this work going forward? Is it a positive or do you think it's a bit of a patty, a bit of a little pat on the head and go yeah we've done what you asked us to let us know. Let's hope it is definitely not that. Big thanks to John for joining us. We'll see you later.


A lot of the students that I work with aren't sure of what they want to do and I think that the practical skills and the life skills that you can pick up through hospitality are awesome no matter what pathway you take, you know, post school. Yeah, I've always liked the idea of cooking. I've been doing it since I started high school. A lot of skills that I've found we've learned in the kitchen lately is a lot of time management, condensing everything into 70 minutes and then a lot of leadership is involved and working as a team to get everything done. Working in a rural area, I think the gateway to industry, school's program is great for I guess identifying what's in the local area and what, as far as producing a new workforce or the next generation of workers for our local area, I think it's great for that because in Dolby we're really based around a lot of trades, a lot of agriculture but with that we get seasonal workforces which then means that we've got a really strong hospitality industry for a town of our size. And so yeah, I think for me being able to I see, I guess see tangible physical results from kids and their improvement but then also see that the skills I'm giving them can lead them straight into a job or you know a tertiary or vocational pathway after school. I think really giving them those options is a great thing but once you can get them in, get them working, particularly if they really enjoy what they're doing, you can see the progression really quickly I think and having real world opportunities for them, yeah, it gets that progress going. Yeah, it does make me realise that I'm on the right path. Since doing hospitality and doing home ec, I've realised that I want to go on the path of doing like events management and hospitality in the future. It's not so much the actual skills that you have related to that field but more so the ability to I guess turn up on time where you uniform correctly, present yourself well, things like that but also in hospitality if you can make a coffee that's also a helpful thing.


Hi everyone! This is a presentation for PKC 2022. I'm Charlotte Lefevre and it is this work in collaboration with Pierre Carman and the paper is named Time Memory Trade-offs for large white syndrome decoding in ternary codes. So I will first start with a few definitions and the motivation of our work. In this work we will be always in a ternary setting and consider linear codes where n denotes the codeland and k the dimension. We will study a particular instance of the fixed white syndrome decoding problem. The fixed white syndrome decoding problem takes as input a rectangular matrix full rank also called the parity check matrix then a vector called the syndrome and an integer called the weight. The aim is to solve the linear system HE equals S where there is a constraint on the humming weight of the solution. We will restrict ourselves in a case where the parity check matrix and the syndrome are assumed to be both sample uniformly at random and the code rates and weight rates are both fixed. In particular we will be in a setting where there are many solutions to this problem exponential in the codeland yet the search space is comparatively huge making thus this problem hard. The main motivation of our work is the waves signature scheme introduced by debris al azaret al in 2018. Its high-level view is quite classical in code-based crypto. The private key is a structural parity check matrix and the public key is a random obfuscation of the latter making it undistinguishable from a random parity check matrix. Next the signature of the message consists of solving a syndrome decoding instance where the parity check matrix is the public key the syndrome is the hash of the message and the relative weight is fixed by the scheme in particular we are in the high-weight regime. The knowledge of the private key provides a trapdoor that makes the syndrome decoding problem much easier. On the other side we must ensure that anyone with only access to the public key cannot produce valid signatures therefore one needs to ensure that the underlying syndrome decoding problem must be computationally intractable. So to give a global picture of the state of the art with respect to the syndrome decoding problem this problem is easy for a certain weight range in other words a polynomial algorithm in the codeland was formed by French. Outside of this interval no polynomial algorithm is known so the problem is believed to be hard in particular the weights used in waves signature scheme is in the hard zone but this is far away from the Gilbert Vashemov bound. Not that this is safe to ensure that the syndrome decoding problem in waves signature scheme is intractable for an adversary one needs to know about the best possible attacks at this particular weight and this has been studied by Brickhout et al in 2019 they use the PG plus SS framework instantiated with a combination of the k-tree and the representation technique and the cost that they derived is given here however this cost is in time and in memory making it making it unattractive in some applications that's why we propose in this work to study the time memory tradeoffs for this problem so to do this we just started the same way as Brickhout et al and use the PG plus SS framework which stands for partial Gaussian elimination plus subset sum this framework has been formalized by them and this is a modular description of what most ISD based algorithm do here we won't present the framework in all of its generality since we fixed some parameters the first step in the framework consists of doing a partial Gaussian elimination on some rows of the parity check matrix and the number of rows is parameterized by a quantity called l this is an input to this framework then we split the syndrome and the candidate solution according to this division the next step is to solve a smaller problem which is a sort of syndrome decoding problem and the parity check matrix is given by h2 the syndrome s2 in particular it has l coordinates and the solution e2 will have k plus l coordinates we require you that it is full weight and one important difference with the syndrome decoding problem is that here we ask for many solutions and the idea is that for every e2 solution of the previous problem there exists a unique vector e1 such that the concatenation of both vectors give a solution to the linear system in particular we solve the syndrome decoding problem if and only if the hamming weight of the concatenation is w and here it translates on the on the condition on the hamming weight of e1 the design number of solution that the step number two is in particular the inverse of the probability that e1 gets the right hamming weight so this framework allows us to transform the problem into a slightly different one so in other words find many solutions to a smaller sub-syndrome decoding problem as pointed by Brickadette R this problem reduces in reality to the subset some problem moreover asking for many solutions opened the way to several optimization and in particular we can require that solution or return in constant amortize time to go back on this l parameter this is a quite important parameter so from now we denote by sl the design number of solutions to the small sub-problem what is interesting here is that when l increases the size of s2 is going to increase thus the problem becomes harder but on the other side the requirements on the hamming weight of e1 is going to be much easier to satisfy so concretely it means that the design number of solution is going to decrease so this is what we can see on the first stage of this curve that plots the logarithm of sl according to l so this l parameter will be central in our tradeoffs since one l parameter plus a fixed algorithm to solve the smaller problem can provide us one tradeoff and usually the memory consumption is going to increase along with l parameter so this particular plot was done by fixing the code length in the wave region not that l equal to zero corresponds to French algorithm which is memory less and recorded l shows the following l parameters and it could provide them solution it was able to provide them solutions in constant amortize time and in no case we are going to explore the l parameter between these two quantities we are now going to see how can we transform the sub-problem into or only some problem from now i'm going to drop the two index notation so that now we want to solve he equal to s with e full weight we are going to use algorithm solving the all is some problem also called the generalized birthday problem so this generalized birthday problem takes as input all list each list containing vector and the aim is to find one element in each list such that the sum of all of these elements give the null vector the syndrome decoding problem can be transformed into all this problem by doing the following so first we split the evenly the parity check matrix columns into our slices we do the same for the candidate solution and now the linear system he equals s can be rewritten as follow so now the list li is going to contain full weight linear combinations of columns of hi unless the last list which will also have the syndrome subtracted so this is quite a classical approach and was for instance used by brick or that are in their work so here even despite the partial Gaussian elimination done within the PG plus SS framework we will be still in a setting where the desire number of solution is smaller than the total expecting number of solution to the sub syndrome decoding problem here therefore in particular we are not obliged to consider all possible full weight linear combinations in each list each list thus we have some freedom on the size of the list however on the other side we cannot have lists as large as we want because in particular each list contains full weight linear combination of k plus l over r columns of a matrix so it cannot be as large as we want and this is exactly what this constraint translates to solve the underlying only some problem we are going to use algorithms and all of them enumerate smartly a fraction of the solutions we have some freedom on the number of lists the size of the syndrome and to a certain extent the size of the list so here are the algorithm that we consider the dissection and the k3 algorithm can be seen as improvements of the meet in the middle algorithm and this is also possible to hybrid them in what we will call here dissection in tree and this is the algorithm that will provide us our best instances the algorithm presented here are able to return solutions to the only some problem in constant amortized time so with respect to time course we could first think that this is optimal however sometimes the algorithm return too much solution compared to the number of solution that we want so that the amortized cost regime works only when we require you at least a certain number of solutions and in and if this is not satisfied this yields a loss that's why we introduce the notion of granularity and it's going to help us to assess if an algorithm is adapted with respect to this quantity the granularity is simply the smallest number of solution that an algorithm can return while not changing its amortized cost looking ahead the dissection is an algorithm which is very memory friendly which has on the other side a granularity not adapted for many l parameters and concretely it will only give interesting instances for small l parameter that corresponds to quite extreme trade-offs in this work we spent a significant time trying to lower the granularity of some of this algorithm when it is too coarse now i'm going to present the different algorithms and we start with the k tree the k tree was introduced by Wagner in 2002 so for simplicity we require that the number of least is a power of two so two to the a where a denotes the number of levels so here is the example of a k tree with r equals eight so that the number of levels is free the target is split evenly into three slices and at each level a meat in the middle algorithm is applied with one slice of the target in no case the tree is balanced so that the number of written solutions after each merging is expected to be equal to the initial this size we can see that one solution written by this tree is highly structured since you require for instance that the first two elements in l one and l two some on zero on l over three coordinates by construction therefore the k tree decimates the solutions but this is not a problem in no case since once again we do not want all of the solution so it's even an advantage and even better than that because decimating the solution will give an algorithm with a fine granularity and if we want more solution we can just iterate this tree using different intermediate targets so for example here we can take an arbitrary vector t instead of the zero target and here replace this zero by minus t now given the constraint that we want solution in constant amortized time for fixed l and a parameters there exists an optimal choice for the least size in the sense that it would minimize both the granularity and the memory consumption and both quantities are asymptotically equal to three to the l of a therefore given one fixed l one wants to have a number of levels as large as possible but this quantity is limited because of the constraint on the least size that we mentioned earlier so it limits it limits the maximal number of levels that we can use given one fixed l parameter here are the tradeoffs offered by the k tree algorithm on y axis this is the logarithm of the time cost divided by the code let and on x axis the same for the memory cost this diamond points is the cost that breakhooded alphonse in particular they use the smooth k tree algorithm that i'll mention in a slide combined with the representation technique that i won't present here so going back to the k tree graph here one point represents the application of the k tree with one l parameters and the values of l are increasing from left to right not worthy is that this graph is made out of several lines in fact one line represents the k tree with one fixed number of levels for each line take for example the origin line it corresponds to six levels and the right test point is the largest l parameter such that we can use the k tree with six levels so for any larger l parameter this constraint is no more satisfied therefore the number of levels needs to be decreased since in our case decreasing the number of levels leads to a larger memory consumption this explains why we have some gaps in the memory consumption between when we change the number of levels in fact there exists a way to obtain a smooth graph with slightly better trade-offs this is given by the extended k tree algorithm presented by minder and singular and adapted in the tanner resetting by breakhooded alphonse i won't go into the details but the raw id is that the merging at the first level is unbalanced and partially dedicated to increase the list size and concretely it allows to add one more level than what the constraint on the list size dictated as we can see on this graph it provides us a smooth curve on better results than the k tree so now i will mention the dissection framework that we explored in this work too it was introduced by dinner at al in 2012 and is another generalization of the meet in the middle algorithm i won't present the inner working of the dissection but rather the key ideas so it's a memory friendly family of algorithm that was designed initially to be exhausted so return all of the possible solutions but it is still possible to not return them all and have and adapt slightly the granularity but the the overall granularity is going to remain somehow coarse some trade-offs are possible with the choice of the initial list size but there are only a few choices that provide solution in constant amortized time and contrary to the k tree where the problem is split in a symmetric way the dissection decomposes the early sum problem into a small one and a large one the smaller problem has its solution stored in memory while the large one has its solution returned on the fly and this decomposition can be done recursively within the dissection framework now i will present the possible trade-offs on this plot the rate points represent the trade-off offered by our dissection with our smaller than 400 we did not increase our any further and it would only add more points in this zone of the graph that corresponds to quite extreme trade-offs this graph was drawn using one single l parameter fixed to 0.0 0.04 times n this gray horizontal line represents the desired number of solutions for this particular l and in the dis and the dissection curve does not reach it so it means that it cannot return the desired number of solution in constant amortized time and the reason for that is that the dissection has a granularity which is not adapted here and this is true for a quite large range of l parameters in general the dissection matches the desired number of solutions only for very small l values so we tried to lower the granularity of the dissection and it gives us the following black dots but it gives only a very small improvement one last remark on this graph is that after a certain point there is a little interest in increasing further the memory because increasing further the memory would only give a small gain in the time cost and now that this is said we would like to extract the best trade-offs by varying l parameters and it gives the following plot where each color represents the dissection plot for one l parameter to obtain only the interesting points we can extract the outline of the curve and obtain then this figure and we can now compare the dissection trade-offs to the ones of the k3 so the dissection outperforms the k3 algorithm for small memories it is meaningful since in this zone the dissection granularity usually matches the desired number of solution and we can thus benefit from the memory friendliness of the dissection on the contrary the k3 is less memory efficient yet its granularity is not limiting up to large l values so so far we have seen two generalizations of the mid in the middle which are by instance very different then one possibility is to consider a hybrid version that somehow combines the idea of both algorithm that we'll call here dissection entry it's an algorithm presented by dinner in 2019 and the idea here is that the list are merged in a tree structure just like with the k3 but instead of applying the mid in the middle on couples of lists now a x dissection is applied on list apples so here is the example of one of the dissection dissection tree that gave us our best results it is a tree with three levels and each dissection done is the full dissection at the moment we impose that every dissection done is exhaustive and still require that solutions are returned in constant amortized time and we shall not forget the constraint on the initially size in fact i didn't mention this before but the full dissection is the base case in the dissection framework and this is the only one which is symmetric in particular this is just an exhaustive variant of the k3 therefore if we unfold in this tree what happens within the full dissection we obtain a tree that has exactly the same structure as the one of a k3 with six levels so we might wonder what's the difference between these two algorithms one of the main difference between them is in the merging strategy the k3 decimates solution in a somehow steady way while the dissection entry is locally exhaustive so on this plot the rank point represents the trade-offs with the dissectioning tree and the square ones with the k3 additionally there is here a color scale that represents the value of the underlying l parameters used for every point unless for this particular part of the curve that i will mention in a moment one horizontal line gives two points with the same l values in particular the same target size and the same time cost so now this is clear that the dissectioning tree outperforms the k3 since it has a smaller memory consumption one possible explanation is that the layer dissection is going to return much less structured solution thus it can explore more quantities solution within the list but on the other side for amortized cost reason the dissectioning tree is going to return also much more solutions than the k3 yet in this case the memory consumption is still better and because the memory consumption is lower there are more l values such that we can apply this dissection entry because the constraints on the on the list size limits the memory up to this particular value one downside with the layer dissection is that it has a coarser granularity with the k3 the granularity was given by the initial list size why for the dissectioning tree the granularity is the square of the list size we can see that granularity programs appear exactly at this straight off t equals m square and from this point of this point one iteration of the layer of the dissection tree is going to return too much solutions so that's why in particular the curve rebounds the bottleneck in the granularity was because of the dissection granularity so that's why to solve these granularity problems we consider non-exhaustive dissection so that its granularity matches exactly the number of desired solution in particular by doing that we decimate the solution quite rapidly so that the memory efficiency decreases it gave us the extra points in brown and we see the loss in the slope of the curve in the case of the four dissection with three levels by doing that we go back gradually to what does a classical k3 do when we increase the memory consumption but in this case what stops the curve is the constraint on the list size one natural idea to extend the plot is then to apply the smoothing technique on top of that and it gave us the following green points unsurprisingly the right most point correspond in fact to the smooth k3 with six levels so at this particular point the four dissection is just a four tree without any repetition of the tree with intermediate targets now let's see a summary of our results this is a table with the asymptotic curves given several tradeoffs the first line corresponds to the cost found by recouped out with time equals memory we can see that when the memory consumption relative to the time decreases it is more interesting to consider larger dissections not wuffy is that the product memory time which can be helpful as a tool to compare different tradeoffs is smaller with all tradeoffs and we can see all of the results plotted on this graph here this is clear that the dissection in gray and the k3 in black are outperformed by layered dissection for small memories globally what works best is the dissection with two levels while for larger memory we should rather use a full dissection with three of four levels in this plot the cost computed is asymptotic and many quantities were not taken into account for example the factors when doing operation in every to the end and the polynomial factors in the cost estimates were omitted so we refined the estimate of the cost by taking these quantities into account the idea here is to have a sort of intermediate cost between the asymptotic ones and the full and accurate modeling of the attack here is the plot that we derived using the wave signature scheme parameters in particular lots of craft disappeared here because these factors made them uninteresting to use for example the full dissection with four levels becomes always less interesting than the full dissection with three levels now to conclude in this work we investigated time memory tradeoffs for a particular instance of the syndrome decoding problem underlying wave signature scheme security to do that we use the PG plus SS framework and instantiated it with the K tree dissection and dissection entry we spent a significant time trying to decrease the granularity of the building blocks so that it matched it it matched the desired number of solutions in our case so this is all for this presentation I hope that you enjoy it and I wish you a nice day