Hi everyone, my name is Irana, I'm a restructur of protocol lab and in this talk I'm going to present Monza that is a new two-party protocol for secure computation of functions that are defined over the ring such in the KAA. And this is a joint work with Dario Catalano, Maria di Ramon and Dario Fiora. So we look at this problem, we have two parties, Iris and Bob, with private inputs and I want to compute a public function F over this input without revealing the inputs. And the way we solve this is design an interactive protocol for Iris and Bob such that even one of the two parties corrupted and does not follow the instruction of the protocol, the protocol stays as secure as sending inputs to a trusted party that computes the output and returns only this to Iris and Bob. So this is the standard MPC problem just for the very specific case of two parties only. And there are a lot of MPC protocols that solve this problem and usually this protocol they consider the function F as a binary circuit like for example Yau scheme does this or add a circuit over a finite field. In this work we take a different approach and we assume that the function F is represented as an aromatic circuit but over a ring specifically the ring of the integers module 2 to the K, so Z2K for short. And why do we do this? This choice comes from the fact that one is interesting and two is an interesting problem and two actually the integer arithmetic on standard CPU is done module 2 to the K for a specific value of K. So an MPC protocol that is designed in this model is simply to implement because you know the arithmetic of the protocol is the same arithmetic of the machine implementing it and then can implement very easily tricks and other sub protocols that are used for this CPU computation to speed up this computation. So at the end we get a protocol MPC protocol that is fast in practice as well. We are not the first one to look at this model actually there are feasibilities result that says that MPC is possible even in the dishonest majority case of a ring for any ring fine ring of course and there are also there is also a framework for a very specific case the three-party case with one correction design a very efficient protocol for computation over the specific ring to the K. This is the shame by the framework and quite recently Kramer and others are crypto two years ago they also extended the tools that are used in many protocols of the speed family to compute overfield they send this tool to compute over a ring so they designed what they call the speed 2k protocol and there are already some variation of this protocol for example over the 2k was presented quite recently and with all of these line of work and we present a new protocol that we call it monza that is specific for the two-party case achieves active security and as speed 2k is in the preposessing model actually we have the same online phase of speed 2k but we have a different preposessing we use for the first time this scheme that is called a joys-lebert scheme that is very well suited for this mpc preposessing over the ring it's very well suited for this because it's linearly homomorphic it naturally supports message space the ring that we are interested in it's quite efficient basic operation like encryption decryption and the homomorphic operation are really efficient moreover they don't need this encryption scheme doesn't need zero knowledge proof of plaintiff's knowledge so this is a plus for the mpc preposessing application however it still needs some kind of zero knowledge proof specifically zero knowledge proof for correct multiplication and the challenge here is that such proof were not known in the literature before this work so in order to be able to use this joys-lebert scheme and you know exploit all these nice features the challenge we had to to overcome was actually designed this specific protocol and I'll tell you more in the following of this talk but before I want to say that Monza is also efficient in practice we implemented the preposessing phase in C and did some we did some benchmarks and tests and you can read all the details of these in the paper here I want to say two things first of all the throughputs of the preposessing phase so how many tripods for example we generate per second it stays the same or almost the same even if the connection between the two parties is low so the throughput for tripods with a like a very good connection LAM connection with 0.5 sorry millisecond between the two parties as latency is 19 if we go down to a very slow connection with the 100 millisecond we still have a good throughput that is 70 so just two tripods left this is a nice feature for application for specific application and also computation wise we have that let's say the role of the two parties is not symmetric we have one party that always has to do like more operation or like more complex operation okay so this means that Monza can be very well it can be a good size in the model where we have a server the client and the server is more has more computational power than than the client okay these are some features and now I want to start to construct the protocol and for this I'll start recalling you what's how a speed like protocol looks we have two tools here first of all we have a secret sharing an arithmetic secret sharing and specifically the additive one meaning that any value like for example A is represented as a pair of values A1 and A2 such that the sum is the value and such that Alice only know A1 Bob only know is to be A2 and we also have an information theoretic mark message authentication code and this means that there is a global key that stays the same you call it data and it stays the same for the entire protocol and this key is used with each value to create this mark the mark is just the product between the key and the value and the mark is also clearly secret shared and these are the two tools that in the speeds in the speeds formula are used for all the online phase of all for all the protocols there and usually they are these tools are used that especially the market is used on them on a field very recently as I told you before Kramer and others they extended this to they adapted this this tool to work on a computation for computation over the ringer that should decay and how did they do it so the key idea is the following if you want to compute on that should okay you actually need to go to let's say an extension ring so that is a ring that is large as and it has other s bits okay so most specifically say you have a value a in that should decay what you are going to take you are going to take an a prime in that to k plus s such that the first k bits are equal that is these two where are equal model to decay and then you are going to secret share and authenticate the the value a prime okay and you are doing these for all the inputs and then you are going to do the computation over the ringer to to the k plus s so the online phase of speeds to like is very is basically the same of of the online phase of speeds meaning that any linear operation in the function is executed locally on the shares by the parties and for multiplication to to have an efficient way to do multi creation we use a random trip also a random triple is three values x y and that they are shared authenticated form and the first two x and y are random while y is the product y sorry that is the product of x times y and once that you have a random triple we have a standard tool trick called the beaver format to also do multiplication okay this is quite the known standard and the key point here is that how do we get this random triple so here is where the preprocessing comes into into play basically before doing the online computation there must be a preprocessing phase that use some cryptographic primitives for example public ecrypto to generate these random tripods and other correlated randomness that we may need and so if you think how to create these tripods in this offline phase with assessing phase you can realize quite quite soon that basically all you need is a multiplication protocol indeed like generating random values is easy because each party can just take their own shares of this value what is complicated is for example to mark this value because you have to do a multiplication between the two shared values and this involves multiplication between like two shares one known by Alice and one known by Bob so if we design a protocol to multiply to multiply two values one known by Alice one more Bob and this multiplication protocol will return the shares of these multiplication then basically we are done we can use these to construct tripods okay so how do we do multiplication between secrets there are like again several protocols that use different primitives different building blocks for example you can use oblivious transfer you are going to have a quite cheap protocol that is but that is however band-wide band-width intense you can use the homomorphic encryption different flavor for example the original speed protocol used at somewhat homomorphic encryption meaning that the encryption scheme that is linearly homomorphic and it also allows you to compute say the multiplication to Cybert or like manipulate to Cybert to get the encryption of the multiplication of the two original values or you can use you can use something simple like linear homomorphic encryption only we take these up let me say first of all that there is no one that is best or that is the best they all have these prongs and cons for example as I said before oblivious transfer is a cheap in computation but bandwidth intense using homomorphic encryption give you something that is much better in communication so requires less communication but is more more intense for computation for sorry computation requires more computation so there are different flavor different solutions and we we present a new solution that use a simply linear homomorphic encryption scheme and in particular the encryption scheme that we choose is this joy live art for all the nice future I told you at the beginning so let me recall you what this scheme is this is a basically an extension a generalization let's say of the godwater minkalis scheme and instead of for instead instead of encrypting bits it encrypts a string of bits or like element of the ring that should do then the public key is a ring an LSA module and with the generator of the group of the invertimal element what you end this generator has to be actually a special one it has to has the jacobi symbol equal to one and jacobi symbol is just an an extension of the legend symbol that you can compute one you know p and q okay so some like let's say a number of theoretic character characterizes specific characterization and idea but one you have these you can encrypt your message just taking your message for example m just doing g to the n so generator to them and then you randomize the encryption taking a random value x and elevating these to the power to them the order of the plain text space okay so once how do we use what that we have this how do we use it to to do the multiplication protocol it's quite simple so again remember that we have a alice with input x bob with input time and they want to compute a secret sharing of these x times y okay we'll assume that alice has public and secret key for the jury bus scheme while bob only has the public so the protocol goes like this artists send the encryption of x to bob bob takes this type artist a and do use the homomorphic property of the of the scheme to compute c that is y times a y is input plus the encryption of a random value r i was chosen by by bobby if i and send back this value c to alice alice decrees and gets her shares basically so defines her share that one as the encryption of c while bob defines is is share as minus r and it's quite easy to verify that z one plus the two now is actually y x times y so we have a secret sharing of the multiplication of the two in both perfect security for bob is super easy because alice can cheat basically can do anything what is challenging here is how do we achieve security for for alice so when bob is corrupted he could for example send back send this c competent in a wrong form okay so in order to avoid this we had to add a zero knowledge proof of the fact that c is actually y a plus encryption of r okay and the challenge is here because such a product is not known for the jay libert scheme and moreover since jay libert works on a ring it's not easy to like take standards not like protocols and adapt to to to work in this case because we have the non-invertible element we have all the problem that being on a ring brings with for example not all and invertible and and so we can't divide easily by elements that are non-zero i'll tell you one more about this but first let me let me do a let me do a comment let me precise one thing so this is what we want to prove what we need to prove to have the multiplication protocol to be secure so we have to prove this blue statement that you see in the slide that was the one in the in the previous protocol however for the rest of this talk i'm going to focus on something that is simpler just for the sake of simplicity and that is actually proving that Bob wants to convince Alice that he knows m such that the public cypher testee is the encryption of m without revealing m okay um the the the key ideas are similar the first protocol is the like the one we need is more involved so we are going to focus on the simpler one for the at least doing this talk so let's construct this simple protocol to understand the the key ideas and we're going to construct it as is not like protocol so the first thing that is going to happen is that Bob the the pruger is going to sample another message s and to encrypt this message with the same key clearly but with new random s w and send this encryption back to Alice uh send this to Alice Alice she is going to choose a challenge challenge as an element of that true to the x true to the s so could be a bit sting let's say it's a bit more or is a bit sting of s element we we um we interpret it as an element of this new ring that to that true to the s and and and this challenge is received by Bob who computes true values values x and y these two values can be computed by just knowing m and if these two values are computed correctly like following this this formula then uh when they are sent to Alice Alice can use them to verify a specific algebraic uh formula the one you see uh on on the slide if this formula is true she accepts the proof otherwise she reacts and correctness again it it's just uh doing some some math it's quite easy and the soundness the soundness in this kind of protocol usually is proven in this way we assume that Alice is sending more than a challenge like a a d prime there are different challenges and we say if Bob can answer both of them then basically we can compute uh this m that means Bob is not lying so if Bob answer many challenges is not lying and the way we compute is that we use the algebraic uh formulas that uh uh that is used by Alice to verify we use that formula with different challenge as we get we compose them together we get basically a formula for m this formula usually depends on the invert of the element e minus e prime the two different challenges and while if you are on a field this is fine because you can invert this element this element is different than zero so you can invert you cannot do this on a ring because on the non a ring uh there are non invertible elements uh they are actually in the ring two to the n there are a lot of them all even uh elements are not invertible for example so how can we adapt this strategy how can we we overcome this problem so what we show in the paper is that actually this value e minus e prime and two to then they have the great common divisor is always two to the t for some t that is smaller than s the bit length of the challenge that is also smaller than m okay so we can basically simplify a factor two to the t from both of these and once that you do this you can at that point you can actually invert the new the new value the simplified value clear you don't invert in the ring two to the n but you invert in the ring that is smaller two to the n minus f and this means that you basically you are extracting your computing you are a formula for m that only extracts a compass and extracts the first n minus two bits of it so if you actually want to extract all the message now you have to go back start from scratch and start your uh zero knowledge protocol with the larger message page you have to work from the beginning on the ring uh uh z two to the n plus s if you do this then you basically start or ask when you start to just the first n bits and notice that this is not an efficient problem we can do this like going to the extension field section ring in uh it's not a problem for efficiency because the cyber test land that stays the same with the bit is a jolly bath scheme okay uh so if you wrap all together basically now you I hope you get an idea of the zero knowledge uh protocol of correct multiplication going to be similar to this one I show you but more involved and you can use it to construct your you can use it in the multiplication purple and multiplication probably is then used in uh to genetic trials there are a lot of details how you use all these together that you can find in the paper let me skip them here instead I want to talk like a minute about the computation the communication complexity of months of the processing phase so the nice thing is that we are able to compute the explicit formula of the communication complexity so all constant are explicit and clearly the communication complexity is linear in the cyber test land and in the input land and in the land of these extra s bits that we need for security but it's not just that the linear we have explicit constant you can see the formula there in the slide and the formula translates to kind of translate to explicit numbers when you plug them in and there's an example that for example for 80 bits computational security and this s our statistical security parameter were equal to 40 less than 70 kilo bits are needed for a typo on the an example where the the input size is 128 bit and you'll just see a table there that you can read more details about it in the paper but basically this is the table that compares our protocol with the speech okay protocol we achieve a very similar communication complexity and and usually Monza is more efficient meaning needs it needs less communication when K is a bit larger like for example for K 128 Monza is more efficient okay before concluding I just want to say that they would have some interesting direction for future works for example we would like to see if we can extend this protocol to the end party case something interesting also designing batch verification for the zoonerage proof because we do a lot of them for each type or two you need a number of the zoonerage proof imagine if you can batch verify them you gain a lot in efficiency and then also maybe you want for some specific application it would be interesting to design soup protocols that can exploit the GL unique properties and with this it is all thank you a lot for watching and bye bye


A useful aspect of matrix algebra is our ability to solve multi-linear systems through the use of what are called elementary row operations. So remember that if we have a system of equations in row echelon form, we can solve it easily through the use of back substitution. But what if it's not in row echelon form? In that case, we need to put it into row echelon form, using either the algebra of solving multi-linear system using the standard written forms of the equations, or the algebra of solving multi-linear systems, wait for it, using the augmented coefficient matrix. The advantage to this is that we can take a system of equations and write them down more compactly as an augmented coefficient matrix. Since every row of a matrix corresponds to the coefficient and constant of an equation in standard form, then anything you can do to an equation in standard form can be done to the row of a matrix. This produces what are called the elementary row operations. So suppose I have a system of equations in standard form. I can write down the augmented coefficient matrix for the system with each row of the matrix corresponding to one equation. So what can we do to an equation in standard form? Well, one of the things we can do is we can take the equation and multiply both sides by a constant. This has the effect of multiplying every coefficient and the constant by the same number. Since every row of the augmented coefficient matrix corresponds to an equation, then what we've done corresponds to multiplying every term of a row of the matrix by a constant. This means we have a new row with the new coefficients and constants. What about the rest of the system? Since we only changed the first equation, the second equation of the system remains the same, and so the second row is also unchanged. Now it is sometimes convenient to record our process. So in this case, we've multiplied the first row by two and replaced that first row. So we'll indicate this by two R1 being sent to R1. And so one of our elementary row operations includes multiplying every term in a row by a constant C, and we'll indicate that by CRI being sent to RI. Another thing we can do when we have a system of equations in standard form is to add one equation to another. So again, let's take our equation in standard form and the corresponding augmented coefficient matrix, and this time we'll add the two equations. Again, every row of the augmented coefficient matrix corresponds to the coefficients and constant of an equation. Now, strictly speaking, we now have a system of three equations and should have a coefficient matrix with three rows. But if you think about it, we got this third equation by adding the first two equations together, which means that we don't actually need all of the equations, because if we wanted to, we can recover one of the equations from the other two. Now, presumably, we added the two equations together for a reason, so we actually want to keep this third row, and if we keep the first row, we notice that we can recover the middle row because it's the difference between the entries. So this first entry one is the difference between two and three. This next entry negative one is the difference between one and zero and so on. So we can get rid of this second row we no longer need it. And again, it's convenient to record our process, so in this case, we've taken rows one and two and added them together, and we've replaced row two with the result. And so this gives us another elementary row operation. We can add one row to another and replace it. So we write this as ri plus rj stored as rj. Another thing we can do when we have a system of linear equations is we can change the order of the equations. So again, we have our system of equations and corresponding augmented coefficient matrix, and maybe I'll change the order of the equations, which is going to also change the order of the rows. And to record this, I'll indicate that I've switched row one and row two. Actually, for reasons that will become apparent later, it'll be better if we don't do this. And so we can also switch to rows, but it will be convenient not to do this as an elementary row operation. To make it a little easier to talk about elementary row operations, we'll introduce a couple of terms. The pivot is the first non-zero entry of a row. So if I have a system of equations with augmented coefficient matrix, then the first non-zero entry of a row is going to be the pivot of that row. So for this matrix, our first row pivot is three, our second row pivot is one, our third row pivot is three, and our fourth row pivot is going to be two. When we reduce our system of equations to row echelon form, then all entries below the pivot are going to be zero. So in row echelon form, three is the first row pivot, and everything below the three is a zero. Likewise, one is our second row pivot, and everything below the one is a zero, and so on. This leads to a process known as Gaussian elimination. We'll have a working row, we'll multiply that working row by a constant to make the pivot one, and then we'll add multiples of this row to the rows below so that we can get zeroes below the pivot, and we'll repeat this process until we're done, and our matrix is in row echelon form. And again, remember the whole point of doing this is so that we can then use back substitution to get all of our solutions. Now it's possible that after we've done this, some of our rows are going to consist of all zeros, and so we'll introduce another term. The number of non-zero rows in the row echelon form of the matrix is called the rank of the coefficient matrix. So in this case, we have three non-zero rows, and so this matrix is of rank three. It's worth emphasizing that while we determine the rank based on the row echelon form of the matrix, rank also applies to the original augmented coefficient matrix. So this matrix has rank three, and this matrix, which gave us this row echelon matrix, also has rank three.


Lava. Lava is molten rock generated by geothermal energy and expelled through fractures in planetary crust or in an eruption, usually at temperatures from 700 to 1200 degrees C – 1292 to 2192 degrees F. The structures resulting from subsequent solidification and cooling are also sometimes described as lava. The molten rock is formed in the interior of some planets, including Earth, and some of their satellites, though such material located below the crust is referred to by other terms. The lava flow is a moving outpouring of lava created during a non-explosive effusive eruption. When it has stopped moving, lava solidifies to form igneous rock. The term lava flow is commonly shortened to lava. Although lava can be up to 100,000 times more viscous than water, lava can flow great distances before cooling and solidifying because of its thick isotropic and shear opening properties. Explosive eruptions produce a mixture of volcanic ash and other fragments called tephra, rather than lava flows. The word lava comes from Italian and is probably derived from the Latin word lebs which means the fall or slide. The first use in connection with extruded magma molten rock below the Earth's surface was apparently in the short account written by Francesco Sarrao on the eruption of Vosuvius between May 14 and June 4, 1737. Sarrao described the flow of fiery lava as an analogy to the flow of water and munt down the flanks of the volcano following heavy rain.


So welcome again to the final weekly charting analysis webinar of 2015. Been an interesting start to the week. We've had the Spanish elections, which of course is a bit of a fallout initially in European markets. But we've recovered back into positive territory. There was a big massive route in U.S. stocks at the end of last week. So we're awaiting the open of U.S. markets to see how they fare. All the while, I'm flipping through the risk warnings on the screen here. And just a reminder that any questions at all, just feel free to send it through to the chat or the Q&A box in the webinar software. Okay. Well, just a little interesting by-the-by working on some summary pieces for 2015 and a little review, looking forward kind of thing. This is something that you have to look forward to if you so desire to look at it, was something I'm working on for the IPOs of last year. Some of the biggest IPOs. World Pay was the biggest one. Auto Trader as well. As you can see, pretty much dominated by those top two. We just had We're There, which had a bit of a rough start, but Pop Tire, not too impressively so far. It's only just listed, so we can't hold it too much against them. But really, almost all the IPOs of this year in the red, none of them earning money from their listing price except World Pay and Auto Trader, the two biggest. So interesting theme there. It's been a good year in terms of the market cap added by IPOs. But with this kind of performance, there might be a struggle to raise more money next year. So maybe a bit of a downturn in IPOs for those of you. Either trade those through our system. We normally list them on the first day of official trading, or if you have them somehow, you're able to participate on the actual IPO itself. Then, yeah, interesting year. Back to markets of the hour. As I mentioned, the Spanish election has been a boom of an issue. It initially caused a lower open across Europe, but now only Spain is down every other market in the green, including the FTSE 100. Obviously, the big event of last week was the Fed rate hike meeting. We've basically been waiting for that the whole year. And the event itself, a little bit of a damp squid, just a sort of general relief rally, I think. Probably see it best in the Dow Jones U.S. 30 chart. This was the week, this was last week, leading up to it on the day of the decision, finished higher. But then, Timber, the last two days of last week, we came right back down to those lows of November. And we're a precipice right now. I'm getting a rebound of these lows, as you might expect, but we did close right at them, which is a pretty negative sign. And this is basically a double top pattern. I'd alluded to it when we were first down here. We've got a bounce back, okay, back into range trading conditions. Didn't make it to the top of the range, first bearish sign, bearish engulfing candlestick on the day, big follow-through down to the bottom of the range. So, you know, it's choppy Christmas holiday season-type trading right now, so may get a break, but I would say more likely a fake out, you know, because there just isn't the sort of liquidity in the market to follow through on these kinds of moves. A lot of choppiness this time of year. More sort of mean reversion type time for trading.  And so I suspect probably there's not going to be a breakdown in two-thin-year, but, you know, it could be wrong. That's, that was pretty strong sentiment. They carried the market down here. And as I said, double top would pretty much, you know, I might as well use the drawing tool here. You know, if we're shooting that split, what am I doing there? Starting wrong. If we call this the height of the pattern, nope, doing that wrong as well. I'm going to adjust that a second, I think. Okay. We're looking pretty much conservatively, I would say, in this sort of 16-270, you know, you could call it 16-300 to be conservative as a possible target on a breakdown here. And obviously that's not too far away from the lows in August and September, the 16,000 round number. So that, you know, that could be quite the sell-off. Should be closed below there. Probably need a, you know, obviously a daily close, but the safest result would be a weekly close before believing in that result. Off a push lower. So yes, pre-fed, post-fed. You know, again, a little bit symptomatic of just choppy markets at the end of the year, but also just not quite knowing what to make of this rate hike just because, you know, normally it's considered quite a good thing, the first rate hike, because it shows that the economy's going great guns, the central bank's trying to slow down the economy because it's doing so well. Not really the case this time. Quite a few problems with the US economy. And, you know, that's, you know, because of course the concern that maybe the Fed is making an error here by actually choosing to raise rates at this point in time. So that, you know, that was the big event last week. It's spread into the other markets and we'll look at those charts as well. If we are on the equities front, let's pull up the UK 100. That's where I am, of course. This is the daily chart for the UK 100. I actually posted this through our new dot-com website if you've been on that one. We've got a new re-slicked format of a news analysis page on there and, you know, posted this rising trend line as a possible inflection point. Did get a sell-off there, but actually, you know, undoing a good amount of that today, as you can see the kind of general environment is that we're in a range trade here. And so we bounced off the bottom of the range, came into that trend line resistance, sold-off. Now we're trying to, you know, we're challenging it again just to see if actually we can push to the top of the range again and we're just fully sideways. I suspect we probably can break these highs, but I'm feeling like maybe there's going to be another sell-off in the range, perhaps at the 6200 or perhaps up here at the more like the 6300 type areas will be places I'd be looking for. Maybe not outright sell-orders, but maybe looking for some signs of weakness through a reversal candlestick pattern or indicate to sell-off. But that's a general state of affairs in the UK 100. Now obviously we've made a lower low here.  You know, we've kind of formed a lower low there after having formed a higher low and then connecting those two peaks is kind of bearish. You know, just going on the very simplistic concept that, you know, we're looking at trying to judge the trend here and it's lower lows, lower highs for a downtrend, which we're basically in according to this weekly chart, but those two lower lows and highs preceded higher highs and higher lows. So if we are in a downtrend, we're just beginning and, you know, I wouldn't be too surprised just to see us bring another higher high here just because the market is quite choppy. You know, if you've been to these webinars before, you've seen that we've broken this longer-term rising trend line and so that's, you know, that's the severity of what we're dealing with here. If we push below here, you know, that's basically confirmed that that's the retest and we're heading lower and I would suspect we head back down to these four 800-times levels. You know, but again, that's a longer-term thing. Don't base your short-term trades on that. Moving swiftly over to Europe, you know, the main, one of the most popular entities here, Germany. So the thing here where we had that sell-off on Friday, but you know, that was kind of the, here was the pre-fed move, here was the post-fed move and then bounce them back again today. But, you know, these two kind of bizarre looking lines are again sort of indicating where we're kind of diverging here because we're putting a lower low but the last peak that we put in was a higher high. So a higher high followed by a lower low basically telling us it's not really a trend. And so difficult to be directional and the higher probability trades are just at either end near the top, you know, near the tops for shorts, near the bottoms for buys as in basically a range-bound environment. Now that could all change bit like the FTSE where we're basically looking for areas that the downtrend could resume. Start with the daily. So here we broke down. You know, we were making decent, higher highs, higher lows. Broke down through this low. Basically came up retested, pushed a little bit through it, dropped down again down to this peak here. Recovered. Are we going to be able to sell off again and make a new low? Or, you know, are we just pushing back and again just range-bound shoppiness? So to me, this broken level followed by the peak on December 7th. Probably the two areas the market would look to sell off again were it going to a more sort of aggressive downtrend-time environment above there. You know, I would suspect that we're just heading somewhere back towards the top of the range. You know, anywhere leading into the top of the range and a little bit above it has some scope for the market to sell off. Hold on. Yeah, sort of chat message coming through there yet. Cheers for that, Ruth. Yes, currency market analysis on its way. Basically the idea is, sorry, I normally mention it at the start, is that we just cover the most popular indices, commodities and effects. So they're all coming up. Any particular pair that you wanted to look at, definitely let me know. So we're pretty much done with the indices there. If we are, you know, we may as well jump straight to FX even though there is a notable downdraft in oil prices today with Brent in his lowest since 2004. So we're talking about 11 year lows for the world benchmark oil price here. Major bear market in place. But we will jump to that in a second after looking at FX. There's a few economic releases of note this week, but you know, which actually, you know, if you are trading the news result or in and around it at least, can provide some opportunity around the Christmas trading in my opinion because yeah, the moves don't follow through, but you do get some moves because of the thinner liquidity. And so we do have the final GDP for the U.S. tomorrow and the U.K. Sorry, the U.K. one's later in the week, but the final U.S. tomorrow. We've got durable goods, housing data, the final U.K. GDP result is on Wednesday and on, you know, obviously it's all pretty much costed into, you know, into sort of up to Wednesday with we've got a half day for the U.K. stock market on Christmas Eve. And so yeah, it's pretty much, we're pretty much looking up to Wednesday here into a few notable results on Wednesday, consumer sentiment as well on Wednesday. So that's, durable goods probably being the big one and then also GDP tomorrow. This is the final one, so it's at least important. We're actually expecting a little bit of a slowdown, nothing too much to write home about, but still we'll raise slight issues about whether the Fed did the right thing by raising rates and, you know, we could see the dollar quite sensitive to that. We're still at that tipping point in the dollar index, pushing towards where, you know, we've got into around 99, just underneath that 100 level that's been a barrier for so long. You know, once you get above that 100, that's really a game changer, I think, and that's probably going to coordinate with Euro-USD heading down to parity. I'm not saying it's going to happen, but the confluence of those two events probably would happen together. Talking of the Euro, let's plug that chart. Not much in the way Euro is in data, to be honest. We have the German TPI data today. You know, that came in in line with the expectations, not quite such a slowdown, so almost in a way supporting the idea of the ECB not doing as much at their last meeting. So on that, on that, kind of what we're dealing with at the moment is just the 108 handle in Euro-USD, where that's where we pulled back to, after, you know, this was the ECB disappointment day, obviously, the 300 plus PIP rally, and we've pulled back since then. We haven't really managed to push much beyond the 110 figure, and, you know, that's basically causing us some trouble at the moment. We've pulled back to that same 108 handle. Below there, you know, you will probably go back down to the origins of the breakout down, you know, 10640 Tiber would be the next logical support for me on that, along with some FIBO levels, but still I tend to use the FIBO and actually use this as a confluence with other significant levels, and I tend to think that would probably be where we're heading, if not lower. Obviously, the sentiment on Euro's been bearish for so long, it's going to take more than just one move to get us up back into the top of the range and looking for a breakout through that 117 that we reached back in August. The ECB disappointed, but they did still add stimulus, so they're still much more dovish than the US, which obviously have just raised rates, albeit with the sort of dovish tone that suggested there aren't going to be that many rate hikes to follow. So, you know, kind of similarly here, we've made a higher high, but we've come back down to test the low, basically range band environment. You know, I'm assuming a bounce back towards the 110 handle. I don't imagine there's going to be any real justification for a big breakdown, other than people really get behind the dollar ball trade after the third rate hike. Maybe I'll skip straight to yen this time, because obviously the big news at the end of last week was the Bank of Japan surprising with additional stimulus, which spurred a big drop in the yen, only for people to realize that actually the stimulus package was more of a sort of readjustment of the current package, just them announcing they're going to do buying some Japanese ETFs, which aren't really that popular compared to just the typical equities in Japan. They're just sort of readjusting what they're buying according to the size of the market, I think.  But I think it's been a bit of a reaction either way, just because it was a surprise announcement. And I don't actually think this pattern maybe has as much meaning as it normally would. You know, that opinion will be cancelled if we drop through this rising trend line, which follows closely by these October lows. Down through there, you know, obviously this has had some meaning, and we dropped down first to I think 1.1870, but then perhaps down to the 1.16 level again. At the moment we're just in a choppy rising trend. We've kind of been capped by this declining trend line. You know, if you pull out to the weak each other, there's still a sort of general going assumption of more BOJ stimulus baked into this slash the Fed's going to be tightening. Should the U.S. economy really slow down, then maybe that's when we can see a break to the downside on this. But I think the default is this is a triangle consolidation before a break higher. And just back over to Sterling. You know, to label this different thing declining wedge, declining channel, but it's definitely one of the two. And, you know, quite clear cut support where we are at the moment. If you connect these, the July and the September lows matches pretty well with this December bounce. And here we are again, pushing into the bottom of this trend line. It's got to, you know, it's got to either provide enough support to break out the top of the wedge or it's got to give way at some point. We can't keep working, but for the moment, it seems to be at least causing some pause in the market. And I would say given this burst divergence in the RSI, probably, you know, higher possibilities within what is basically a general sort of range bound environment to the upside than there are to the downside after this quite steep sell-off here. Obviously, the general backdrop to this is that many had hoped that the Bank of England would be quick to follow the Fed with a rate hike. I still think that might actually be the case and I think language might shift quite dramatically next year from the Bank of England, but for the moment, that's pure speculation. And actually, what they've been saying is that just because the Fed raised rates doesn't mean we have to, wage growth is higher, but it's weak, and obviously all prices just capping inflation in general. There's no particular reason for the BOE at this point, according to them at least, to raise rates even by 25 basis points. So hence the weakness in the pound against the dollar. Different story against the euro, obviously, but even there we're seeing a slight narrowing of the difference between the monetary policy with the Bank of England being quite dovish, ECB disappointed, so that differential between the ECB and the BOE coming in a bit, meaning that that euro-pound sell-off is sort of stabilizing a bit. Now, jumping over back to commodities here, Brent has been the headline grabber of today because here, this is the short-term chart, sharp sell-off, and you can see that every bounce has really been sold into recently. OPEC meeting was here. We were basically kind of range-bound before the meeting, and then boom, a few days after the meeting, sell-off, and it's really been quite heavy decline since. Oh, sorry, what I meant to do was just show you that longer-term picture of, here we are, we're basically below these lows now. In Brent, keep in mind that this is obviously an adjusted futures price for the futures chart for the cash, but still that's what most people look at when looking back at historical charts for Brent. So the exact low was naturally here, but still everyone pretty much be looking at the same adjusted chart. So for technical reasons, it kind of is the low, even though whatever that says, 3667 wasn't quite if you catch my meaning. So significant, certainly, but obviously we've kind of been here before with this 2008 sell-off, so have we just seen here the end here and are we bouncing all the way back to 120? This feasible doesn't seem likely at this point. This was more sort of general scare in a financial crash. This has been what I think is more of a sort of defined oversupply specifically in the oil market. A lot of calls for $20 per barrel. You can see that is the support from back in 2001. So that's feasible. You know, we could definitely get there, but this drop-off is getting pretty overdone. My suspicion is maybe it doesn't get much past 30, but pretty much like catching the falling knife at this point. More just something to think about rather than to actually execute via your short-term trades. Very choppy in gold. You know, here just also indicating that general idea that we pushed out to a new higher high back in August, but then we since just dives leading into the Fed meeting and made the new low-low, and now we've kind of stabilized into this new range, which gold will basically do. You know, look at this movement. Back between March and May was in June even. We pretty much went into a kind of choppy sideways range off here. This was a bit of a more kind of rising range, but you can go back and go back in gold and see that we get these sharp moves followed by choppy consolidations. And obviously we're just in that consolidation phase at the moment. The best of this sell-off has been had. And I suspect even if we do get a little push down to 1.040, it's not going to be a major route, I suspect. It's going to be more of a low-low, fake out, push up, higher high, fake out before we actually determine whether we are going to push down to $1,000 per ounce in gold. Fundamentally, with the Fed raising rates, there's good reason to think that gold has further downside to come. You know, obviously no one wants an asset that doesn't yield anything when yields are rising. Similar theme with silver. Basically at the moment, I think, as I mentioned in the chart forum here, I think looking at a fake out through this declining trend line and maybe going to get pushed up to this 14, 60, 7-ish type level, 65. And then above there into this declining trend line, which you can see better on the weekly chart, has held pretty nicely. This is a declining wedge pattern as it stands. We get a push through there. Then there's obviously not really anymore. But this is actually a bullish pattern. And to some extent, we've been trying to push into severely new lows past 14, but it hasn't really worked ever since last year. We haven't, you know, clearly the market is quite bearish on commodities, but silver hasn't really done more than it did in 2014. It just, the bounces have been shallower, which is certainly a negative. But actually this technical pattern just shows some compression and a possible push up here. And we could move back up to the 200-day moving average and back up to the sort of 21, you know, 2021 level. Not there yet by any stretch. And we just had a bearish week a couple of weeks ago. Didn't get much of a follow through the following week. You know, that's kind of what we're dealing with here, is that kind of basically fake out. We push lower, close the week above, and then you can see on the daily chart here, starting to show some signs of wanting to push higher. So up through this high, should to me, carry us to this high, and I think probably up to the declining trend line before maybe 15 attracts a bit more of a sell-off again. So yeah, in summary, a bit of a shortened week really. Obviously we've got Christmas and no one wants to be trading on those days anyway. But for these three days, there's definitely a few things going on. All prices to bear in mind, obviously. Any extra news on this Spanish election and just these a couple of quite serious economic results. The durable goods gives us a good picture on the U.S. consumer heading into the big buying season of Christmas. And these GDP results, which gives us a better idea what happened in the third quarter, gives us some basis for which to compare the fourth quarter performance when those data are released in January. Okay, well, good luck for trading this week. And Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and talk to you again in January. Thanks very much. Jasper Lawler signing out.


All right, I'm here to talk to you today about some of the techniques that we use to examine vision in children. And you can imagine that there's a wide range of techniques given that some children are pre-verbal and can't read our eye chart while others have limited ability to read letters and numbers. And so we do tailor our vision testing to the age of the child and to the pathology that we're looking for. And so we're going to talk and highlight some of the most important things that we examine today in our lecture. So we'll start, though, with what's normal at birth. We like to see that the child reacts to light. And in fact, if the child's born preterm, we can see this response after about 30 weeks of gestational age. So this we consider to be a normal response at birth. We then like to see that the child can maintain eye contact with other humans, particularly lock onto faces, around six weeks of age to two months. We don't reliably measure visual fixation or following behavior until the child's about three months of age. And then we can start to measure a formal visual acuity in terms of reading numbers and letters on an eye chart around about two years of age, depending on the child. And finally, at five years of age, we like to reliably see that the child can read the SNELIN eye chart that we're most familiar with and that we test adult vision with. So let's now focus on the first two perimeters, our fairly self-explanatory blink to light and fixation on faces. But let's talk about how we assess for fixation and following behavior starting around three months of age. There are multiple ways we can do this. The first category would be an indirect assessment. We can talk to the parents and say historically, does your child look at things and follow them in space? We can also test directly whether the patient can fix and follow a target. We also have a method called the CSM method. We'll talk a little bit more about in a moment to kind of more quantify this behavior. And then finally, we have based on prism testing to really understand the fixation behavior of each eye individually. We also can test visual acuity more directly in this population using the phenomenon of optokinetic misdiagnosis with an OK-indra. We can use preferential looking tests that we'll talk a little bit more, teller visual acuity is an example of this. And then finally, we can use visually evoked potentials, which is an electrophysiology technique that measures the speed of transmission of a visual stimulus to the brain. So we'll start with our assessment of a fix and follow behavior. This is really the most commonly tested form of vision in this age range. So you can see this preverbal child pictured here. And these pictures are from the text pediatric ophthalmology. You can see on the slide, and it's written by my mentor Ed Wilson at Storm Eye Institute. And you can see him pictured here. He's testing the ability of this child to look at the toy he's presenting the child with. And the fixation target in children is really important. They're not going to look at something boring. They just won't, especially at this age. So you have to have toys and you have to engage them and interact with them. So you can see this child just naturally wants to look at a toy. We use that to move the toy around, see how the child's eyes move, to see if they move conjugately in all directions of gaze, and to see if the child can continue to maintain fixation on that toy throughout the testing. And so that's pictured in here, but then we don't want to forget that we also need to test each eye individually. And so you can see this in the second picture. We're covering up one eye and trying to understand whether the child maintains fixation on the target that we're testing. So that's a very important perimeter in our fix and follow modality. And we'll move on now to the central study maintained, which is historically a very classic way of representing preverbal child's vision. So C stands for central and it refers to the corneal light reflex. And it also importantly is only referring to fixation under monocular conditions. So when one eye is covered, the eye that's looking at your target is the corneal light reflex well centered. The S stands for steadiness of fixation. Again, this is under monocular conditions. And so if you're holding the fixation target stationary or slowly moving the target, does the child's eye fixation remain steady and slowly follow the target as well? You could imagine this would not be true. For example, in a child with nystagmus, they would be unsteady. But a child that can look and follow with each eye individually in a steady fashion would have a normal perimeter for this S. And then M is unique because it's tested under binocular conditions unlike C and S. And this is the ability to maintain fixation with both eyes well aligned when both eyes are fixing on the target. And why do we do this? Because we're not really quantifying vision in a way that we classically think about for adults on an eye chart. We don't have numbers that tell us, oh, their vision is 2050. Well we do this because it's a very important perimeter for normal visual development. And so the thing that we're most interested in for these kids is that the eyes are equally performing on our visual testing that there's not a preference of one eye over the other eye. And the reason being that as you can see here, if a growing child's eye does not provide a clear focused image to the developing brain, that can result in permanent irreversible vision loss that extends into adulthood and can't be treated after that age. And so when we're testing the use of each eye individually, we are asking ourselves, does this child use each eye equally and therefore do they have normal visual development? So it's a very important perimeter, but it's a little bit different way to think about it than we do in adults. So thinking about this more, another way we can sort this out, because every child's different. So sometimes in one child, you can more easily test in one way and then in another child, you might use a slightly different technique to get the information you need. So this is a little bit different technique that you can use to decide if there's a preferred eye. And so this child, you can see when you cover one eye, the child is unhappy. When you cover the other eye, the child doesn't really care. And so that tells you that the child may have a preference for, in this case, it would be the left eye, the eye that the child is unhappy when you cover. Another way to sort this out is to essentially give the child double vision, as you can see pictured in the lower image. And again, this is from Dr. Wilson's book. But this only works in a child who has straight eyes. So if a child has under binocular conditions where both eyes open, if the eyes are not straight, then the eye looking straight ahead and fixing on the target is the dominant eye. That can alternate, or it can be the same all the time, and that's an important thing to assess. But it's trickier when the eyes are straight.   Usually we use about a 20 prism diopter unit so that the images are sufficiently separated in space that the child can see the two separate images, but they're not too far away that the child wouldn't notice that there are two images. So that's why we use the 20 prism diopter unit. And you can see we put it base down over each eye. And what we want to see here is that the child will use each eye to look at the image that you're presenting.  And the fixation target is going to be double. And then you ask, well, in this situation, it looks like the child is looking up and the base down prism is over this right eye. The upper image is being produced over the right eye. And so in this case, the child's using the right eye. But if you go to this image, the second image, the base down prism is now over the left eye. So if the child were using the left eye, similarly, he would be looking at the upper image. But you can see he's not. He's looking straight ahead at the lower image. And that means that the child still is using the right eye. So the child prefers the right eye. And therefore, we have to investigate why the child's not using the left eye. That's how you use this test. So when we talk about approximation of actual visual acuity, which is appropriate in some circumstances, for example, a child that comes in and isn't tracking and the parents are worried the child can't see, one thing you can do is use an OKN drum as pictured here. And if the child tracks the OKN drum, we say that they have a range of about 2200 to 2400 vision reliably if they're tracking the OKN drum as you rotate it. And you can see here that as the child gets older, we can actually estimate that they are having improved vision as they can track the OKN drum. So this can be very helpful. We also can use the preferential looking test as we mentioned earlier. And this is based on the principle that infants demonstrate a greater tendency to fix on a pattern stimulus rather than a homogeneous field. And so we have some cards called teller cards that have a grading appearance on them. And some of the grading is more coarse, while others is more, other cards have more fine grading and the more fine grading appears more like a homogeneous field. So essentially you want to see which pattern the child will preferentially look at. And this is done as you can see pictured with both eyes open. The examiner is behind the pictures being presented to the child because you don't want anything distracting the child's gaze. And so the examiner is actually looking through a little peephole that's designed in the test itself to determine which pattern stimulus the child will look at. And as the child will look at a more fine pattern stimulus, you can approximate that they're having improved vision with that. And so you can see here that normal vision is approximately 20, 30 by age two when testing with this modality. All right, so we're moving on to children who are around age two, two to four or five years old who are now becoming more verbal. They don't have a good command potentially of letters and numbers. So we can't just ask them to read this Nell and I chart, but we can ask them to read certain I charts. And so some of these are, for example, Allen picture charts. This does often overestimate a child's visual acuity and per our BCSC series, the normal age range within an age range of two to five years, the normal visual acuity with this particular type of testing can range from 2020 to 2040. There are other testing methods that I prefer in this age range called the HOTV or LEA testing. There are two separate modalities pictured here, HOTV obviously here, LEA testing here, but the unique thing about these images is that they're palindrome. So they're the exact same image on the right and left and in this age range of two to five years, children do, it is a normal developmental milestone that they could become confused at working out right and left aspects of an image. And so this just takes that out of the equation completely. And therefore, I think it's a little bit more reliable way to test vision in this age range. And the thing, another thing I like about it, you can obviously use cards for near vision and you can test each eye individually, which is really important. You can start doing that at this age, but then it with distance vision, you can also use this as a matching technique so you can give them the near card, but also present them with one of the images at a distance and ask them to match what it is, even if they're shy or they don't feel comfortable verbalizing what they see. So there are different ways this can be done, but I think overall these are very effective ways to start to assign a traditional measure of visual acuity to children within the age range. And using these testing methods, similarly to the Allen cards, we would expect if a child had normal vision, they would measure about 20-20 to 20-40 with distance vision testing. Alright, and then finally, if you have concern that the child has a preferred eye that might be termed amblyopia and we'll discuss that definition in a little bit more detail, with these modalities as opposed to the Allen testing, you can use a crowding bar phenomenon which more accurately will represent the true visual acuity of a potentially weaker eye. So that's another reason why that testing is helpful. So finally, you're all familiar with Snellen eye chart testing, we can start to use this depending on the child at about five years of age. If the child can read the Snellen acuity prior to that, then by all means test it. Usually that's not reliably seen until about five. And we should present the child with letters in a line for most accurate vision testing. Single letters can overestimate the child's vision. We also certainly want to be testing one eye at a time at this age. And you have to make sure that if you have concerns that one eye has better vision than the other, a child will cheat, not because they're trying to deceive you, they're just trying to perform well and make you happy. And so you want to be vigilant of that and really make sure you're including each eye as you're testing monocular vision. And we do like to see vision in the range of 20, 20 to 20, 30 in this age range to be considered normal. So what if vision is abnormal by one of these testing modalities, what are you thinking about? Well, there's a wide differential diagnosis, as I'm sure you're aware, but some of the basic categories you could think about would be structural developmental abnormalities like a cataract, a coloboma, optic nerve, hypoplasia, trauma to the eye, infection in the eye, systemic disease. Another thing could be amblyopia, cortical visual impairment, delayed visual maturation, which is a diagnosis of exclusion. It certainly is an entity that we see where children just develop their ability for vision at a slower pace than others similar to other developmental delays, but you only make this diagnosis after you've ruled out every organic cause of vision loss. And always when you're starting to think that vision is abnormal, take into context your other interactions with the child outside of formal testing. So if the child's lethargic or inattentive, you're probably not getting an accurate visual assessment. If the child's playing a Game Boy or with other toys or their friends in the waiting area, but then they come into your exam room and can't read anything on the eye chart, take that into account as well and maybe just retest them at a different time. But I think the one thing we want to highlight in this particular lecture today is amblyopia as a form of vision loss. And this is in general caused by an abnormal visual experience early in life, two to four percent of children in the US at least will experience this form of vision loss. And it's responsible for more poor vision in children than all other causes of poor vision combined. And further, it's the leading cause of monocular poor vision in the working age adult population. And this is important because it's actually a preventable form of blindness. And so let's talk about how we can detect it and prevent it and or treat it if it's already developed. So you can see here that it's the diagnosis of amblyopia is when a patient is found to have a condition known to increase the risk of amblyopia or an amblyopia risk factor. And when you also see reduced visual acuity that cannot be explained entirely on the basis of an organic condition. And so you can see here in the classification scheme listed below, these are also the risk factors for amblyopia. So anisometropia where you have a difference in the refraction between the two eyes. You can also have bilateral amyotropic amblyopia where you have a high refractive error either myopia or hyperopia that will account for bilateral amblyopia. You can have a strabismic amblyopia where the misaligned eye is usually the eye with the weaker vision where you can have a deprivation amblyopia owing to corneal scar, cataract or some blockage of visual input to the back of the eye. So when we are diagnosing amblyopia, again, characteristics of vision alone cannot be used in and of itself to reliably differentiate amblyopia from other forms of vision loss. You have to use other techniques and other pieces of information. As we mentioned earlier, the crowding phenomenon can be helpful in doing this. If a child's visual acuity decreases, when crowding bars are placed around the image you're asking them to read, either the HOTV, the LIA images or the SNELL acuity chart. If their vision decreases with the crowding bars, that's suggestive of amblyopia. But it is not uniformly seen, so you can't, if they don't have that present, you can't absolutely say they don't have amblyopia. APDs or afferent pupillary defect can occur in severe forms of amblyopia, but it's not common in the more mild forms. And interestingly, amblyopia can coexist with actual organic disease, and so that makes it kind of difficult. For example, if a child has optic nerve hypoplasia, there may be visual potential in that eye. It won't be equal to an unaffected eye, but they can get amblyopia on top of their compromised vision from just the structural abnormality. And so these are things you kind of have to think about when following a child with an organic vision loss. And then you may need to do multiple assessments with a variety of testing to really sort out, particularly in a preverbal child. If they have an eye preference, if they're not using one eye or one eye is weaker at participating in your testing, sometimes you just need to do that on multiple occasions to really sort out what's going on. But the general principles of testing include looking at the fixation behavior in a preverbal child, as we've talked about, the different techniques for doing that. And then in a verbal child who can read the eye chart, looking at linear testing, utilizing the crowding bar phenomenon. Those are kind of the basic testing modalities we start with when we're thinking about amblyopia. And then when we think about the levels of amblyopia, essentially it's just mild, moderate, and severe. We don't have anything fancier to really talk about the levels. But you can see that there are criteria listed in the slide for the cutoffs for these. And then interestingly, we often see, not always, but often we'll see that refractive amblyopia is a more milder form. Strobismic amblyopia is often a more moderate form. And then deprivation amblyopia is often a more severe form. The reason for this is not quite clear. But, and it doesn't always follow this pattern. But in general, that's what we see. So when we treat amblyopia, there are a number of different treatments. But the first thing we think about is how can we remove the risk factor? So do they need glasses? Do they need eye alignment? Do they need cataract surgery? How is it possible to remove the risk factor that is causing the amblyopia in the first place? That's where we start. And then I always like to start with glasses if they're indicated. I always start with glasses if they're indicated in a child. Due to the fact that studies have shown children with amblyopia can have improvement of up to three lines of vision on the eye chart with glasses alone. And so if glasses alone, for example, for mild amblyopia, will entirely resolve the condition and the child wouldn't need more extensive therapy, it would be easier for all involved. And you would have resolved the amblyopia. So that's where I start. Now glasses are sometimes difficult to know when to prescribe, particularly in preverbal children. And we don't have any concrete guidelines or absolute cutoffs for prescribing glasses. If we see amblyopia, then we do prescribe if there's a refractive error. But there are kids that are at risk for amblyopia potentially due to their refractive error. But they don't manifest signs of amblyopia yet on the testing modalities we've talked about. So what do we do with those kids? Well, Sean, Donahue, and others, as you can see here, have done work to try and answer this question. And again, they're guidelines for prescribing. They're not absolute cutoffs. And I always consider these in connection with the exam that I'm getting from the child and how they're using their eyes. So it's one more piece of information you can use to assess the visual development of the child, the risk for amblyopia, and understand if they need an intervention and how to follow them. It's just one of the pieces in your toolbox. But you can see here that we won't go through all of them, but that at different ages, we would consider refraction over a certain amount to be an amblyopia risk factor. And so this is kind of a good thing to have in your office to refer to when you see these kids. So moving on to some of the more classic treatments for amblyopia, once it's been determined that the child has amblyopia, potentially the child's in glasses, but the amblyopia hasn't resolved, what do you do? Well, we have patching therapy, we have atropine penalization, we have optical occlusion. As you can see here, but the theme for all of these is that we're occluding the stronger eye so that the child uses the amblyopic or weaker eye. Amblyopia is fundamentally a decreased communication between the weaker eye and the brain because that eye's been disadvantaged because of strabismus, because of a cataract, because of a higher refractive error. That eye's disadvantaged, the developing brain doesn't want to tolerate a double image or a blurry image from one eye. So a developing brain can say, well, I'm just not gonna use this eye because I don't wanna tolerate this abnormal visual experience. And so we need to get the brain using that eye again. The way we do that is essentially to force it to use only that eye for a period of time. And so all of these modalities are based on that principle. The treatment overall is easier the younger the patient is as the patient becomes older because this is really brain training. The brain is developing and maturing and with that comes less ability to influence the brain's development. Just like in an adult the brain is fairly set. We can't do a lot to influence or change the brain's patterns. And so as a child gets older, the same becomes true. So traditionally we think that the age of visual maturity is about age eight to 10. So these therapies are much more effective earlier prior to that age. And as can be seen here, we've done a lot of testing on which modalities are best. And because I mentioned several to you all based on the same principle. And I think the take home is that overall studies have shown that two hours of patching a day as a starting point is equivalent to if you kind of extrapolate from all the studies is equivalent to, for example, starting with weakened atropine. A note is that atropine works by cycle-pleaging the eye that you've put it in, so the dominant eye. And that paralyzes accommodation, so it works most at near and it's gonna be most effective for that reason in hyperopes. It's relatively less effective. You could still try it in a myope, but just based on the principle by which it's working, it's gonna be less effective. So with that caveat in mind, overall we've done with the pediatric eye disease investigation group, PDIG has done quite a number of studies to really sort out what the best treatment is in terms of these occlusion therapies. And so the bottom line is we start with two hours of patching the dominant eye a day or weakened atropine in hyperopes. And that atropine is most effective if you administer it at night because it does two things. It dilates the pupil, but it also cycle-pleages. We don't really care about pupillary dilation. That's not what we need to achieve our goal. We need the cycle-plegia. And the cycle-plegia takes about 12 hours to get to full effect. And so if you put the drop in at night while the child sleeps, the cycle-plegia is taking effect and then will be in effect for the full day, the next day, and therefore that's the most effective way to administer that drop. The other important thing to note about the studies that PDIG has done is that children as highlighted here who are older than the traditional age of visual maturity into their teen years who have not patched before because it wasn't known that they had amblyopia. So they have no history of patching or atropine or any treatment. You can start the treatment at those later years and see benefit, particularly in the group that has never had patching or treatment in the past. So that's another important take home from these studies that PDIG has done. But I think that overall amblyopia treatment is a dynamic process. Every family and every child is different. And so you can see from the flow diagram here, which I think really well is a good exemplification of kind of the thought process we use in clinic. We might start with two hours of patching or weekend atropine, but then we have to assess how the child's responded if we need to increase our therapy, if their amblyopia has resolved, if they're non-compliant with therapy and that's why it's not working, maybe changing treatment modalities to fit the nature of the child's cooperation, the family's willingness to do the therapy, et cetera. And so it's not the same treatment for everyone and it's kind of a constant reevaluation depending on the things that you're measuring in clinic as far as how much improvement you're seeing, but also how compliant the patient and family can be with your treatment. And then these take home pearls I really liked from Dr. Wilson's book. I'll let you read those. They really are discussing the things we've already talked about, but his book has a full chapter on this topic of amblyopia and is very helpful in discussing our current knowledge, our current treatment modalities and can be of added benefit if you wanted something to read.


Good afternoon all. Cloud and cloud native identity and access management challenges and opportunities. Enterprise IT paradigms are constantly evolving. Multi-cloud, hybrid environments, container platforms, microservices, architectures and APIs for partners and subsidiaries. This is becoming the new norm. At the same time, the threat landscape is ever-evolving. Cloud misconfigurations and all the breaches that we've had pose more and more challenges for enterprises and hence they have to move towards zero trust architecture. Yet identity and access management is a space where there are a number of challenges enterprises are facing. Basically because of the sheer scale, dynamic and distributed nature of cloud and cloud native technologies. So in this panel discussion, we will discuss some of those challenges and opportunities available to enterprises. So without further ado, let me introduce this panel to you. My name is Radna Chital. I work for TIA and I'm the coach here for CNCF tax security. Nathan, you want to go ahead and introduce yourself? Sure. Nathan, you're coughing. I'm a chief strategy officer of Cloud Entity focused on bringing identity and access management to the cloud native world. Thank you. Greg? Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Greg. I'm Greg Blana. I have been doing IAM for gosh, at least 20 years with the Boeing company independently here recently and have recently accepted a position with Costco. Congratulations. Thank you. And Craig Thomas, president of C2 Labs. We serve as a digital transformation partner for our customers, largely focused on DevOps, cloud native and full stack development. Thank you, Greg. So my first question, I'll start with you, Greg. What do you think are the biggest challenges for traditional enterprises, especially the regulated enterprises in the space of identity and access management? Thanks. So what we've seen working with various customers in these areas, primarily in the highly regulated spaces are, there's identities all over the place. They've got a lot of homegrown solutions, different directory services, whether it be SAP, Oracle, Active Directory, other systems, various networks and shared no shared identities across those networks. And it seems like a million passwords still largely focused on the user rather than processes and services and rely on the user in this password that continues to be social engineer continues to be least common denominator for all these disparate systems. And then the big one today is this lack of modern authentication, right? So as we are developing new modern technologies and modern apps, there's not that modern authentication mechanism in a lot of these homegrown solutions that they had to invent, they won't die or they can't die. And then these batch processes, instead of real-time APIs across these various systems. So you often get this, we made a change, wait until tomorrow and try it again or wait until that runs at the end of the week versus real-time go and get logged in or get the additional permissions that they need. And then we've got this lack of skills in IAM, especially as the technology ever changes this skill gap that we see. And dealing with certificates today, still very manual, you know, separate monitoring if they're good. We continue to see even in Microsoft and others, these certificates that expire and cause problems across the board. And now with regulations and other things, HSPD 12, PIV cards, smart cards, tokens, Yubiquis, adaptive auth, I guess it's just kind of all over the board. And organizations continue to struggle with that, both from an end user perspective as well as from kind of an IT administration perspective. Also, IAM is not a core part of the project planning, right? And so we have, cyber has gotten better at being baked in and network architecture baked in. But having this IAM as part of this project planning and this IAM board of, hey, you're going to bring on a new project or a new system, it has to support this identity structure. Black of modern enforcement points as we look across containers and other things, you know, how do we enforce identities? How do we, you know, enforce these policies at different levels rather than just this edge case of firewalls and, you know, network ACLs. And then just finally the frustration of users by of using this, you know, lack of funding priority of the business and IT of fixing the identity issues to be able to support kind of the next generation of IT architectures and projects. Thank you, Craig. So, Nathan, you've been doing identity for a couple of decades now. Would you shed some light on how to mesh container platform identity and access management and enterprise and cloud IAM provided by the providers in a multi-cloud environment? Absolutely. You know, what we've really seen over the last, you know, four or five years with the advent of distributed services, microservices, Kubernetes, right, is the need for a workload identity. And that's really where Spiffy arises, you know, generating that common identity framework, you know, for everyone. It's really what the definition of Spiffy is, right? And, you know, and the beauty of that is now we have what we think of as service identity in the past. It's been done by things like, you know, API keys or by, you know, shared X509 certificates, things that are obviously just as bad as sharing passwords in the old user identity context. And so now we're taking that and we're expanding it outward, right? We're thinking how can we federate across, you know, across Kubernetes clusters, across service meshes, across different parties, and be able to maintain that unique identity for the workloads and then cross-reference that into very much a zero trust algorithm, right? Making sure that you can identify and authenticate the workload to identifying and authenticating the service or the API to identifying and authenticating the actual user, right? And being able to corroborate all three of those and then build a zero trust authorization, right? To interlay and control how data is flowing in between those three disparate entities, right? Being able to authenticate them strongly, being able to pass that authentication on, and then being able to authorize exactly what is being passed down to them. And that's really what we're seeing kind of emerge, particularly in that hybrid and multi-cloud world is. We've got developers building the net new, and we've got kind of a lot of the legacy, more traditional items, you know, that might still be on-prem or at least a bit, or maybe have been re-platformed into your cloud. But how do you start to interconnect those, right? How do you securely connect services and APIs from your monoliths out to your next generation, you know, functions? And Spiffy, coupled with OAuth and Opa, began to solve that problem in a very elegant manner. Thank you very much. So I have a follow-up question. But still, the traditional identity and access management on-premise for enterprises and this disparate identities and management systems, this still caused a lot of integration issues. So do you have any ideas as to how we'll mess them together? Yeah. So what we've seen in 2012, 2013, right, as we saw the advent of OAuth and OIDC. And what that was designed to do is separate apart your user authentication away from your service identity and your service authorization, right? Literally, OAuth is designed for delegated authorization. And so by decoupling those, right, now you're able to continue to use your existing IDPs, use a standard-based way of federating them, whether that's OIDC or whether it's something like SAML, now aggregate all of that as identity context, right? And then you start sharing that identity context into what you can almost think of as your service IDP, which is a combination of OAuth client IDs, as well as obviously Spiffy identifiers, being able to correlate those. And now you've got a very secure way of authenticating your user. And that could be MFA, it could be adaptable authentication, it could be even legacy user ID password, and carrying that over into your service identity. So it's now also have their own strong authentications, again, using things like OAuth client identities or using Spiffy. Thank you, Nathan. Well, my next question, Greg, I want to talk to you a little bit about claims of error and externalizing, claims of error applications and externalizing access decisions out of the application. This has been a concept that has been discussed in the industry quite a bit, but I haven't seen a whole lot of progress made in this space. So do you want to shed some light on this, please? Yeah, I don't know if I'd call it a pet peeve, but it's definitely an annoyance of mine. I find it frustrating. You know, we look at the OAuth top 10, either for API or for web applications, and we see access control as a major issue. It's gaining in prominence. I think I just saw a very recent release of OAuth top 10 for web authentication or web applications and authentication, broken authentication went to the top. So it's definitely a problem. I also think that as we see, I'm an optimist, I think we're going to see gains in our ability to protect ourselves with ZTA technologies, that sort of thing. It's going to become more and more enticing to go for that low hanging fruit. We're going to go to the front door and knock on it and say, hey, can I have your gold and your jewels? And if we get the answer, yes. Great. That's a great attack. So this is definitely a problem. It's definitely going to continue to be worse and worse until we do something about it. In this sort of scenario, maybe I would look at the industry and say, okay, I'd like to point my fingers at the standards bodies. They're not giving us answers. But I think we all here are aware that NIST has been giving us answers for getting close to 20 years now. And they've been evolving those answers quite well as security technologies evolve. And so I can't really blame the lack of answers. I could look at vendors and say they're not giving us the solutions. They are. We had our first go around with the exact role. I think there were concerns there about performance, et cetera. But as we move into cloud native, the opportunities to sidecar some of these capabilities, I think eliminates that concern. And so what's the problem? Why are we still moving rapidly towards a dark picture around access control? We just need to have, I think enterprises step up and adopt this as a very important part of their security stance. We need to be able to go out and do a quick scan on the internet or talk to someone who maybe just got out of school and not get three or four or five answers as to how we should be stepping up our access control scenario. We should all be speaking from the same playbook. And I think until that happens, we're going to continue to see this problem get worse. But at the same time, externalizing access from applications in traditional applications is a hard problem. It requires investments, it requires development work. Greenfield applications, I agree that it's easier to implement. But why have we not seen a migration in this direction? And Nathan, could you shed some light on this as to whether it is being adopted? I haven't seen much success in this. Yeah, well, so there's a couple things there, right? So it's a multi-part question. So it is being adopted by forward-looking organizations, but it's few and far between to your point. Now, I think what's happening is we've been kind of caught in between a rock and a hard place or a legacy equipment and what our developers are building today. And there hasn't been a good bridge built, right? So if I go and talk to a traditional IAM person, right, he's still worried about how do I add IAG to SAP, right? Trying to think of kind of an older application, right? How am I going to do role management? All of these things. And those are defined and known problems that have existed for last decade and a half.  And that's why we see developments slowed down so often by security because there hasn't been a good model built for how to pull kind of these two very disparate worlds together. It's not not I can replatform in the cloud. It's literally, I have to rethink how I'm going to address identity, user identity, start incorporating service identity, and build in a robust externalized authorization to connect what those different pieces look like. And it's only been in the last couple of years that we've started to see this start to emerge in the industry. There's been some standards out there, you know, OIDC, OPA, well, OPA is not a standard, but CNC, I think you better project, right? And Spiffy that can be used to interconnect kind of these three big, or these different disparate pillars. However, right? It's the technology is not quite there yet. And we need much more automation. I mean, we're working with customers now that you have tens of thousands of containers. And each of those containers ends up having its own unique identity, right? That also needs to be able to corroborate and authenticate the user identity or the requester identity or the service identity is coming in from other SaaS or other partners, right? So it builds a fairly complex landscape in exactly what's transpiring. And you've got to use authorization kind of at this governing body, right? That's ensuring that only the right data is going to the right services after then accordingly authenticated. I don't know if you could pop up that diagram, but I can kind of walk through how they all fit together. Probably a good time for it. Sounds good. I will share. So real quick, you know, we've got three major, you know, standards ask, or at least open source CNCF protocols that are interoperating here, right? We've got Spiffy, we've got OAuth2 combined with OIDC, and we've got Rego policies or Opal policies. And as we see these net new services pop up, right? The services first have to get their own identity.  They'll get this SFID that is a very strong concept and a very short-lived certificate that provides the actual workload, the carbon, essentially, its own identity. Now, to communicate, right, and to start authorizing, can Service A talk to Service B or can a requester actually get data from this service, right? A couple other things need to happen. One, we've got this OIDC framework, and we've got this OAuth framework that need to be interspersed, right? So OIDC, that's how the user's going to authenticate. We'll just say the user's a requester in this instance. So I go and I authenticate my user, I get an OIDC token, I take my SFID token coming from my Spiffy identifier from the service. Now, I use that and correlate that SFID token with an OAuth client identity, because more often than not, I'm actually going to speak over an API. So once I do that, now I have a correlated Spiffy identifier, SFID certificate, and I have an OAuth client ID that my service now has access to. So as a user, I can take another OAuth client that's on my device or make an API call with it, that then gets passed through to that service, they can mutually authenticate each other, strong authentication, and I can start applying authorization policies. Now, authorization also looks very different than it did a few years ago. It used to be we're only concerned about what's happening inside of our network, right? We pretended we had this great strong perimeter, and everything inside the perimeter was okay. Now as I moved to distributed services, that perimeter actually moves right to the edge of the API or the edge of the service itself. So authorization needs to be not just can service A talk to service B, and not just what can user X do within that service, or what does that service look like to that user, but also with privacy consent, it has to look at what can this service know about the user, and what can that service share about the user. So we've gotten a much richer set of requirements, as well as a much richer set of tools that when they all work together, right, can accomplish this in a very automated, seamless manner, and then wrap a rich layer of governance around it. However, like if you're just on day one, you got to start somewhere, and you have to say, I'm going to start with giving my workloads identity. Hence, let's I'm going to start using spiffy and using things that are out of the box, you know, within things like Istio. And then I'm going to carry that forward and tie it together with my OAuth. And then I carry that forward and tie it together with my existing IDPs and use an IDC. And then I'm going to start protecting that data based upon authorization policies that are aware of the context of the service, meaning, is it passive financial data? Is it regulated data? Is it privacy data? And then perform authorization policies right on top. So it all has to work together in a very cohesive manner. And we do now have the tools, right, available to us to start building these options. However, we have not, most companies have not actually started that path, you know, in a rich manner. We'll do it for a project or two, but they certainly haven't done it, you know, at a cloud center of excellence or an API architecture point of view. Thank you, Nathan. So Craig, I have a follow up question for you. So this is a great architecture, but how does Istio fit into this, right? And what value does Istio provide in addition to provide greater zero trust model? Is that to Greg or Craig? I'm sorry. Craig. Oh, yes. So, no, I appreciate it. And I think we dove in really well here and it kind of goes into how do you deal with, you know, zero trusts across containers and other things, right? How does, how does Istio fit in? Like Istio becomes your control point, right?  So taking, taking these various pieces, um, and then enforcing that policy, um, you know, now the big thing is how do you then, the governance around that, right? That, that the same as when we're managing firewalls and everything, right? Because now identity has become the new firewall, right? We've heard and so managing, you know, Istio policies and others in much the similar ways you're managing firewall policies, making sure that you're going through the approval process and you're understanding what's opened, um, you know, up with those new policies and rules. Yeah, my concern would be, um, the dynamic nature and the volume of transactions, right? And whether Istio is able to, um, keep the scale up, right? For all the dynamic interactions that services need to have or predefined policies that you can set the Istio mesh with and then, you know, what transactions are going to communicate through those channels and vests, you can use side cut proxies. Does that make sense? Yeah, and I agree that, uh, you know, I can't speak to the level of robustness of that, but certainly have those same concerns as we scale it out. And maybe Nathan has a little more experience or Greg, in scaling that out versus kind of like you were talking about, Nathan, just kind of a POC, you're a small, small scale deployment. Yeah, I'm just curious, Greg or Nathan, do you have any opinion on that, that you'd like to share? Well, yeah, yeah, so it's definitely scaling out and, and scaling out in very big ways, meaning tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of transactions per second as well as tens of thousands of containers, right? And so what's happening, right, is obviously all that's not in a singular Istio cluster or in a singular Istio service, a single Kubernetes cluster, a singular Istio service mesh, right? So you have to start federating, which is part of the, the more recent SVID work, I'm sorry, spiffy work, federating in between your different, you know, Kubernetes clusters or Istio service meshes, right, to start to share that data. However, by, by up-leveling it kind of one notch and saying, okay, it's going to be API communication, or at least, let's start identifying it with API communication and tie in OAuth, right? We've seen OAuth scale massively already, and being able to start to incorporate that as the defining body for delegated authorization, you know, can the services talk to each other, what data can the services see, as well as now with the latest grant spec within OAuth, you're able to start tying together rich policy with how data is being released and how services are communicating. So we have the frameworks there. We have seen it scale up to millions of services, even with, you know, even more users accessing it. However, now it needs to start moving into how can it be, you know, better product ties and how can it move into production faster and be adopted faster by more companies, which is to your point. Thank you very much. I think we are at time. We have to leave some time for questions and answers too. I want to thank you all for this discussion today. Thank you all. Have a good day. Thank you. Thank you.