What is this

This is not a whitepaper, you can relax, we are not selling you a token. This is not an academic document, we are not publishing our latest research findings nor the results of an exciting experiment. This is not a sales pitch, there's nothing to buy.

This is a manifesto, a declaration of intent, based on our analysis of the current state of computing, blockchain, cryptography, and information security and where these communities are today. Its goal is to showcase the amazing things that have been invented and built by geniuses in recent years, then try to make sense of it all, and outline a common vision for the future of computing.

What you'll learn

These machines, designed solely to compute quickly and accurately are now required to do it securely, reliably, privately, and with constant connectivity. As a result, we have become accustomed to regularly seeing millions of individuals suffer data breaches, or businesses shut down by ransomware. Worst, keeping systems secure is getting more and more complex everyday as new security risks are identified, so the problem is only going to get bigger unless we do something.

In this article, I will argue that recent advancements in computer science, as well as society’s increased acceptance of technology create an opportunity to rethink our computing paradigm and address some of its flaws. We will study how a number of recent innovations demonstrate that it has become possible to address these problems. Finally, I will share my vision of what this future of computing is, and the steps necessary to get there.

Why I talk about it

I started work back in 2007, doing network security for an internet service provider. I then spent 10 years in enterprise information technology and was the chief information officer for a multinational company in the construction industry. My job there was to lead IT to build and run all facets of an information system for a modern business.

What more could we do

Millions of people have realized that computers are broken. Many of them are younger people, who never lived without computing, and maybe because of that they can see better than others not only computing’s limitations but more importantly its potential. So, what is this vision of a world where computing is secure? The short version is that we could trust computers with much more. If we go back to the fundamental properties of secure systems, we can have a sense of what we’re missing today.

If computers enabled ubiquitous:

• Integrity, records couldn’t be modified, and we would know that an email forwarded to us wasn’t altered in the process.

• Confidentiality, files couldn’t simply be shared or copied, and factory owners wouldn’t take risks when subcontracting work.

• Authenticity, we could verify digital claims of authorship, and we wouldn’t need to print, sign, and send paper documents.

• Possession, assets would remain in control of their owner, and banks couldn’t unintentionally prevent us from moving it.

• Utility, then files wouldn’t suddenly become useless when the software initially used to read and edit them stops to exist.

How would this impact you

Using secure computers will be a vastly different experience from using computers of today. We all know too well that every time we open our laptop or smartphone, there is no guarantee that our data will still be there, or that our device will even function correctly. The anxiety that this creates, with so much of our lives depending on these machines, has a profound effect on everyone. What if instead, you had an absolute certainty that your applications would ‘just work’, and that your data was ‘just there’?

Informing ourselves would be vastly different too. Once every quote, every recording, every video can be securely attributed to its author, why would you continue to read news built by copying and editing information found elsewhere? Once people can anonymously prove their credentials and knowledge of a topic, who wouldn’t read the comments they leave on news articles? Imagine being able to see the statement of a government’s health minister debunked in the comments section by thousands of people that you know are relevant members of the health administration, while no one is revealing their identities.

Where does this take us

The computing of tomorrow will give us security. Secure computing is not personal, it is an abstraction built upon traditional computers that continue to provide the raw horsepower. Secure computers are virtual machines, composed of thousands of interconnected nodes that all agree on a security policy, and economic incentives to enforce it, a.k.a. blockchains. Tomorrow, secure computing will be enabled by millions of blockchains, and trillions of tokens. There are large, complex, and largely unsolved computer science and engineering challenges ahead of us that will keep us busy for decades.

Technological revolutions have abstracted, and automated, the things we used to do before they came. We abstracted and automated the making of goods during the industrial revolution. Then, the digital revolution abstracted and automated the delivery of services. The current revolution is abstracting and automating the creation and operation of entities that produce goods and services. And instead of raising funds, these new entities can issue and distribute their own currencies, which become integral parts of their economic models.

Practically

We need to be humble

Blockchain, cryptography, cryptosystems, all these technologies are attracting a lot of attention and interest as people have come to realize that there is something very important going on. And while what we’re all building is important, it is not yet very impactful. Almost no-one uses a blockchain daily today. Even the most popular services have a limited feature set. The ecosystem overall offers a poor user experience. We need to acknowledge these issues first if we want to address them.

Gather the building blocks

While we’ve got a long way ahead of us, we also have an amazing arsenal of tools built by the blockchain, cryptography, and computer science communities. If we go back to the fundamental security properties that we require, we can pretty much map them one to one to some of the recent information technology innovations.

• Utility, we have created a machine which allows us to store and retrieve information anytime, anywhere using common standards, the internet. The information itself is increasingly standardized as well, and we have built ways to decouple the schema of information from its computer representation.

While individually, these security properties can be guaranteed, there is no consensus today on 1) how to enable all the properties of secure computers at the same time, and 2) the direction to take so that the secure computing capacity grows with demand for it. I believe that these two problems are the fundamental problems that we need to focus on right now, if we want secure computing to succeed.

And put them together

Then introduces the following questions: What are the interfaces between these layers? What is the order of the different layers? I would like to propose the following model for discussion with the community.

And since the overall goal of this exercise is to enable the use of secure software on secure computers, there are computing properties that are required in addition to the security properties.

If we want secure computers to scale, and become prevalent, we need our “PC revolution”. Personal computers suddenly allowed most people to use software in their daily lives. We need a revolution that’ll allow most people to use secure computers in their daily lives. And we have a huge advantage: almost everyone has a computer already. We should also acknowledge that there are still large unsolved problems.

Practically

I would like to propose three actionable tracks to get to secure computers. While this is a generational change, and it will take a while for secure computing to become prevalent, we need to get the ball rolling. For this, we could 1) build a proof of concept, 2) work on the long term problems, and 3) assemble a sustainable community.

We need to build a proof of concept secure computer. It must enable all security, and computing properties in the model that we have established. Its speed, or the user experience do not matter at this point. There are two goals for it. First is to demonstrate that secure applications can be built and used. Second is to learn along the way, refine the layered model proposed, and progress towards an accepted standard architecture for secure computers.

Second big problem, composition of computation and privacy of information are conflicting requirements. How do we allow one program to make use of another program in a computer where everything is private? If everyone is lending and borrowing privately, and the interest rate charged by the program is public, an observer could derive information about loans by carefully watching the interest rate evolve over time. Perhaps information will in the future not always be absolutely accurate, and we would sometimes accept the tradeoff of a decrease in accuracy to maintain a higher privacy.

Lastly, and this should be obvious by now, the amount of knowledge, education, effort, and capital needed to achieve these goals is enormous. And just like security is a team effort, secure computing must be open and transparent. No single organization can claim to drive secure computing as that would defeat its very purpose. For this reason, one of the very first steps we should take as a community is to assemble ourselves and get everyone to participate.

Computing is now everywhere

Cisco estimates that there are between 20 and 30 billion connected devices across the world today and that in 2023 there will be more than 5 billion internet users. Computers, smartphones, IoT devices, and ‘the cloud’ can be found anywhere on Earth, and even on its neighboring planets.

All these devices are built on the same fundamental design. Central processing units are given computation instructions, they retrieve the input data required for the computation, execute the computation, and then store the output data. This cycle is repeated billions of times each second, and this allows your smartphone to connect to the internet, a server to send you this article, and your screen to display its contents.

Subtle variations exist, for example in the way in which instructions are executed, or how data is accessed and stored, or on the number and arrangement of processing units. But it is important to understand that these 20 billion connected devices were all built for one purpose: process as quickly as possible any instructions they’re given on the data they’ve got.

But running a 50-year-old design

Fundamental parts of computers' design are much older than some people realize. It is generally accepted that the modern computer architecture was created in the late 1970s with Intel’s 8000 series of microprocessors, and later the first IBM PC in 1981. We could even argue that computers still use the same architecture as the IBM Harvard Mark 1, released in 1944.

Performance, however, cannot be compared. An interesting metric is the dollar cost per GFLOPS or billions of floating-point operations per second, it measures the cost of a unit of performance as computer hardware evolves. Since 1984, when Bill Gates was first featured on the cover of TIME magazine, this cost has gone down from $46 million to 3 cents. That’s a staggering 99.9999999% reduction over 40 years. The success in processing as fast as possible any instructions on any data is undeniable.

The question is, should computing any instructions on any data still be the objective of tomorrow’s computers? Is it what we want of 20 billion devices that constantly exchange data and instructions with one another? We aren’t living in a world where personal computers sit on a desk at home with its floppy disks in a drawer anymore.

Security wasn’t part of the specs

The geniuses who designed and built modern computers were living in a world that was different from ours. While Alan Turing and his bombe electromechanical computer were designed to defeat the Enigma machine and break its encryption, it is not until the late 70s that the modern concept of encryption using public-private key cryptosystem was born. While CPUs were being designed, and the first motherboards were built to architecture how computers would receive, store and process information, these primitives that are everywhere in security today didn’t exist. And it took another 20 years before encryption became widely used.

Today, there are several properties that we expect from a system to be considered secure. For example, the ‘CIA triad’. Confidentiality: being able to limit who has access to information. Integrity: that the original information remains complete and unaltered. Availability: being always able to retrieve information on time. These three are sometimes extended to include possession, authenticity, and utility. Possession: being able to tell who currently owns a piece of information. Authenticity: the ability to verify claims of authorship. Utility: remaining able to use a piece of information over time.

It is important to understand that computers, on their own, are unable to provide any of these six properties. To achieve any of them, we must carefully design, build and operate additional hardware and software systems that enable these fundamental security properties. In the 1970s, security was not a part of the specs sheet. A CPU must execute whatever instruction arrives on its pipeline. RAM must store whatever data shows up on the memory bus. Peripherals must deal with whatever data is given to them. Computers were built to be personal, and compute personal information.

Everyone is impacted today

Atato is a team of builders

Building secure computers operating system

For secure computers to succeed, we need to rethink how we operate them. Right now we expect users to create a wallet, secure a seed phrase, understand transactions, tokens, fees, learn how DeFi protocols are designed, and figure our the right dApp to use them. While this is the state of the art, and the dApps and their protocols are absolutely incredible, the reality is that very few people care enough to go through all these complex steps. The success of DeFi, NFTs and gaming on blockchains is a great indicator of the potential of the technology. But we're still expecting tech-savvy users, either with a background in software engineering, fintech or gaming.

Atato's goal is to make it easier to interact with blockchains. We let you use secure computers, give them inputs, receive outputs. Our products sits between the decentralized applications and the user. Already, we introduce several innovations to make this easier. One of them is that our custody solution lets you create wallets without dealing with private keys or seed phrases.

To enable the next 100 million users

Using multi-party computation, we abstract the concept of private keys, and enable new wallet recovery scenarios. This allows businesses such as digital asset service providers, exchanges, brokers, and other financial institutions to onboard a large number of users, securely and at a low cost. Small businesses also use our solution to secure their crypto holdings.

We interact with blockchains today by making transactions, and our goal is to provide a simple, yet secure interface to use secure computers. Signing a transaction does not have to be a complex operation, and should be as easy making a call. As the vast majority of decentralized applications today are based on tokens like ERC20 and ERC721, these are the key features of our custody solution today. As the types of decentralized applications continues to evolve, our goal is to ensure that businesses have a secure access to them.

Practically

One might wonder how digital assets custody relates to using secure computers. Our view is that one's blockchain identity (his public/private keys) is equivalent to the 'user' of traditional computers. While we interact with a computer using a keyboard, mouse and display to send instructions, receive results, and interact with applications, we sign blockchain transactions to run dApps on blockchains.

Computers are amazing machines

Because computers are so enormously powerful, we rely on them more and more, and the importance of their security limitations is therefore ever increasing. Computer storage has become virtually unlimited for everyday purposes, as storage hardware prices continue to decrease, and the use of online storage services continues to grow.

In addition, the internet has also exploded in capacity and reach. Almost every corner of the planet is connected all the time, with speed sufficient to exchange large documents, place video calls and collaborate remotely. Communication capabilities can now be built into any device so that every tiny IoT chip has a remote access to vastly superior resources for computation and storage.

And computers are not only amazing at quickly processing vast amounts of data, which is useful when processing repetitive tasks that can be outlined in a precise program; they’re also getting increasingly good at pattern recognition, where instead of a precise program for repetitive tasks we can now teach a degree of artificial intelligence to computers and enable them to extract specific information from unstructured data.

That now run significant parts of society

And are not personal anymore

And we entrust computers with much more than talking with colleagues and loved ones. These machines also keep track of our possessions today. Everyone’s bank balance is stored on a computer and has been for decades. Your insurance details, medical records, credit score, driver’s license records, tax payment history, the list goes on. Most of the things that you own, a computer owns for you.

Practically

As we have learned to live with the limitations of computers, it can be difficult to understand how these limitations affect us, and it is useful to pause and wonder about how we do things.

Last week, my sister wanted to make a bank transfer. She’s living in Europe, and banks there use the SEPA bank transfer network. She wanted to send money outside of Europe, and the receiving bank used another transfer network called SWIFT. She had trouble navigating her online banking menus and options and asked for my help. While she had the money on her account, we found out that her bank didn’t allow for online SWIFT transfers, but only the European SEPA. She had to call her bank’s call center, and it took a few calls before an agent capable of helping her was on the line. After she managed to make her transfer, she called me and was shaken by the realization that her money is not ‘hers’ as much as it is the property of her bank’s software and processes.

Just a few days ago, a colleague and I needed to sign documents sent by a customer. I was not at home or in the office, and neither was my colleague. The documents were urgent, and so we sent back an electronic signature of a PDF file. Our customer couldn’t accept electronic signatures, due to the nature of the documents and their internal policies. They had to wait a few days so that both my colleague and I had access to a printer, a messenger so that they could receive paper copies of what we submitted a few days before in a format that was arguably more secure. This time I wondered, why do some of us still have such distrust in computer files, and why should it be a problem that I have to deal with?

Adopt this new mindset

Secure computing is a team effort, built on open protocols. And this vision that we are outlining here is already shared by a number of communities, and startups. Web3 is a term that also encapsulates a number of shared key ideas. We should try to forget everything we know and expect about how computers and the internet operate. We need to rethink things from scratch, with a solid understanding of the security properties enabled by secure computing.

Perhaps the most important then is to start thinking about how we interact with hardware, software, services, and businesses not in terms of what they do well, but in terms of what they could do if they were powered by secure computers. The DeFi community is an amazing example of how fast the idea can spread, and what it enables. Starting a bank used to be a multi-year, multi-million dollars journey that involved hundreds of people. Secure computers enable anyone to build a bank and operate it with immense security. Instead of vaults, firewalls, security teams, audit teams and complex processes, we 'just' have a set of smart contracts that are running with extremely strong security guarantees.

Once we have a good understanding of what we're missing out on, then we can start to see the opportunities, and get to work. We must challenge everything we have come to accept as normal and demand integrity, availability, confidentiality, authenticity, possession and utility from the software we interact with. We're embarking on a journey that will lead to profound changes in how software is built, hardware is designed, and how businesses, services and our society operates. While we do not know what is in store for us, we should also remember the values that enabled this in the first place. Openness, transparency, integrity, and good governance.

Join the community

Perhaps the most significant challenge will be to get the ball rolling. Each of the communities of information security, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, zero-knowledge proofs, multiparty computation, fully homomorphic encryption, crypto anarchists and cypherpunks have a reasonably clear vision of how they are advancing their agenda and information security. Getting at least parts of each community to join a broader movement to build secure computers will be a gradual process, one that will probably require compromises to individual visions.

And contribute

You might contribute your knowledge, and provide feedback on the model we outlined here, point out things that do not sound right to you and help us outline a better vision for everyone. You might be part of one of the teams we spoke about here, or be a user of their products. If this article sounds interesting to you then spread the word, our goal is to assemble like minded people to get to work on building secure computers.

You might have access to people you think can help the secure compute community make progress. If you do, please get them engaged with this material and the community. Building secure computers will not be a one-company thing, just like no single company built the internet. We're going to need help with all the different layers of secure computers to make them a reality, and it's only by working together that we will make this vision a reality.

You might be looking to deploy capital, and make investments into startups who want to rethink the way computers are built and operated, in this case please keep an eye on the companies active in the community, and if you're unsure who's working on what then take some time to join us and learn more. We're going to need all the help we can get.

Outro

After 50 years, computer science is experiencing a paradigm shift. This shift will affect every facet of information technology; how we build products, what problems they solve, and how they integrate into our lives. Cryptography and blockchains are the driving forces tearing apart the notion of personal computers and inventing privacy-preserving, secured computing. The implications for individuals, families, businesses, and society are profound and not fully understood. An enormous amount of work lies ahead to create tomorrow’s computing. Companies like atato are building what will power tomorrow’s tech industry. Come and join us!

50 years of computer science breakthroughs

While large parts of our computers were invented in the 1970s, the good news is that researchers have of course been hard at work during that time, so that the number of tools at our disposal to make computing secure is huge.

A few years of experience

Not only has science and research progressed, but the community has been building and using secure computers for a few years now.

And a huge community working on it

Throughout the world, we now have this growing community collectively working to create tomorrow’s secure computers.

With so much effort, resources and time spent on cracking the problem of building secure computers, the speed at which the community makes progress will only continue to accelerate.