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Explore your curiosity - Interesting people with fascinating stories.
Life consists of three things:
-The stories we tell others
-The stories others tell us
-The stories we tell ourselves.
Eric, welcome aboard to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me, Ari. It's, good to be here.
Speaker 1:Okay. So we're gonna go down the rabbit hole, but eventually, we will come up. Okay. So we kinda know that our phones have chips in them.
Speaker 2:A lot. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Quite quite a few. Quite a few. We kind of know that those chips are manufactured in China, some of them. And we also kind of know that the US government got their underpants in a bunch about some some modem chip that half of electronics use, and they're like, oh, what if this has a backdoor to the Chinese government? So we kinda we we're kinda like, do we need to be thinking about chip security now?
Speaker 1:Is that a thing?
Speaker 2:We absolutely should be, and we should have been thinking about it for a long time, but it's definitely been a tough problem for people to figure out. And, you know, I think I have a solution to that.
Speaker 1:Okay. So so let's break this down. There's a few problems here. One is I had a friend, he manufactured electronics, he's much smarter than I when it comes to all things electronics. He showed me this chip and he says to me, and it's a small little black thing and it looks like it has like metal legs, right?
Speaker 2:It's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:And he shows me this thing and he says, Ari, this is indistinguishable from an original chip. I paid about $5,000 from this to buy it. When he put it in the x-ray machine, there was nothing in it. It was it was just plastic. They sold
Speaker 2:him Russell Rough surprise after five
Speaker 1:They sold him 5,000. Some of these chips are expensive. Right?
Speaker 2:So Incredibly expensive.
Speaker 1:That's why
Speaker 2:they're so valuable to spoof and to counterfeit and to try to generate alternatives for.
Speaker 1:I wish I had my little cap. This is pretty cool. I, not everybody watches this on video, but basically, right, you have this thing over here. So for example, you have a chip over here. And then what if this chip over here is just a piece of plastic?
Speaker 1:There's no logic or kind of intelligence in it. That's an and then you're sending out something to a customer and the customer's like, this doesn't work. And then you get it back and it's like, well, we had a problem. We bought a fake chip.
Speaker 2:And then the question is whose fault was it? Whose problem is it? Who has to pay for it at the end of the day besides the consumer?
Speaker 1:That's right. This has been an incredibly difficult problem for decades, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, decades.
Speaker 1:Us about this. Why hasn't this been solved yet?
Speaker 2:It's because it's either too expensive or it's too hard. There are complicated ways that you can put security features right on the chip at the silicon level to say, yep. This is authentic. But one of the challenges, that security feature either degrades with time or it's too expensive to put on chips that are really the most important chips in our daily lives. We all drive cars with semiconductor devices in them.
Speaker 2:Our lives depend on $5.10 cent pieces of silicon that there's no profit. Hold on.
Speaker 1:I don't understand. This on one hand, this chip costs $5,000. On the other hand, there's no profit. How do those things live together?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Semiconductor industry manufacturers, the whole range of devices that are, you know, our lives are vertically integrated upon. It's everything from the 5¢ microcontroller in your transmission of your car to, you know, the expensive chips that are in our computers or in the AI servers that are of light blooming up everywhere. Each one of those instances is important to know that it's authentic and that it's secure. And that could be anything from, you know, protecting you as you drive to making sure that your financial data is secure as it bounces around the servers of Visa.
Speaker 2:With today's technology, it's just been too expensive or too complicated to secure the silicon supply chain to know that you're getting authentic parts that are reliable and will deliver the capability that you expect them to have.
Speaker 1:Did you did you so this is I mean, this is scary shit. Right? I know Obama is kind of like, you know, the guy behind this movie, so let's not get too political. I don't know if yeah. Some people love him, some some people hate him, doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:But he did take out he did put out a movie and in this movie, the Tesla cars became these mass weapons of murder where the Tesla cars would start running into people. And this was supposedly Chinese Mhmm. Basically hacking the car and then, you know, basically coming in through a backdoor, telling the car to basically drive into people.
Speaker 2:That's the doomsday scenario that, you know, people think about and see in the movies and like, oh, well, that's never gonna really happen in daily life.
Speaker 1:Happen, though?
Speaker 2:It does. And so there are stories on a week by week basis.
Speaker 1:Do you mean it does?
Speaker 2:So there was a story recently about a month ago about Trojan hardware being installed in solar power inverters that were put there by the Chinese government.
Speaker 1:And who uses solar power inverters?
Speaker 2:A lot of people in California, particularly Silicon Valley. And these counterfeit these Trojan hardware were basically able to ping your cell phone as you're walking by them, pull data directly from them.
Speaker 1:Okay. What does that mean, though?
Speaker 2:That means that your information isn't safe no matter where you go because you don't know where there can be Trojan hardware. There can be things that are maliciously trying to intervene in your daily life. That's scary.
Speaker 1:So the tinfoil hat people got it right.
Speaker 2:The only way did.
Speaker 1:Way to secure your phone. So this this YETI right over here, I don't know where it's manufactured, but if it has a chip in it, which can basically scan my phone, the only way to keep my phone secure is to put it in a tinfoil hat which is basically what we call a paradise cage. A paradise cage is a cage or some kind of element which doesn't allow electrical interference or signals to get in or out And if you took aluminium and you just wrap this up in aluminium, that would act as a ferrite cage. That's the tinfoil hat.
Speaker 2:That's the solution. We're we're at the tinfoil hat stage of our society.
Speaker 1:Okay. Fuck off. That's all I can say at this stage. Fuck off. When did the world just go batshit crazy?
Speaker 2:It was right around mid two thousands. So thousands when the counterfeit spree really started. And what you saw in the late thousands was this idea that we were gonna protect the supply chains. We weren't gonna do anything on the manufacturing side. We were just gonna make sure that everything was passed off and paperwork signed that where we were getting things from was authentic and certified.
Speaker 2:But counterfeit, malicious hardware, it's cat and mouse. And just saying you have to get around paperwork, that's an easy one for counterfeiters to get around. And so now we're at the stage where even those prevention mechanisms can be bypassed to the extent that DOD has recognized that 15% of their devices contain some amount of counterfeit or Trojan hardware in them. And they spend billions to try to catch that.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna get political, but without getting political, there was a supply chain attack that will go down in the history of counterterrorism for the next thousand years. And this happened in the last twelve months. That was a supply chain attack. This is exactly
Speaker 2:what we're talking about. Yeah. You wanna make sure that when you get this new cell phone, it's gonna do what it did what it's supposed to do and nothing extra.
Speaker 1:Nothing extra. Cell phones, beepers. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so this is the scary thing. And it's everything from, you know, as we're talking about, like, handheld devices, things in infrastructure to even the worst case scenarios, which, you know, Fukushima, after they did investigation there, they identified counterfeit hardware in the coolant pumps that was not hard, still functional, but not rad hard. And so they therefore, they failed prematurely.
Speaker 1:So let let's let's think about this. Right? We've got infrastructure that cleans our water. We've got infrastructure that makes power. We've got missiles that have control systems that can launch or not launch them.
Speaker 1:If any one of these fail at the hardware level forget software, that's a whole Exactly. Different We've kind of wrapped our heads around the software cat and mouse game. The hardware game is really interesting. If any one of those hardwares becomes susceptible to a competing nation, right, it can be really dangerous. We can suddenly have too much chlorine in our water.
Speaker 1:We can suddenly lose power. We can suddenly lose communication. In fact, I think Obama's main point was that if we lose too many of the systems that make us human, we become animals. We don't have power, we don't have communication, we don't have food and water, we basically descend into anarchy. That was Obama's point and his point was so really that film was about the fact that there's this modem chip and half of those modems are made by China and we don't know if they're secure, that so means half of electronics in The US are susceptible to Chinese hacking.
Speaker 1:And that's why Obama made the movie, but this is a much broader problem, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Absolutely. It's systemic in our modern digital lives. And how do we solve this?
Speaker 1:Okay. So so how do we solve this area? So, okay, in full disclosure, we do keep this show at a kind of like high level, not to go too technical. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But you know we talked two minutes before the show, you know that I'm a manufacturing guy who has basically done this my whole life. I work for Siemens, I designed chips for Apple, for Qualcomm, for Honeywell, basically everything that's in anybody's phones, I helped design that by creating algorithms that would check the hardware. What I can tell the audience is that I've come across this problem and it's been an unsolvable problem for over two decades. So the magic that you're about to hear right now is a problem that engineers across the world have been trying to solve for a very long time.
Speaker 2:And you set up the boundary conditions perfectly. You know, the challenge ahead of us is we wanna secure every single semiconductor device, and we make billions of these per year. Anything from a 5¢ chip to a $30,000 chip, and you wanna secure all of them. But we're still in a commercial environment for the most part, which means it's gotta be cheap. It's gotta be fast, and it can't really disrupt your product at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:So you can't take up chip real estate. You can't spend a lot of money on it. That's what makes us an incredibly hard problem to crack. And so that's where, you know, what I've been working on for the last year is how do you use existing semiconductor manufacturing processes to intrinsically encode a security signature at the silicon level that you can then detect later on somewhere in the supply chain, you know, maybe at a contract manufacturer, maybe when, you know, the device is in your hand and authenticate it and verify that it has its integrity intact. So that hasn't been altered in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 1:So let me translate that into something my grandma would understand. You guys have figured out a way to create an encrypted watermark that costs basically nothing on every single piece of electronics and not just electronics but every single component in the electronics in the world at virtually zero cost.
Speaker 2:That's the magic sauce. That's the, you know, silver bullet that everyone's been looking for and we've cracked.
Speaker 1:This is this is truly, truly something incredible. I mean, if you're a terrorist, you should care about this because you don't want your shit exploding. But if you're a home, you know, you're just an everyday Joe, then you also care about this because how do I know that I didn't just buy a fake iPhone or a fake Rolex or a fake whatever? Maybe the Rolex will be fake, but at least the electronics in it is real. That's a different problem.
Speaker 1:So this is huge. I mean, home appliances that are expensive or maybe just dangerous, right? Maybe a chainsaw that's fake to the stuff that cleans our water and decides what percentage of chlorine goes into the water that we drink. This is a big deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think the biggest market for us is, you know, like Obama's movie, it's like, it's automotive. It's like, you wanna make sure that when you get in your car, it's gonna operate the way you think it will. And if you do have an accident, you wanna make sure that it functions the way it's supposed to to keep you safe.
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 2:there's been a recent rash of counterfeit controllers for airbags that has led to billions of losses in the automotive industry, but also many lives. And that's become our mission is we are not doing this, you know, the you know, we're doing it for a little bit because it's cool technology, but also because it has such an impact on our everyday lives and the people around us that this is our mission.
Speaker 1:There's a few verticals of evil in the world as it pertains to this product specifically. Sure, there's gonna be forces in the world that are gonna take out a person and they're gonna try and crash their car or maybe they're gonna physically crash their car off another car but there was a chip that turned off the airbag. So that's one type of evil. You and I probably don't need to worry about it. But there's another type of evil in the world, and that's greed.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Parts manufactured by the lowest bidder. That's really where a lot of these issues stem from. The co founder of my company, he was burnt by this whenever he purchased components from a reputable supplier and turns out half of them were gray market parts that did not function.
Speaker 1:So, so hold on. If it's a reputable supplier,
Speaker 2:where do the bread chips come from?
Speaker 1:Yes. That's the that's literally the million dollar question.
Speaker 2:That's the billion dollar question, really.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is true.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, that's the challenge is there are so many leaky points in our supply chain that a lot of times, like when you, you know, go on Amazon and you're like, okay, which thing do I wanna buy? This one's a few dollars cheaper. I'll buy that one. It looks the same. It functions the same.
Speaker 2:It'll be fine. And that's the trap we find ourselves in is when you break it down to authenticity, that's the difference.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And the problem is that when the buyers push the sellers to give them stuff fast that they don't have yet, or they don't have enough inventory or other problems, and sometimes they're tempted to buy even though they are reputable in themselves. They're sometimes tempted to buy from somebody else.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They have to go to brokers and ask for like, Hey, I need a 100 of these, a thousand of these parts. Do you have any? It's like, well, there's a box over here in the corner.
Speaker 1:Anytime that some of my good friends got screwed and then they talked to their supplier and they asked them, who did you buy this stuff from? Then it's like, we may have used a broker for this one. And that's where he's like, so you know supply chains leak and
Speaker 2:sometimes people
Speaker 1:make bad decisions. Why? Because they're trying to fulfill a contract.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:This is where greed comes in. Like, so, okay. Okay. So this is, this is amazing. First of all, this, think is, is, know, I hope that will come out.
Speaker 1:Know, obviously the problem with security software is that it helps the good guys and the bad guys. I don't know, you you always wanted to help the good guys, but not the bad guys, but I'm not sure if that's possible. Right? GPT goes out to everyone. Then the criminals use GPT to create more smart.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you know this, but they're using it to do better phishing attacks.
Speaker 2:Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Not surprising, but yeah.
Speaker 1:That's surprising. Yeah. So
Speaker 2:what's what's happening happening is the the phase of cat and mouse. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, there's SaaS companies that create phishing attacks, right? You can buy software on the, obviously in the dark web, and then you basically can do like call up a support line and say, Hey, I'm trying to do a phishing attack right now. And my mark said this the software, oh, this is real. And then the software gave me this error. What do I do next to create this phishing attack?
Speaker 1:And they'll walk you through it. Selling software to do phishing. Okay. This is real.
Speaker 2:Are you sure you wanna be scaring your viewers as much as
Speaker 1:Like, dude, 90% of the time, I'm a positive smiley guy smiling right now. Hopefully, they're watching the video and feeling very relaxed. Yeah. The good news is though, Eric, you guys are bringing something wonderful to the world. Usually we don't like, we don't say things that people make are wonderful because we don't promote on this show.
Speaker 1:This is really is exciting and I've suffered from this problem myself I'm gonna make a transgression and say that you all should look into the future of Eric's company because think there's something interesting there.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it, Ari.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been an awesome This
Speaker 2:is great.
Speaker 1:There's one more question.
Speaker 2:Alright.
Speaker 1:Okay. So this is the only question that we ask on the show that is, you know, pre prepared that everybody gets asked is a difficult question. If you had to go back to the hardest part of your life anywhere, what advice would you give to yourself?
Speaker 2:Keep your head down and keep going. Gets Keep on trucking.
Speaker 1:This too shall pass. Absolutely. Eric, thank you so much for coming to show. I appreciate you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Ari.