Cross "Border" Digital Infrastructure

 So again while at ID4Africa in Cape Town this week, I heard a lot of people talking about Cross Border use of digital identity. Lets talk a bit about infrastructure here, as I'm not sure people are aware of how hard it is to determine, reliably, where a person, or device are located, geograhpically, let alone jurisdictionally.

We (Microsoft Center for Cloud Research) wrote about this a wwhile back when simply considering the impact of GDPR on Cloud Services and the location of personal data.

The infrastructure doesn't tell you where it is - borders are not digital, they are geo-political constructs that only exist in someone's mind. GPS doesn't work in doors, and can be remarkably perverse in cities anyhow. Content providers (e.g. the BBC in the UK) worry about delivery of content (and adverts and charging) because of different business models in different countries, different content ownership (pace Google YouTube, but also OpenAI), and have, as yet, not solved this problem.

COnsider that someone in ireland can be in or out of the EU in a single step. Or that someone might be on a boat or plane outside a national jurisdiction, using a network to process personal data, which is, exactly, where? Data and processing can be replicated or shareded across multiple sites (indeedmost Cloud Services specifically support keeping copies of state machines while rtunning far appart so that they survive local outages (power failure, disaster/flood etc) and are still live/available. In some cases, the geographic separation to get a required level of relaibility may involve running live programs on live data in multiple jurisdictions/sovereign states. The law does not comprehend this yet (well). and designing digital id (services and wallets etc) without understanding it is not going to help much. Of course, we have the concept of "adequacy" between countries (with regards GDPR - this was also discussed in ID4Africa last year/2023) - it needs some very careful updating.

Also, recentl moves in Internet Standards worl are both towards more anonimity (e.g. oblivious HTTPs) but also towards providing precise location as a service (e.g. proposals from CloudFlare). 

Be careful what you wish for, where?

sustainability of digital wallets for public infrastructure services

One thing occurred to me when listening to people at ID4Africa 24 talk about wallets is that there's a major sustainability problem due specifically to security considerations. 

Any wallet needs to be trusted if it is used for transactions that involve personal data or money.

To implement this trust, the wallet software currently built by major vendors such as Apple, Google and (say) HSBC can use secure enclaves (Trusted Execution ENvironment) support on the device (e.g. trustzone on ARM processors, or variants as built by various handset vendors).

However, the supprt varies with time, but with modications to hardware coming along (e.g. future ARM support for multiple realms and attestation) and simply because software and hardware volunerabilities arise, some of the latter being mitgated by changes to the software, some not.  THis is expensive, so vendors tend to time out support on older devices fairly aggressively.

One report from Cambridge shows how short that can be in practice, so your device no longer gets security patches for the OS (or application SDKs). At this point, can you trust things on it? Almost certainly not in this day and age.

So there are around 750M people in Europe, 450, of them in the EU. If we mandate wallets for Id (or even just make them the only convenient way to access many services) you need to upgrade, typically by replacing all their phones about every 3 years. That's 130M phones a year. Many of these phones cost at least 100 euro and upwards of 1000 euro for high end devices. That's a cost of 130B euro a year.

Oops.

While some of the materials can be recycled (including many newer batteries), the rare earths and other materials used in these devices are already pretty unacceptable in supply chain ethics.

Not a sustainable way to do things. Meanwhile, proposing to run a secure cloud based wallet is viable, but the cost of running a data center with much of peoples' personal data, which full encrypted access, and TEE style processing is also very high (some large single data center energy use is approaching that of large city metro energy use already), plus moving the data to and from between device and clould is also a non-trivial contribution to running costs, both monetary, and energy/carbon wise.

We are building ourselves into another unacceptable future...

Someone please check my arithmetic...

DPG #2 or should I say DPPG or possibly DPPI

 We're hearing a lot about DPIs - Digital Public Infrastructure (the Internet, the spectrum for mobile telephone,  open banking networking etc)....

So then there's a lot of talk about building new Infrastructures for (e.g.) Digital Identity - and provisioning this through Public Private Partnerships - so really we then have a DPPI - indeed, the Internet and WWW and Cloud serve as an example of just that too.

But then we have Digital Public Goods - for me, this is an extension of the notion of open source - so again the software that runs the Internet is available in open source form, together with documentation, and even much test data (simulators too). 

But new systems have evolved new forms of ownership, so a lot of the digital content in the Internet is a mix of open (free) and open access but not free to re-purpose (e.g. copyright owners want recompense) - this showed up first in music/file sharing networks, now subsumbed by systems like Youtube - which have to navigate the ownership space carefully .

New forms of digital goods now include trained models (AIs - e.g. LLMs) - these derive value from the data they are trained on (supervised, therefore involving human labour too, or unsupervised), so we then have a new form we might call a DPPG, something that has a mix of properties of public goods and private goods. 

This needs careful consideration, since a lot of IP rights are being skated over right now - the old "move fast and break things" is being applied by some unscrupulous (or to be more generous, just careless) organisations.

Is OpenAI just napsterising the stuff in the common crawl that has clear limits on commercial/for profit re-use (code and data)?

A couple more points about the Public/Private Partnership aspect of digital infrastructure (and goods). 

The Internet was public til 1992. Then the US government divested, so the birth of commercial ISPs happened. Later, ISPs got big enough to own transmission infrastructure (fiber, last mile copper, spectrum etc). Some of the net remained state provided (from my narrow UK perspective, examples are the UK JANET network for research&education and the NHS spine for health services - there are plenty like that) - there are also community provided networks (e.g. Guifi in Spain) that are collectively owned and operated. In the process of federating these together various tools and techniques emerged for "co-opetition" - things like BGP for routing, CA transparency for certificates etc -these are also examples of how to co-exist in a PPP world and they have (mostly) worked for the 32 years since then.

So there are interfaces between components provided using different models (public, private, community). And these change over time (both the technical and the legal, regulatory, business relationships).

The other thing here is time scales - the Boeing 747 ("Jumbo Jet") has had a product lifetime from 1963 until 2023. Software to model it (from wind tunnel tests, to avionics etc) has to run until the last one stops flying. That's 60 years so far. Any DPPG (software artefact, digital twin etc) being designed today better have a design lifetime of at least 100 years. Yes, that is right. One Hundred Years. Not of solitude.

What sorts of businesses have survived unscathed for these sorts of timescales, and what models do they use (my university is 800+ years old, and then there's the Vatican:) Quite a lot of nation states have not lasted that long.

DPGs #1

 

The oldest and best example of a digital public good is the Internet. Why people don't start from this is surprising to me:

Since 1982, source code of the exemplary implementation from UC Berkeley has been 

available plus documented in an open access series of books documenting that code and working:TCP/IP Illustrated (vol 2)

The key thing here was that every thing accepted as an internet standard had at least 2 interoperating implementations, preferably three, one of which was open source (unencumbred by any IP) - for me, this defines digital (code/data), public (there's no barrier to entry due to ownership restrictive practices) infrastructure (you can run the code and computers are general purppose machines so any computer can run it, subject to resource constraints:-)

Two other reference points - despite the best of intentions and some clver game theory in design processes , we still suffer from frequent tussels in cyberspace - see Tusslees in Cyberspace

from the same people that said this:

"We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code." David D. Clark 1992.

The standards process in the IETF has open governance, overseen by the non profit Internet

Society, with free access to standards documentation (RFCs) and processes...plus online/remote access to standards meetings for 30 years...go from here: The Internet Society and the Internet Engienering Task Force which includes hackathons and code sprints as well as writing specs.

For many years, there were also open events for interoperation testing. I remember going to the first Interop Trade Show in Monterey in 1986

The actual operational running of the internet (a mix of private, public and mixed provisioning) 

has teams of people around the world coordinating - e.g. NANOG and RIPE and AfNOG in US and Europe

and Africa e.g. see Reseaux IP European and also net information registries e.g.  AfriNIIC

As well as this, the origin of computer emergency response teams (the "CERTs) who deal with 

coordinated response to security incidents...was from coping with attacks on systems and the infrastructure.

Much of the leading edge research is also covered in open access academic conferences which also typically feature published code and test data (artefacts) and even reproducibility testing results - e.g. see ACM SIGCOMM for a good list of examples of state-of-the-art (probably about 5 years ahead of deployment

A sustainable DPG would include a decentralised grid made of a very large number of microgenerator sources - we have been building something like this on public buildings in the City where I live (London, England) where we crowdfund putting large solar installations on schools, gyms, etc, at scale of 100Kw typical configurations. We are working on getting permission to build a publically owned grid to re-distribute spare power locally (rather than having to just go through the privately operated centralised grid). SUch a system could (with appropriate use of storage, e.g. in batteries in nearby parked EVs) provide a power source for must digital public services.

A whole ecosystem ready built as a way to do all aspects of a DPG!