Prof. Qwerty Petabyte, Working with the Official Naughty/Nice Blockchain...

hello i'm courtney petabyte professor of blockchain technology here at elf university as a part of the university's assessing and evaluating human behavior for naughty and niceness curriculum we're going to be talking today about blockchain technology and how it fits into the broader naughty nice list infrastructure here at the north pole we take the integrity of the data on the naughty nice list very seriously we've been tracking the naughty nice list digitally since back in the 1930s and when santa developed blockchain technology back in the 1960s we converted the naughty nice list over to using that technology like a lot of north pole tech blockchains have leaked to the general public and now they're beginning to understand the benefits and usefulness of blockchains in this case leaked is probably a misnomer we all remember that night back in 2008 when santa ate a few too many cookies and in the throes of the sugar rush rattled off that white paper under a pseudonym and sent it out into the world causing quite a stir what is a blockchain a blockchain is just a method of storing digital information blockchains provide data integrity by storing information in a way that ensures that if any portion of that data is altered or changed or removed tampering will be obvious while blockchains are used as part of a cryptocurrency uh technology because you know who in his white paper they represent a completely separate technology individual data records are called blocks and they're linked together one after another that's how we get the name blockchain how does a blockchain provide data integrity it's actually very simple in addition to its own data each block in the blockchain also stores a cryptographic hash of all of the data in the previous block if any chain is made change is made to any block in the blockchain it'll be immediately obvious because the cryptographic hash stored in the following block will be wrong and the cryptographic hashes in every block following the change block will be wrong this ensures that once we've added data to the blockchain it can't be altered or removed without that change being evident this is why we have chosen to store naughty nice list information in a blockchain keeping track of the naughty and niceness of 7.8 billion humans and magical beings is a difficult difficult task every one of those beings is tracked 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 days a year by our fleet of elves on the shelves who report naughty and nice activity back to our data center here at the north pole we've calculated that on average each tracked individual will perform some sort of action that will rise to the level where it needs to be recorded on the naughty nice list approximately 2.1 times per week if you do the math this works out to be over 27 000 new blocks per second because that would be an enormous load for a single system to try to handle we have actually broken up the block chains into 1 000 different block chains with each individual assigned to one of those different block chains in addition to protecting the integrity of the data using blockchain technology we've also used a santus our santa signature system no block can be added to the official naughty nice blockchain unless the data has been signed with a digital signature from our high-speed santa signature system the s3 is our most secure system here at the north pole you cannot access that system individually it requires three separate people to access the system each one providing both a password and a hardware token the s3 system will digitally sign a hash of the data portion including the previous hash of every block that is assigned and added to one of the official chains how are you supposed to document an incident well each block represents an individual incident that rises to the level of altering someone's naughty nice score field operatives are expected to provide some sort of documentation of the incident and that's usually in the form of a report a photo or other background information blockchain blocks are designed so that you can add up to nine separate documents of various formats and those will be attached to each block we allow a wide range of formats as you can see here on the screen relative documentation that doesn't match a supported format can be added just simply as a binary blob just so that you know most of our operatives work with simple pdf documents attaching each one to a single block in the blockchain well what does a naughty nice block look like well the naughty nice block contains two different kinds of information as shown on the screen here the red information is user input this is information that you will be adding once you've graduated from elf university's curriculum the blue information is added by the blockchain code each block consists of an index which is the number of the block on the blockchain a nonce which is a 64-bit value randomly generated by our blockchain code and added to the block and we'll explain the reason for this in the coming slides the information that you will be adding are the id number of the naughty nice individual your personal uh uh id number as the reporting party you'll tell us how many documents you'll be adding to the block you'll tell us the score of the naughty nice points assessed whether it was a naughty action a nice action and then you'll provide the documents the blockchain code will add the date and time it will add the hash of the previous block and it will then send it off to the s3 system to be digitally signed once it's returned the full block hash will be taken and that will be used as the previous hash in the following block how do we validate that the blockchain has not been altered it's actually very simple to ensure the data on the blockchain has not been altered we begin at the first block known as the genesis block it is assumed to be valid just simply by being defined as the genesis block from there we begin by checking the hashes of the block and the digital signatures of the block and we check to make sure that the hash matches the previous block hash of the following block if at any time any of those are incorrect all of the following blocks will be incorrect as well and we know that we've found an invalid block on the blockchain we're in the midst of a two-year modernization project for our blockchain technology here at the north pole we've been using blockchain since the technology was developed by santa back in the mid 60s and quite honestly our code base is getting a little old most of it has been written in cobol up until this year we're currently in year one of a two-year program to overhaul our technology based on the suggestions of rit consulting firm jf consulting we've moved our code base to python you may have noticed that we talked a lot about cryptographic hashes and well uh unfortunately due to some unforeseen delays we were unable to deploy our new python code until after the beginning of 2020 when we already had blocks in the blockchain our previous blockchain code used md5 hashes and we know that md5 hashes have some potential issues luckily uh several years ago we began adding a 64-bit random nonce to each of the blockchain blocks that was what i described as the nonce when we look at the contents of a blockchain block those 64-bit nonces are added to the beginning of the block in order to keep us from having any issues surrounding md5 we're ready to plug to deploy patching uh to switch over to sha 256 hashes once we begin our rollout of 2021's blockchain thank you very much for attending today's lecture on blockchain technology should you have any questions i have office hours available

Channel: KringleCon

Views: 1,627

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Holiday Hack Challenge, KringleCon, SANS, InfoSec, CTFs, CyberSecurity, Cyber Security

Id: reKsZ8E44vw

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020