Porcfest2015

Can you trust your computer? Can you control what it does and doesn’t? Or is someone else in control? How can you even know what it is or isn’t doing? Even if it tells you, how do you know it’s not lying? As computer systems become more complex, how can "Trusted Computing" be achieved, not (just) by big corporations and centralized governments, but rather by individual citizens? I’ll discuss missing bits that could help put individuals back in control: radical auditability; more "reasonable" programming languages; controlled side-effects; capability-based security; provably correct kernels; trusted bootstrap chains; spot checks of hardware along the supply chain; trustless randomization; crypto-feudalism; decentralized network protocols; digital currencies; pervasive sous-veillance; etc. There are plenty of technologies you could be working on that could contribute to making tomorrow a safer place for individual freedom rather than a totalitarian nightmare of centralized control on computing.