Jason Sabin, DigiCert | DigiCert Trust Summit

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. We're back here.

Live in, uh, las, where are we again? Las Vegas at the Resorts World DigiCert Trust Summit. We are thrilled to be here in person.

What an amazing day it's been of talking to many of the speakers here at DigiCert Trust, uh, both DigiCert people as well as, uh, non DigiCert people, right? Some amazing, amazing folks. Let me introduce you to our next guest, speaking of amazing folks.

His name's Jason Saban. Jason is the CTO at DigiCert. And, um, Jason literally just walked off the presenting stage a little bit ago, right?

Yes. Um, so first of all, Jason, welcome and thanks for joining us today. Appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you for having me. It's my pleasure. Secondly, let's, well, before we get into what you, you talked about, I'm gonna ask you to share with our audience a little bit about kind of your personal story, your personal journey, how you came to be CTO here at DigiCert.

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, for me, I was that nerdy eighties kid who picked up computers from an Atari and, uh, as well as Apple computers. Mm-Hmm.

And so I had that Apple two e uh, in the fifth grade. You would still have it, do you? I don't, I don't.

Okay. It was at the school, but would love to still have one. Yeah.

You And me both. Um, And love that fascinating concept of here I could invent and create anything with a programming language. And so I shifted over into computer science, um, went into engineering and I focused on, on cybersecurity.

My, my entire career started out with identity and access management before I came over to digit search, um, in the engineering department. Went through a number of different roles from CSO or VP of R and d to CSO, to, uh, CIO, and then finally back into engineering again as CTO. It's a great trip.

Right. Alright, so you presented today, as I said earlier. Why don't you, if you don't mind, share with our audience a little bit, maybe what your presentation was on Yeah.

Today we talked about artificial intelligence and, uh, the risk versus reward of that as well as, as how you're going to be able to add in some protection around artificial intelligence. And so, uh, the first part of it, we very much focus on, especially deep fakes, that with gen ai, we've had this massive advancement that has changed, the industry changed to society, that everyone is now using chat, GPT that happened literally just a few months ago. And so now we've had this new technology out here with artificial intelligence, uh, being able to do the generative AI for different types of content, and how do we start protecting against that?

Because the negative aspects, the, the dark side, you could say of it is really all the manipulation and misinformation of the same content. Yep. So we've spoken a little bit about this today and I, we've been talking about it at Tech Trunk TV now for, for months.

Well, the whole thing's only less than a year old, so Yeah. You know, but for months. But here, here, here's something I wanna say from the outset.

I think sometimes we tend to focus so much on the potential negative mm-Hmm. That we lose sight of the good that this can do. Yes.

Of, of what a great game changing technology this is. That being said, though, you know, I've said it for a long time with stuff on the internet, if it wasn't for the bad people, we'd have such nice things and, and, but there are bad people who are going to use this maliciously or for their own gain and, and so forth. And, and the, the, especially with generative ai, the the potential harm is, is severe.

I mean, I, so, so I'm a person who believes that even before generative ai, a large percentage of our population couldn't tell fake from real anyway. Mm-Hmm. Especially when it comes to news.

Yes. Social media. I think social media and, and the whole 24 hour news cycle has been the bane of western civilization.

Right. Because too many people, you know, they swallow these conspiracy Mm-Hmm. Things hook line and sink sinker.

And I, I'm not making a political statement. It's from one specter to the other specter of the political spectrum. Right?

Yes. One extreme to the other. They, people have a hard time.

I, I grew up, we had three channels. Well, I grew up in New York, we had five ch six channels. We had A, B, C, C, B, S, NBC, and then we had, uh, channel five, which was a precursor to Fox Channel nine, channel 11.

The Yankees played on it, and then we had PBS, Sesame Street. And, um, but that's all you had. And if you didn't like CBS, you could, you know, you didn't like Uncle Walter, you went to Tom B Bro Broco Mm-Hmm.

Or, or Peter Jennings or whatever. Um, today everybody has an opinion and everybody publishes it on the internet. And most people have a very hard time discerning the quality of, of information.

Now add AI on top of that Mm-Hmm. And we don't know whether this is really Jason or not. Yeah.

It boggles my mind how we're gonna be able to get people smart about this. And, and it's a discussion we had here earlier today. Do you just give them the fish?

So in other words, is there some magnifying glass they look through and they say, okay, that's, that's deep fake. What do we teach them to fish? Mm-Hmm.

Which is, you know, have a little common sense here. Here are the telltale sides. Yeah.

What camp are you in? Yeah. It, it's definitely, and I kinda look at it from detection to mitigation.

Mm-Hmm. And so for me, how do we apply a technology concept to a complex problem? And so for me, what I'm looking to do is to say, uh, and DigiCert is let's inject identity and into the content itself.

So being able to create a content provenance. And so as an individual is taking a picture with a camera that inside there, it's getting a digital signature as you take that picture. And then as it's being the next round is gonna be, uh, let's say Photoshop editing as a professional editor comes in here, they're going to put another stamp or digital signature to say, I have now added to this image.

Or edited. So You're talking about like an SBO for photos, Essentially like an sbo. So you can be able to track it throughout the entire process of when it was first created or birthed at the cradle of the actual image all the way along the process.

And so then as, as a society, you can go back and review that to say, here's what's happened to that image all along. And being able to do that for any type of content. If it's a statement that a political individual has has made or a, um, CEO of, of a publicly traded company, that each one of those can have that content that is signed if it's a video, audio, or some other type of content that you can inject the identity into the content provenance.

So, sounds great. Is this, is this Jason's mind we're listening to? Or is this, I mean, is this real?

How real is it? It's, Right now we're in industry standards. And so the industry standards coming together as technology companies and by experts in the field to say, how do we solve this problem?

And so, but given that that dig cer, we already have technology today to do a lot of these digital signing. And so it's working together with these different companies to say, manufacturers, let's produce those certificates, those digital certificates to do that digital signing. Let's add this into the pro the process.

So essentially, like you can said, we almost can get an SBO m for images, an SBO m audio and video. Would these, Would these digital certificates sort of be in the meta information? It Yes.

Essentially it is. And so on each one of those digital certificates, you can provide information. And so you might say, well, as, as an individual, I might not want my name stamped on this image, but I want my company's name.

So then you have your choice to say, do I want my individual name? So if you're some type of social media influencer, absolutely you want it inside of there, but maybe you're just someone who's working for a company and you don't want your name, but you want the company's stamp on there. So you have Different choices.

Well, vice first the company doesn't want your name. They want their name. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. Or a combination. You can also Right.

And have both. It, it's part of it. Um, it's fascinating.

Now, I had this conversation we were talking about post quantum and some of the post quantum algorithms. Of course, the downside is, is when you try to run these post quantum algorithms on, you know, uh, today's computers, it could be a 10 x hit Mm-Hmm. In terms of, you know, speed latency, how much latency is this gonna add to the, to the equation?

Yeah. It's, it's definitely a little bit scary when you think about this major technology advancement of artificial intelligence to post quantum crypto cryptography. And those two are converging together.

Mm-Hmm. Where you're looking at this to say, the solutions to solve for all these deep fakes, this, this misinformation is digital signatures and content providence. But at the same time, p qc breaks all of that.

And so you have to have that crypto agility to be able to have the solutions of today, but then rapidly change it very quickly to the post quantum cryptography algorithms. Right? Yes.

Some of those were still evaluating to figure out what's the performance of those, what's the impact? And identifying how to do that. But we want to be prepared to say, as this is happening, let's swap it out really quick and continue advancing.

So a lot of this content will actually have to be bulked signed. So you've imagine like legal contracts, today's legal contracts are gonna come in and we have to rapidly resign massive amount of those contracts. And so bulk signing is gonna be a critical need coming forward as well.

So, I mean, but let's take legal contracts for a moment. So that's an area where we're already used to digital signing and certificates, right? Yeah.

That's kind of accepted today. Yeah. Status quo.

It's rare that we do a wet signature anymore. Mm-Hmm. Um, and it really does, it actually speeds things up.

You don't have to print and then scan and fax and, and all of that stuff. Do you envision that happening with graphics and, and written content and everything else where we can, you know, quickly see a blue checkbox or some sort of lock symbol or something that signifies, Hey, this is legit. Yes.

Yes. I do that, that we need to get to that point to be able to say if it's a, some type of audio statement, a video, or if that's some type of content. The same thing with a contract.

If you're signing a, a, Dr. Hugh Thompson was, was my co-host and co-panelists, uh, in the presentation. And he talked about signing a contract for a bouncy house to rent for, for his kids' party is a much different contract than a very legally critical contract of a company.

And if that can be manipulated and edited and redone because the digital signature is broken, you need to be able to pro produce that content providence and that security and authenticity around it. So that digital signature needs to be reapplied. Mm-Hmm.

So you can verify that not only today for the digital signatures today, but also that's gonna be going forward in the future. 'cause some contracts last for years And then some. Yes.

I, I don't disagree with that either. Well, Jason, I wanna stop you for, I want to thank you for stopping in today and talking to us about this. This is something we've been talking about all day, you know, and a point I had made with the, uh, CPO pr Dipika Dipika Yes.

Was, as a customer of DigiCert, I don't wanna have to really worry about these things till I really have to worry about Mm-Hmm. But as a customer of DigiCert, when I really worry about them, I expect you to have a solution. Yes.

And so you gotta really worry about them earlier. Absolutely. We're, We're ahead.

And it's, you hear that you, you are really worrying about them and working on them now. We are. Excellent man.

Thank you. Thank you for hosting and, uh, keep up the great work. It's fantastic.

Thank you, Alan. All right, we're gonna take a break here in Las Vegas. I think we have a, a double coming up and then one more after that.

And that'll wrap up. Las Vegas, uh, 2023 digit sir. Trust.

Thanks, Jason. Thank you.