So, happily, my talk is going to build a little bit on the talk that you just saw, the difference
being that I'm making proposals and they actually built things, so it's a little different.
My name is Robert Reed, I am the founder of Public Invention, but what I'm presenting
today is not a Public Invention project, this is co-work with two other people, Victoria
Jacqua and Christina Cole of Open Source Medical Supplies, Open Source Medical Supplies
and Public Invention are both US 501C3 organizations.
So what I'd like to talk about is global open source quality assurance of emergency
supplies and we call this GASCOS or the Global Open Source Quality Assurance System and I'm
making a proposal today for this.
Now, open source manufacture has rapidly responded in a number of important cases to things that
have happened like open source software responded to contract tracing in the previous talk.
In particular, 3D printers can represent sort of an army for good that can immediately do
things to help in a man-made or a natural disaster.
In particular, we're working with some people to make tourniquets for the crisis in Ukraine
right now and of course, if you saw my other talk, we've also made human ventilation products
and other things.
But when you do this, you have this fundamental problem, you have a widely distributed supply
chain of people attempting to make useful products, but how do you trust them?
And the trust can be broken down into two issues.
How do you trust that the design itself is useful?
And then even if the design is a good design, how do you trust that the manufacturer is
in fact a good manufacturer?
Because of course, we all know, for example, 3D printing requires tuning and so forth.
Well, if you imagine using a tourniquet, which is a simple physical device but can easily
be mis-manufactured, especially if it's 3D printed, you're using it in a life-saving situation
where you're trying to stop bleeding.
If it breaks, you have a real serious problem.
And so even though a tourniquet only costs $20 and it's a relatively simple device, ensuring
the quality of that is very important.
It's almost better not to have a tourniquet than to have a faulty tourniquet.
Now I am a humanitarian engineer and I consider humanitarian engineering the space that I
work in.
Most of the people who worked for this that I know of were not making money from it.
They didn't have a financial incentive to try to sell products to address these things.
But nonetheless, engineers have a psychological problem, right?
Nobody wants their baby to be called ugly.
And so all of us wanted to be heroes and we wanted to save the world and save lives.
And for that reason, engineers cannot be trusted to evaluate their own work, okay?
But of course, this is a problem that the open-source software community has dealt with
already and I'll deal with that.
So in October of 2022, just four or five months ago, many non-governmental organizations in
the humanitarian engineering space got together for three hours and we had really a surprisingly
unanimous agreement that we needed quality assurance for rapidly manufactured open-source
devices.
And we needed an alliance of NGOs to try to address this.
And so Christine and Victoria and I formed a new informal organization, we haven't incorporated,
that we call GASCOS or the Global Open-Source Quality Assurance System.
So the open-source software movement knows how to do testing, okay?
Of course, it's easier to test software than to test hardware devices.
With software, you normally have automated tests that anyone is empowered to run.
You download the repository, you run the test, and you have an independent verification of
the quality of the code.
So in a sense, what we want to do for hardware devices is what's already been done for software
devices or software systems.
So fundamentally to this for hardware devices is to show the data.
So you want a test procedure that's sort of a named standard test procedure.
And then you want to record a test result.
You want to say, what was done, when was it done, how was it done, and who did it?
And you may have obviously an analysis of either you pass the test or you fail, and
if you fail, in what way do you fail?
And finally, you want a discoverable publication of those tests for the particular device.
Now there are examples of testing organizations like Underwriters Laboratory and ASTM and
other things.
Often what happens is an industry begins its own testing procedures and then later they
become adopted into governmental regulation.
So it's actually the case that many industries are sort of self-policing and then they become
part of a governmental structure later.
So what we propose is asset provenance tracking as the fundamental way that we can improve
the quality of rapidly manufactured devices.
So when I say provenance, what I mean is the history of the device in the same way that
an art object has a provenance, right, who owned it, what happened to it, where was it
physically throughout time.
Now this is a way to fight counterfeiting, which is a serious problem for medical devices
particularly in low and middle income countries, but even in other situations.
It's also a way to organize documentation on behalf of makers.
So it's not necessarily that you're doing anything that couldn't be done some other
way, but you could be relieving the burden of the makers themselves from having to do
all of the documentation and distributing the documentation across a number of parties.
So this would allow third party quality assurance testing, relatively simple to implement, can
use minimal well understood cryptography, I'm going to talk about that in a minute.
Now of course people will say, well there exist asset tracking systems.
There is an open source app asset tracking system called Snipet.
It's possible that this should be a fork of Snipet.
There are some ways in which it's different.
What I'm proposing is different than Snipet.
I don't have time in this talk to discuss that issue, but this is what we would like
to produce.
So you can imagine a box of tourniquets having a gas cost seal printed on it, literally a
sticker is put on it.
And the person who manufactures the tourniquets gets a unique key for this box of tourniquets,
which either they generate or we generate for them.
We describe the product, which is actually more important than you might think.
And then we can give certain certifications if they have actually occurred for the object
so that anyone who holds the box in their hands can get some useful information about
what's in the box.
But more importantly, every box will have a key that you can use to look up in a public
open access online database stuff about the particular object, okay?
Now it's kind of easy to understand how this would work.
Imagine that it's made in Prague, it gets a private key, someone else in Prague does
a third party test on it that goes into the database, it's then purchased by a middle
man in Egypt, the person in Egypt transfers it to Tanzania, in Tanzania, someone verifies
that it's in inventory and a potential buyer in Kagoma then looks at the key, takes the
box in their hand and points their phone at it and says, this claims to be a box of mask
or tourniquets or electronics or whatever.
And they look up in the website the complete history of the device.
Now just as we use for intellectual property and other art objects, if you can see the
complete history of the device, it's very difficult to fake that.
Not impossible, but it's quite, quite difficult to fake a chronologically accurate history
for a device.
And so in this way it provides great confidence to the person in Kagoma that this product
is what it says it is.
Thank you sir.
Okay now I assume most of the people in this room are computer programmers and they can
probably have already imagined how this would be implemented.
From a programmatic point of view it's very simple, you just have a database, you assign
keys, you use one way encryption, much easier than the sort of public key encryption and
the other kinds of things that are necessary today in the cryptocurrency world.
You just do a simple one-way encryption of the key so that you allow a public access
where anyone can write into the database, okay.
Now there are a number of things that you would think are security flaws in this.
We don't have time in this talk to go over them, but I hold that the following principle
is simple enough and good enough.
It's not perfect, but it's good enough to build a workable system.
If you have the device in your hand you have a right to see the provenance.
Now there are ways in which that differs from our norm today.
For example in the United States if I have a box of something in my hand I do not have
a legal right to see where it physically was located before I got it.
And if I have a box in my hand I do not have a right to see the provenance in the future.
Nonetheless seeing those things is not particularly harmful.
You can imagine that being a right and it wouldn't really hurt anything if that were
true.
And so I consider this to be a great simplifying assumption.
If you have the physical device you have the right to see the provenance.
And that simplifies an enormous number of things.
Now what you're not allowed to do is even though the database is in a sense public you're
not allowed to scrape it and see the history of all of the devices which are in the database.
But you won't be able to do that unless you have the keys because it's encrypted.
Okay, therefore the database can be made a public database.
This is very very simple, but I claim it's going to be good enough for us to really provide
quality insurance.
So if you imagine this system existing and you have a gas cost seal that can be put on
objects you can ask well does it apply to medical devices or does it apply to non-medical
devices?
Does it interact with the CE stamp used in Europe to authorize medical devices or with
the US FDA?
And the answer is it can overlap all of those in a complicated way.
It really doesn't require the approval of a government.
It can be a completely open provenance tracking system which is used or not used as people
see fit in a voluntary way.
Now the idea of open source devices are a threat to monopolies, but they're not a threat
to large firms.
There's no reason large firms could not use open source designs and use the same provenance
tracking system that we are suggesting here in order to give buyers confidence in their
system.
Today, very large firms have their own internal provenance tracking systems.
They have asset tracking systems that they use for their own inventory purposes, but
they do not expose those and make them public to people and would consider them a trade
secret.
There's no reason why they don't use an open source provenance tracking to add confidence
to their products.
So I claim that there's no reason anyone ought to particularly oppose this system.
Now we have started writing technical papers about this.
These are very much in a draft form.
They're not super great, but they're publicly available and we invite comment on them.
We are actively trying to build this system.
And so today, in this very small room, I'd like to publicly launch the free global asset
provenance tracking idea.
I would like to be the technical lead of the new open source project system to build a
website to provide this technology, but I can't do it completely by myself.
For one thing, I run public invention, which is a nonprofit that takes up a lot of my time.
So I'd like to call for volunteers, both computer programmers and non-computer programmers
who can handle business and communications and other things that we need to make this
a reality.
There's going to be a lot of work convincing people to voluntarily use this system until
it becomes respected enough that people start to demand it.
Thank you.
So that ends my talk.
Thank you.
And I'm happy to take questions.
If anybody has a question, I'll repeat it into the microphone.
Yes, sir.
If you notice that something was touched in some previous steps of the system, what happens?
So the question is, if you notice that something was previously touched.
Yes, so for example, this middle man in Egypt took a few out or screwed it up and then after
five steps, the guy in Tanzania noticed that something was wrong.
What happens?
Well, so there's no guarantee that the entries in the database are completely accurate, okay?
But it is the case that you can make an entry saying, it looks to me as if the device was
tampered with, okay?
Now the people downstream of the provenance can decide what to do with that information
or not.
They can ignore it or they can say, well, so and so says the box was tampered with, I'm
going to begin a legal proceeding with someone earlier in the provenance train or I'm going
to ignore it or I'm going to believe that that was entered for some nefarious purpose
to sabotage my system or I will use it to repair the device and inspect it and make
sure that it's good.
It's already the case that the US FDA requires market surveillance of objects for the purpose
of doing recalls as well as for other safety purposes.
So in a sense, the fact that you have that potential information is a positive thing
about the provenance tracking, not a negative thing.
Yes, sir?
So maybe you suggest that anybody can just add information to this whole database, like
how does that build on trust of suppliers or like how do you, the sticky recognition
of who actually supplied this information?
Yes, the question is, can anybody add information to the record for a device and the answer
is yes if you have the key.
Okay, so a bad actor can't pollute the entire database, but if I broke into your warehouse
and took a photocopy of a box, I could create a record for that.
So anyone can claim that they have this device if they have the key for the device and they
can make a false claim about it or an accurate claim.
But just as with art objects and other kinds of things, I think false claims will be relatively
easy to sort out in the system.
And so the great simplicity of this is that it's a completely open database that doesn't
require any security beyond maintaining the individual keys.
And if a key for an individual object is corrupted, like for example, suppose I took a photo of
your box and published it on the internet.
Well, bad actors could likely disrupt the provenance of that box, but they could not
disrupt the provenance of the rest of your inventory.
So I claim this is the correct balance between simplicity and security, and we don't have
to go overboard on it.
All right, thank you, I think that's all the questions we have time for.
Okay, thank you very much.