Overclocking Your Sunflowers - Cyber_Coo

for Elliot woo right just before I properly start and tell you what on Earth I'm actually going to be talking about um can I get someone at the back start I stop watch and I want everyone mentally to take a bet on how long this Hat's staying on my head throughout the talk and how far into this 30 minutes I'm going to manage to get with this on cuz this is my first time presenting a conference uh so I'm I'm really excited to share this with you guys and just to kind of help leave nerves I always had a thing with my mates that if you're if you're feeling stressed you put on something a bit more

colorful something just to brighten up the mood so so we always we always got out lays and just you know just a bit a bit of lay just really really helped it's beautiful make everything better so I'm going to tell you what I'm talking about and then going to conference and all the usual stuff so overclock and sunflowers so what on or in Earth um I actually going to be talking about so just how Machinery moves with um electrical we all know that Machinery moves through electrical signals and so and we know might control these electrical signals just the same way that we move through electrical signals those control Power brain but to further extend this we also know that we don't

need an Arduino for things to move we can entirely with no chips no anything just have the electricity doing a much simpler circuit and this is what we find in Plants a lot of the time plants are able to move out brains so this is largely speaking a thought experiment kind of talking through whether or not it's possible to use living plants and just things that are around us and maybe if we're sting FR computers all day and are completely you know surrounded by scream having a we plant really helps with your mental health really helps a lot things like this but can we actually use it as a form of mul Factor authentication so

there's a question I'm hopefully going to be answering for you guys today and so here's kind of what I'm going to be going through all the questions on your mind will be answered am I mad um of course the obligatory who am I um how I actually came up with this idea how you'd actually go about measuring it and the next step what we could actually do today if we wanted and we had the right tools what we could get set up in probably a couple of hours if we really tried so who am I I'm Elliot most sometimes known as cyber cou um I'm part of the ner cyber security Society um I'm the vice president this year was

President last year right now I'm interning with National Grid as a sore engineer and I absolutely love bad ideas as you can maybe tell from this talk I love love what we can actually learn from bad ideas I don't believe that they are useless um that bad ideas can really help us in numerous ways um we've taken this idea um me and a few of my friends from Ed here and Glasgow and those of the other um Scottish Unis and we we've created a thing we like to call Seas sides which we call um it's bad Talks by good students where you do purposely bad talks about bad ideas and you just need to try and get to work just to boost

your confidence speaking um and also I'm a lover of very high quality very smart sophisticated puns as you may or may not see throughout and of course I'm I'm very prepared and would never for example the night before this talk be sitting in a pub finishing finishing off my finishing off my power I wouldn't do that right I wouldn't um also also what I definitely definitely wouldn't do is well I I definitely wouldn't be sitting up the back like at lunch and stuff just still editing and making sure that like not even naming my presentation so it might get lost just leaving it as something I wouldn't I wouldn't do that I'm very organized and I wouldn't leave leave in

until the last second right so first question all your mind am I mad so the the idea of using a plants for things that aren't necessarily uh what you would usually use them for not normal biolog and all that is not necessarily uncommon there's um things about like modern bi U Modern Biology I don't know if any of you have seen this guy um like this he's a real fun guy like um right right some of you might have might have missed it there but but that that was that was actually a that was actually one of my smart puns and I can don't worry this is this is for all levels so just to make sure I feel like

I feel like I should warn you all so so you know a pun's coming just so you know you can prepare yourself or or you know to laugh so you don't feel left out um tell you what why don't we do something like we'll put a pawn warming up so we'll we'll have this guy come up and I saying bottom left hand cor uh bottom left hand corner yeah um for you guys just anytime I'm about to say a pun just just so you know you know to warn yourself and then like you know oh yeah it's the it's the pumble bee uh it just gets worse from here guys this is entirely what my talk is um so

we we'll we'll try this again we'll be like am I mad well there's Modern Biology um really interesting guy talks a lot about the psychology behind it as well as not only he um basically plugs his synthesizer into living plants and uses the electrical signals from there to create music um really really interesting um this would be nice to have I'll stick this a bit in and you get things like like this come from mushrooms so it's quite a quite a fun guy but yeah there is there's lot people who do things like this um you've got Greg who um did a whole Ted talk about it just kind of going over things like Venus fly traps and M the Mimosa um PL

not to be confused with the drink um which are both moving plants so as well know Venus traps close their mouth and uh the mimos plant also know as the sensitive plant closes its petals over whenever you touch it this creates really easy to detect electrical signal so action lab's also done a few things like this and this guy from YouTube which is actually where I first came up with the idea so I mean let's say basically basically what I'm trying to say is yeah I'm mad but I'm not the only one so where did this idea come from because as as we go through this journey I think I think it's really important that we

remember our rootes uh throughout this so as I said action lab did where they hooked up a sensitive plant to a uh Venus fly trap and when they were when they touched the sensitive plant the Venus fly trap actually closed because you're able to send electrical signals on and you're able to measure it look something like this and so the question became clear in my mind where it was like well if we had enough sensitive plants together you've got basically a binary system you've got open or closed is it sending out an electro signal or isn't it and if you've just got some bit of nonvolatile memory to remember that could you make an entire computer out of sensitive plans

now I'm not smart enough to actually B that off in my mind or anything or anything like that but maybe I can make it more cyber security related and more actually tangible something useful almost so the first question which was one I spent so long trying to work out because every single video about everything always was like yeah you just plug it in and you go but well okay so largely speaking you you ground the ground wire stick that one in there and then add a v met to it for things like sensitive plant this works because as a big movement lots of electricity like with humans when we're actually moving our fingers when we're moving

about the electrical signals are a lot easier to detect than some of the smaller things firing off in our brain we can still detect them but it just adds a bit more complexity to it um so what is possible right now so what we've got is we've got a plant that when we touch it it sends out electrical signal that we can easily detect and we can do that with each petal each leave oh I don't know want there so we can do that with each pet with each leave so really what we've got is we've got look something that we tactilely touch and then we're able to determine what we've touched through well I mean really really we've got a

keyboard or the very beginnings of a keyboard all we need to do is I don't know find some software that helps with it so like you know just like rubber duck but and we we want to make this easily so well if we've gotten Arduino arduinos have boards in place to build basically bad USBS and that allows us to really just with a bit of trial and error um put together a very basic keyboard as it was and we can use that as a password so when in terms of multiactor authentication um we've got about four different types of authentication and we need a combination of these to create mul Factor authentication so we've got

things you know knowledge what we created there is something you know it's a password that you need to know how to operate you need to know how to operate the plant and you've got a password check next type things you are the issue with things you are the plant's not going to prove you are anything it I that doesn't really fit into this but what I'm going to go on now is things you have in your procession you've got you own the plant you've got the plant in your procession can we prove it's that plant and things you do now this this one's going to be a bit more slightly more abstract but your daily routine

might involve Watering your plant it might involve not watering your plant when you go away on holiday do you want your plant to still log you in well no but if we manage to relate it to things you do sure surely we should be able to get something that as soon as you go away on holiday your physical item doesn't work it's mixing together um things you have and things you do that brings me on to the why because we' just got a keyboard we don't have anything useful but that doesn't mean it's not useful first of all it's changing the way we look at plants potentially um you might all of a sudden come up with a new idea you might

go somewhere else in this or you might just learn something that's not too useful but just a fun novelty fite your friends over and go hey look I can log in with my plan I just need to stick my hand in it but we could create a lot more secure systems theoretically with a plant but how do how do we measure this one because if we are not using sens plant before using a normal it's really really small tiny iCal signals that are measuring so and really we want to do it over a long period of time because what we're wanting to do is want to see if it's normal behavior Lally speaking we are seeing if it's the right plants we

need some signature off the plant so that's how the plant's electrical signals behave over a long period of time and we are wanting to know if it's reacting to the outside world differently so I can't remember what pun I put in here not going to lie to you guys um I was hoping I would have notes on the screen but um I didn't set up for that so but we can we can stick in ccope and then we can we can measure over a long period of time the issue is as soon as you got an oscope measuring there's I mean there's there's background radiation the oscope helps with it but really what would be ideal

just just for the measuring in like a learning stage to work out what's normal and just for testing to see if this would be possible is we need to a far cage would be ideal something to just remove electrical so really really what we we're wanting to do is well first of all I'm going to need to build mycope let's not let's not get too far ahead of ourselves I need to build my so I'm going to whip out my soldiering kit and use it as a few days distraction so I don't need to actually do things I need to do um so yeah building up my oscilloscope and then we're here where we we just we've got all this electrical

signal around it that just it's making it really hard to tell what's the plant what's not the plant yeah there's ways you can work it out but it's just I mean what would really be idea was if we could just shrink it down and then if we if we had some cheap far cage somewhere like some something that's just exess for into house like a microwave exactly perfect so if we manag to get it in a microwave and we start measuring it we get a lot better and here's where actually a lot of the questions that I don't have the answer to come up in this talk because it's what the diodes are made out of yeah we grounded one diod and we

stuck the other one in the flower but largely speaking there is loads of different papers talking about oh no no no you want to use titanium steel you want to use glass you want to use this you want to use that and they've all got different properties they've all got different abilities so you start looking at that and you go well we're going to need to test to see what actually works the best Which Way gives us the greatest indication of what is there so now what really we're going to need to tr and error we need to go through those different things try out loads of different plant see see if that see if that works really um

and it's laric just because we could from all the papers they've shown that outside actors you watering it everything plants react to it there's plants that sense of a bees nearby by listening for the sound of the B fluttering swings and if it hears that it will release more pollen so that that you can measure through the electrical signals to some extent so all these things show that you with a well-trained probably with a well trained AI you could create what is normal for a plant and basically create uba for H so uba's user analytics um so just determine whether or not it's the correct plant or whether or not the plant's acting differently so

all of a sudden you go on holiday and you've got Jimmy next door coming in to water your plant he Waters at a different time of the day than you this and that so you've got a real give and take at that point where you're needing to ask are [Music] we like are we wanting to oh no I missed I forgot to water my plant STI I can't log in sorry phoning up your work being like Oh that's me out today or really are we wanting to be a bit more forgiving or wanting maybe three days without watering and then that you cut off but really I feel like it would be a really really good bit it helps

give extra morale it's something nice around something nice to look at but also we could use it as multiactor authentications to the point we could use it that's both something you are as something you have and both something you do so yeah it it kind of works we we all scientific papers Point towards this even if they haven't put it in these terms um I've got those references afterwards if anyone's interested reach out to me come find me I can get them to you so things you have things you do theoretically possible to create a actually useful plan as multiactor authentication so I know you guys are thinking what does this mean for me what

is my Future Organization going to look like so it's going to look like a kind of basic I've just thrown up some security places here not necessarily an encompassing one but just an idea so then we can remember that maybe in the future we'll have the gardeners with us or bot the nests thank you that that was that was the best one I came up with I'm not I was so happy but it was that and pumble Bee I was so happy with myself for like 3 days straight after that so um there's also crisper which I'm just going to cover quickly it was the 2020 um Nobel chemistry prize um it's genome editing it's getting to the point

where you can have take on uh genome editing uh point you can have take home genome editing kits which is great but you've got all issues of you know um interacting with the outside world as it going to damage the ecosystem is all that I feel like should we not exhaust what plants can do without you know Medi thing before there's loads of papers about oh we could edit it and then it can store our information it can do that it can do this and it's it can do so much right now we just need to think about it in a different way we just need a bad idea to bring it all together so maybe next time you hear hack the

planet you can think of it just slightly more literally and thank you that's all if there's any puns that you are very disappointed I didn't have please add me on Twitter and use hash pumble v um yeah thank you very [Applause] much