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insight story blockchain

Blockchain’s amazing versatility promises world-changing uses

  • min read
    • New blockchain applications are spreading fast in every type of business. It can do things once hard to do reliably, like validating supply chain sustainability, giving consumers more trustworthy information and even rewarding people for getting exercise. Does your business need to get to grips with blockchain, and how could you use it to transform your business for the better? Kaspersky's new podcast, Insight Story, unpacks emerging tech trends with global specialists and businesses successfully using the tech. Episode 3 looks at blockchain. I speak with UK-based Helen Disney, Director of The Realization Group and Founder of Unblocked. Germany-based Abhi Sharma, Global Lead of Mobility Platform, Blockchain and Partner Universe at BASF also joins us. A simple way to understand blockchain Helen likens blockchain to an old idea everyone recognizes. "We've had ledgers for a long time – someone sends you an invoice, you write down when someone pays and match the two. Blockchain is a digital, distributed ledger. It provides an audit trail for all transactions and activities on a shared network. 'Distributed' means everyone in that network has a copy, so you can't go back in time and change things." Businesses see that a reliable, shared ledger that's hard to change makes more things possible. Helen says, "There are examples of using blockchain in business and for social impact, like in healthcare and supply chains, in creative industries, the energy sector and environmental initiatives. In financial services, blockchain can create efficiencies, speed up settlement times and let people transact with assets not currently tradable." Blockchain Research Institute continually examines the many applications of blockchain, from ocean health to medical research to border security. Grand View Research estimates the global blockchain market is worth 10 billion US dollars today and will grow 88 percent each year. Cottoning on to value in supply chain sustainability Abhi Sharma explains a BASF blockchain initiative that capitalizes on the premium consumers are willing to pay for sustainable products to incentivize sustainable cotton production. The largely undifferentiated nature of the commodity market has made this challenging in the past. Abhi says, "Farmers have had no incentive to use better practices to protect the environment because that information doesn't flow to the consumer." Seed 2 Sew aims to change that. "Farmers enter information in a mobile application at every stage of their season, harvest and delivery of goods. When they use sustainable practices like natural irrigation, they can enter the practice in the application and take photos for proof, creating extra value." It's not just farmers who could claim credit for doing the right thing. "Other players in the market could be motivated to install solar panels, use sustainable electricity and so forth." Seed 2 Sew is designed to fit naturally with how farmers already work. "They're not sitting at a computer filling in spreadsheets – they're taking photos in the field and feeding that data into the blockchain. Their motivation is high, because there's high demand on the retail side for more sustainable products." And on the retail side, consumers need confidence in sustainability claims. "Consumers are becoming more conscious. They want to buy less, but buy more meaningful, story-driven products. We're creating that traceability and transparency that prevents greenwashing." Where to start with blockchain But where should a business leader start? Helen thinks it's down to understanding your business as much as blockchain. "Think about, in my business, where could this be beneficial? Do I want to offer some reward points or incentives to customers, change the business's financial infrastructure, or do something with my supply chain? Start with what's important to you, and look for real-world examples of what's been done." Many early-adopter projects haven't continued, and Abhi sees lessons in that. "Organizations need a start-up culture. You need fail fast, learn fast models. But it's more about the people than the investment – whether they can drive a project, whether they can scale it. Your people will drive your idea into the marketplace." He thinks exploring blockchain is worth it regardless of whether you ultimately use it. "For those who've dived into it, it shifts their mindset. Thinking about the possibilities gives them different ideas. Once you realize you can do something in a decentralized or distributed way, it changes how you think." Blockchain and cybersecurity Head of Kaspersky Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) for Latin America, Fabio Assolini, thinks businesses should note risks associated with blockchain, whether you use it in your business or not. "Blockchain isn't immutable. Attacks on these systems have happened, like 51 percent attacks." That's when a group of cryptocurrency miners achieves control of more than half of a network's computational power, allowing them to alter the blockchain. "Another problem with blockchain is double-spending – under certain conditions, miners can modify blocks to spend cryptocurrency twice. For small companies, that can be a real problem." But cybercriminals using blockchain is behind a fast growing number of attacks. "Cryptojacking is one of the most common attacks. Cybercriminals hijack the power of processing on your servers by programming your device to mine cryptocurrency for them. When they invade a system, they will also sell the access to other cybercriminals." Cryptojacking is rising dramatically – Kaspersky research showed a 230 percent increase in 2022. It can slow systems and ramp up your energy bills, but Fabio warns there aren't always obvious signs. "More professional fraudsters prepare crypto mining software that runs smoothly. The administrator may not realize there's something going on." Businesses can prevent cryptojacking by adopting cybersecurity best practice. "There's no single action, but a set of good practices to protect against remote access. For example, you need firewalls, access control to all systems and logging of all user activity," says Fabio. "Attacks that install crypto mining software will also be detected by a good endpoint security solution." Where will blockchain go next? Blockchain will be as common as smartphones, according to Helen. "In the future, we'll all have a web wallet and assets and tokens sitting on blockchains." She believes the incentives and benefits will compel consumers to adopt blockchain-based products fast. "We're already seeing examples, like play-to-earn games, where you can earn cryptocurrency playing computer games and then trade it for other things. Sweatcoin lets you earn money for walking. These apps also generate data business or research organizations could use to understand our lives better." Our experts have a few thoughts for those considering or starting to use blockchain. Abhi says, "Business leaders should think more about how to maintain it. I see many sustainability-related blockchain initiatives, but few survive." Helen thinks we need a more widespread understanding of blockchain to unleash its true potential. "We can solve big global problems by building communities of interest and incentivizing change. Blockchain is for everybody. You needn't be technical to understand it. Make time to learn, and you'll find it fascinating." Listen to the full Insight Story audio series on Podbean or your usual podcast provider.
trust management

Businesses need trust, and trust management is here to help.

  • min read
    • Trust is crucial to personal and professional decisions. It determines which brands we'll share our data with or work with and allows managers to let employees work flexibly. But could trust help us make better decisions about sharing corporate information and IT network access? Workplace mental health expert Dr. Joti Samra says pandemic life has given us "new co-workers:" Those we live with 24 hours a day, seven days a week. My partner Dr. Theo Dimitrakos is a world-leading expert in trust management, currently working in the Trustworthiness Theory, Technology and Engineering Lab, Huawei Europe. He's a much-cited author, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kent, where he chairs the advisory board of Kent Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Cyber Security and founder of an international trust management research community. Between lockdown chores and deciding who should load the dishwasher – while we wait for Samsung's futuristic new kitchen robot – we had a cup of tea and chat about trust management. Dr. Theo Dimitrakos, Trust Management expert Susi O'Neill: Trust management, from what I hear between the walls, seems complex. What are the basics – how would you explain it to your mother? Theo Dimitrakos: Before retiring, my mother ran an olive oil business in Greece. I learned many skills by helping the family business. In the 1980s, I installed an Amstrad computer in our Athens shop window, showing 8-bit animations to amazed passers. My parents would produce print packaging slips giving measurements of the olive oil's pureness from the state chemical analysis agency. This was before standard classifications like 'virgin' and 'extra virgin' olive oil. Central to trust management is reliability assessment, so parties can trust each other to share data. If I claim my olive oil is 100 percent unrefined virgin oil, you need to be able to check my claim. It helps if I give you a trust statement, like the oil purity label. You need to validate the assessor – in this case, seeing proof from the state agency who is an authority qualified to assess the oil. I can verify your mother's olive oil is delicious. What are some more key concepts in trust management? In the olive oil example, recognizing authority is a key concept which underpins trust assessment. Different methods of measuring trust are also important. My colleague Professor Audun Jøsang, who invented subjective logic, created a calculus for computing in trust networks. It's now combined with decision networks to measure trustworthiness in neural networks. Trust-based decisions inform how an intelligent agent program makes final purchasing decisions using data. Professor Harrison McKnight, my co-editor for Trust Management VI, developed a cognitive model to explain the process. Another fundamental of trust management is trust negotiation: Incremental information disclosure. Organizations must take care of what they disclose, to whom and how. Releasing information over time can help reach a trust level to share more valuable data for a common goal. Trust negotiation can help decide how to share credentials to achieve the least-privilege principle (users can only access the parts of the system or data they need for their job) to implement the zero-trust security model. Trust negotiation algorithms do this and more. Before you let someone have privileged information, you may want to check their security clearance. In an IT system, you may want to share as little information as possible for the task, then let the system ask for more information when you need higher-level access. How did you become interested in trust management? After gaining my Computer Science Ph.D. at Imperial College, London, I worked at a UK government computing lab. We experienced the first dot-com bubble crash around 2001. People lost trust in tech businesses. I felt I had to take action, so I got involved in an international partnership between government, academics and industry to improve trust between customers and companies. In 2002, with the late Christos Nikolau (IBM and University of Crete,) we established iTrust, an interdisciplinary network including experimental economists, philosophers, and cybersecurity and access management specialists. Trust management previously meant identity and access management for IT networks. We broaden it to include models for measuring and increasing trust and consumer confidence. I found the experimental economists' research particularly interesting. Microeconomics Professor Claudia Keser wanted to look at giving incentives for supplying data. We now see that in practice as people trade their data for free online services. In 2004, I led an international applied research project that developed a framework for managing trust when sharing sensitive data between organizations. The research informed web services trust protocols in use and created a start-up that's now a market leader in dynamic authorization. My interest in trust management continues. At the forthcoming IFIP conference, I will present new methods to authorize and change a person's access depending on their situation. For example, if they're working at home and others are present who shouldn't have access to sensitive documents, or they're trying to evade detection when taking photos of confidential documents on their computer screen. How has trust management evolved since then? There have been significant developments and new identity verification models, virtual organizations and consensus-based decisions. There are now more decentralized ways to create digital identities, share and verify them without violating privileges, nor the identity provider needing to track who's used them. How does this relate to decentralized data models like blockchain? Blockchain's decentralized trust model has distributed credentials and verifiers. It can be used to implement a trust model, but it's not the only way to implement trust management today. Credentials verification is a model promoted by W3C – the community that sets global open web standards – for verifying web information. It has nothing to do with blockchain but can be used alongside it. My colleague Professor David Chadwick, a co-editor of the standard, highlights this distinction. Blockchain or not, it means someone can prove your credentials without assuming a centralized authority, the party and identity provider issuer know each other. And you could use someone's credentials without the identity provider tracking what you do – for example, when you share your identity documents to open a new bank account or use a trust-led community like Airbnb. If credential verification becomes popular, big tech firms like Google will be less able to track us. How can businesses establish a suitable trust management model? Knowing your business means understanding its processes and data flows with suppliers, incentives for users and which authorities regulate your data or services. Understand your relationships, model them, design your system, then make it secure. Apply security from concept to deployment. How can businesses use trust management to improve IT security? Trust management predates zero trust and will probably outlive it. Zero trust integrates different decentralized trust models. It's becoming popular because of how technology has evolved: Our work environment has become more decentralized with cloud computing, remote working and data sharing. Zero trust is about decentralized trust models, fusing trust authorization and verification versus reliability. It means you need to check your assertions about someone rather than rely on another authority to validate them. You need to examine the subject and score them, then use that score and the outcome of your trust algorithm to decide what systems and information they can access. Now we can measure trust, so your decisions must be calculated. You can have verification like digital signatures, behavior analysis, biometrics, or a combination. This creates a trust score for each entity that should be linked to your access management policies. Authorization becomes dynamic and continuous. This is often overlooked when considering zero trust strategies for security and access control that only focus on prevention. As trust values change over time, authorization levels and access must change. You may need to increase, reduce or revoke authorization previously given. With Dr. Fabio Martinelli, Vice-Chair of the European Cybersecurity Organization, we recently developed a lightweight enabling technology for network gateways and consumer internet of things (IoT) devices that combine dynamic authorization with an evaluation of trust levels. I hope this helps zero trust models go beyond corporate networks to smart homes and data usage control. Excellent! Now I feel suitably informed about trust. So in place of the dishwasher robot, can I use a trust management model to make sure you do this? Yes, but we first need to set up an algorithm and scoring method, agree on incentives and maybe a consensus protocol. Perhaps technology models can't solve all our challenges yet. Opinions are those of the interviewee and do not represent his employers (corporate or academic).
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Secure Futures magazine is your go-to business guide for opinions, trends and insight into the world of technology and cybersecurity. We help your business to bring on the future. Brought to you by Kaspersky, the global cybersecurity experts.

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