by Bozho | Jul 17, 2020 | Aggregated, blockchain, Developer tips, ideas, integration
Blockchain has been a buzzword for the past several years and it hasn’t lived to its promises (yet). The value proposition usually includes vague claims about trust and unmodifiability, but rarely that has brought demonstrable improvement to existing processes. There are dozens of blockchain projects, networks, protocols, “standards”, and all of them can in some way help you solve either data integrity issues (guarantee that data has not been tampered with) or multi-party trust issues (several companies participating in one process shouldn’t have to trust each other in order to have automated cross-organization business processes). However, deploying and integrating a separate blockchain solution is usually a large project in itself and especially in the COVID-19 crisis likely gets postponed because of the questionable return on investment. But for the enterprise, blockchain is largely a shared database. Sharing data with other participants in a given business process in a secure way that doesn’t allow any of the participants to cheat. And this can be achieved not by adding a whole new blockchain infrastructure that would in turn integrate with existing systems (which in many cases can’t be integrated easily because they don’t have APIs), but by “blockchainizing” the existing database. Ideally, what I’m describing should be a project itself, which is either deployed alongside the database, or as part of an application. And what it can do is as follows: Select tables and columns to share with other participants – obviously only parts of the database should be shared with others Define shared data model and data transformations – sometimes data has to be transformed, or masked, in order to...
by Bozho | Oct 13, 2019 | Aggregated, blockchain, cryptography, Opinions
This week I have a talk on a meetup about blockchain beyond the hype – its actual implementation issues and proper use-cases. The slides can be found here: The main takeaways are: Think of blockchain in specifics, not in high-level “magic” Tamper-evident data structures are cool, you should be familiar with them – merkle trees, hash chains, etc. They are useful for other things as well, e.g. certificate transparency Blockchain and its cryptography is perfect for protecting data integrity, which is part of the CIA triad of information security Blockchain (a private one) can be a good enterprise integration solution for multi-organization setups where trust is required Many proposed use-cases can be solved with centralized solutions + trusted timestamps instead Usability is a major issue when it comes to wider adoption As with anything in technology – use the right tool for the job, as no solution solves every problem. The post Blockchain Overview – Types, Use-Cases, Security and Usability [slides] appeared first on Bozho's tech...
by Bozho | Apr 26, 2019 | Aggregated, blockchain, Opinions, security
Blockchain is a relatively niche technology at the moment, and even thought there’s a lot of hype, its applicability is limited. I’ve been skeptical about its ability to solve all the world’s problems, as many claim, and would rather focus it on solving particular business issues related to trust. But I’ve been thinking about the positive side-effects and it might actually be one of the best things that have happened to software recently. I don’t like big claims and this sound like one, but bear with me. Maybe it won’t find its place in much of the business software out there. Maybe in many cases you don’t need a distributed solution because the business case does not lend itself to one. And certainly you won’t be trading virtual coins in unregulated exchanges. But because of the hype, now everyone knows the basic concepts and building blocks of blockchain. And they are cryptographic – they are hashes, digital signatures, timestamps, merkle trees, hash chains. Every technical and non-technical person in IT has by now at least read a little bit about blockchain to understand what it is. So as a side effect, most developers and managers are now trust-conscious, and by extension – security conscious. I know it may sound far-fetched, but before blockchain how many developers and managers knew what a digital signature is? Hashes were somewhat more prevalent mostly because of their (incorrect) use to store passwords, but the PKI was mostly arcane knowledge. And yes, we all know how TLS certificates work (although, do we?) and that a private key has to be created and used with...
by Bozho | Dec 3, 2018 | Aggregated, blockchain, Opinions
Last week I gave a 20 minute talk on the way I see blockchain applicability. I’ve always been skeptical of the blockchain hype, having voiced my concerns, my rants and other thoughts on the matter. I’ve followed actual blockchain projects that didn’t really need blockchain but managed to yield some very good results by digitizing processes, by eliminating human error, and occasionally, by guaranteeing the integrity of data. And recently I read an article that put these observations into perspective – that blockchain is just a tool for digital transformation (a buzzword broadly meaning “doing things on a computer and more efficiently”). That rarely the distributed consensus is needed, let alone public ledgers. But that doesn’t matter, as long as the technology has lead to some processes being digitized and transformed. So here are the slides from my talk: And people are usually surprised that I have a blockchain-related company and I’m so skeptical at the same time. But that’s actually logical – I know how the technology works, what problems it solves and how it can be applied in a broad set of domains. And that’s precisely why I don’t think it’s a revolution. It’s a wonderful piece of technological innovation that will no doubt solve some problems much better than they were solved before, but it won’t be the new internet and it won’t change everything. Doesn’t that skepticism hurt my credibility as a founder of a blockchain-related startup? Not at all – I don’t want to get a project just because of a buzzword – that’s not sustainable anyway. I want to get it because it...
by Bozho | Jul 29, 2018 | Aggregated, blockchain, digital signatures, Opinions, security
Recently technical and non-technical people alike started to believe that the best (and only) way to prove that something has happened in an information system is to use a blockchain. But there are other ways to achieve that that are arguably better and cheaper. Of course, blockchain can be used to do that, and it will do it well, but it is far from the only solution to this problem. The way blockchain proves that some event has occurred by putting it into a tamper-evident data structure (a hash chain of the roots of merkle trees of transactions) and distributing that data structure across multiple independent actors so that “tamper-evident” becomes “tamper-proof” (sort-of). So if an event is stored on a blockchain, and the chain is intact (and others have confirmed it’s intact), this is a technical guarantee that it had indeed happened and was neither back-dated, nor modified. An important note here – I’m stressing on “digital” events, because no physical event can be truly guaranteed electronically. The fact that someone has to enter the physical event into a digital system makes this process error-prone and the question becomes “was the event correctly recorded” rather than “was it modified once it was recorded”. And yes, you can have “certified” / “approved” recording devices that automate transferring physical events to the digital realm, e.g. certified speed cameras, but the certification process is a separate topic. So we’ll stay purely in the digital realm (and ignore all provenance use cases). There are two aspects to proving digital events – technical and legal. Once you get in court, it’s unlikely to...
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