| | January 201519CIOReview A system would imply for accountability and transparency for global society that would transform our society from trust based to truth basedEnter the BlockchainOne of the most significant trends over the last few years, (spearheaded by Bitcoin) has been the move away from centralized trust authorities to decentralized "consensus" trust models­assertions about what is and what is not true can be verified independently using a public ledger built using consensus based decision making.Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) is an example of a blockchain technology optimized for the Industrial Internet­trusted parties are eliminated for verifying the integrity and provenance of both infrastructure components and data generated from that infrastructure. If we think of the Industrial Internet as a giant logistics platform for data, then we can think of a transaction as a transport or processing of data. Data is generated from sensors (network), processed (compute) and kept for reuse at a later date (storage). Imagine if the Blockchain contained every data transaction-every transport, compute and storage of data, i.e. every step in the data supply chain. The truth would be inside the block chain, which can be used to verify the status of infrastructure and provide complete chain of custody for all data that was generated and transmitted through that infrastructure. Everyone can independently verify the status of that infrastructure and any change would indicate a breach­which can be acted upon in real-time. It is security based on different assumptions-but those assumptions provide a level of empirical verifiability that has not been possible to date. Subsequently, with this real-time awareness, incident response, data-loss prevention, investigation, and/or network resilience it is now possible to detect and react to any misconfiguration, network and/or component/application failure. Implementing the BlockchainA Blockchain security system for the Industrial Internet would give complete traceability, accountability and transparency, organizations that are either using or administrating the Industrial Internet can be held responsible for their actions. Regulators get to audit all processes and everyone involved can verify what happened after the fact--and act in real time when things go wrong.Of course a reasonable question to ask would be whether such a system could be built in reality. Billions of data transactions every second that would need to be entered into the blockchain and distributed out to the edge. The implied network, storage and compute requirements would make it impossible to scale­but these are precisely the challenges KSI was invented to solve. Now here's a thought-imagine if that blockchain wasn't just for one Industrial network-but for all networks, and all data-every transport, compute and storage of data across all networks in the world. Imagine what such as a system would imply for accountability and transparency for global society. It would transform our society from one that is trust based to one that is truth based, i.e. humans can choose to trust each other, but they can also verify; they can prove what happened without trusting anyone.Integrity BreachYour CarYour FlightYour Local Power StationYour PacemakerYour Home ConfidentialityBreachYour braking system stops working.Your braking patterns are exposed.Your plane's instruments report that you are 1,000 feet lower than you actually areCritical systems compromised leading to shutdown or catastrophic failureYour security system is remotely disabledThe contents of your fridge are"leaked". You drink how much beer? Shutdown and deathYour electricity bill is published online.Your heartbeat becomes public knowledge.Your flight plan is posted on the Internet. (note: it already is)"Mike Gault
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