Why I’m helping build Tierion

Zaki Manian
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read

For past few months, I’ve been helping out Tierion with the design and implementation of Chainpoint and the Tierion Network. As with most experts in the blockchain space at the moment, I find myself with a lot of compelling things to do work on. I work on Tierion for several reasons.

  • Wayne, Glenn, and Jason are smart and extremely pleasant to work with.
  • A globally available robust time-stamping system has been a missing piece of internet infrastructure for decades.

The No Assholes Rule

The first and most important thing I look for in a security project is a group of smart, empathetic people trying to get things done. There is a mistaken belief that security is only achieved through adversarial process where the best ideas “win”. Every adversarial process I’ve seen results in suboptimal dangerous results. Building secure software is an act of care and empathy with users. Wayne, Glenn and Jason have repeatedly demonstrated they understand their user base and have a strong desire to build a more secure Internet.

Why Chainpoint is needed and necessary?

If you have been paying attention to information security news, you’ll notice that attacker behavior is starting to shift from stealing and encrypting data, to modifying and falsifying data. While forgeries are more difficult to execute, their potential impact can be much more devastating that other attacks. The idea of using merkle timestamping as resilience mechanism is ancient by the standards of modern cryptography but it is still only used in specialized settings. Anecdotally , I’ve read of banks and hedge funds. Probably the mostly widely deployed system is certificate transparency but efforts to make a certificate transparency end point verifiable have yet to materialize. It’s mostly a system for giant internet companies to audit the certificate authorities.

What is needed is a system that is globally available, too cheap to meter, secure and fault tolerant. The design of the Tierion Network is a plausible mechanism for democratizing access to a secure time stamping infrastructure beyond the elite systems that rely on it now.

Competing systems

There numerous competing systems out there but as as I can tell none of them get the design quite right.

Certificate Transparency

An ecosystem around distributing inclusion proofs and verifying logs. I’ve got no objection to centralized accountable systems but so far the Trillian and the other parts of the ecosystem are focused on other problems. It appears to take Google’s massive distributed database Spanner to operate CT on global scale. The options seem be Tierion or waiting for a major infrastructure player to move.

Open Timestamps

Open Timestamps seems more like a proof of concept than a generalized utility. Latency seems unacceptably high. This is largely a result of not having a high availability server infrastructure that maintains a calendar chain. Running a HA system requires a lot of engineering and ops skill. Tierion optimized for high available in choosing a modern micro services based architecture.

Guardtime

Guardtime is an excellent time stamping system for 0.1% of government, military and financial institutions. This capability needs to be democratized and the Chainpoint Network seems to over a plausible model for doing so.

Factom

The place where Factom went wrong is that they use their distributed data system to host their native cryptocurrency. Designing a distributed system that is double spend resistant comes at an enormous cost in terms of speed and scalability. TNT makes the right trade off. Leverage an existing chain to host tokens and optimize the network for speed, latency and reliability.

Conclusion

I fundamentally believe that Chainpoint is for good the continued health and well being of the internet. I worry for the future of internet security without something of this sort. I genuinely believe the Tierion team can get it done.

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Executive Director of the Trusted IoT Alliance and Board member of Restore the 4th.

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