Week of 7th May: Blockchain security news roundup
The following is a rundown of recent announcements about security-related blockchain research and development:
Blockchain security for police forensics
A new kind of blockchain system could provide law-enforcement authorities with a way to ensure the security of evidence seized for police investigations, according to information recently published by China’s Intellectual Property Office. Developed by the Third Research Institute of China’s Ministry of Public Security, the system is designed to “effectively prevent the forensic data source from being falsified in the cloud computing data forensics, and simultaneously carries out privacy protection, and achieves the goal of preventing falsification and privacy protection afterward”, according to a Google translation of the document.
Colorado eyes blockchain to combat cyber threats
Legislators in Colorado have recently approved a bill that requires state officials in several departments to identify cyber threats and investigate potential safeguards against such threats, including distributed ledger technologies. Approved on 7 May, Colorado Senate Bill 86 — ‘Cyber Coding Cryptology For State Records’ — applies to the governor’s office of information technology, the department of state and the executive director of the department of regulatory agencies. The bill aims to “protect against falsification, create visibility to identify external hacking threats, and to improve internal data security”.
DHS cybersecurity head testifies about blockchain efforts
The US Department of Homeland Security is working with several industry partners to evaluate “the security and privacy implications of blockchain technologies”, the department’s Douglas Maughan told a joint House committee/subcommittee hearing in Washington, DC, on 8 May. In written testimony, Maughan, director of the cybersecurity division of DHS’ Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate, said: “Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies are rapidly moving from hype to reality in application domain areas where DHS S&T is currently working. This reality means DHS S&T must aggressively work with its research, development, test and evaluation partners throughout government and industry so homeland security applications of blockchain and distributed ledger technology are effective and trusted.”
Specs are out for forthcoming FINNEY ‘blockchain smartphone’
Switzerland-based Sirin Labs recently released specs for “the world’s first blockchain smartphone”, a device it is co-developing with Foxconn International Holding. The smartphone is expected to arrive on the market later this year. Featuring Android functionality and an embedded cold storage crypto wallet, the FINNEY phones will enable “seamless and automatic token conversions for the use of different decentralised applications, without the hassle of obtaining the different tokens through an exchange”, Sirin Labs said. The company is also working on a blockchain-enabled FINNEY PC.
‘Entanglement in time’ could keep a quantum blockchain secure
A pair of researchers in New Zealand have proposed a conceptual design for a quantum blockchain that would be secure from hacking even by a quantum computer. As described in an article in IEEE Spectrum, Del Rajan and Matt Visser’s proposal would encode block records using photons through “entanglement in time… In this scenario, a hacker cannot tamper with any photon encoding records of the past, since those photons no longer exist in the current time — they already got absorbed. At best, a hacker can attempt to tamper with the most recent photon, the most current block, and successfully doing so would invalidate that block, informing others it got hacked.”
