Flowchain’s PPKI
The most unique part of Flowchain’s ecosystem is its privacy, which can be considered one of the best for data privacy. Before talking about it in deep, let’s first talk about the traditional PKI.
PKI is abbreviated as “Public Key Infrastructure” which consists of hardware, software, management policies, participants and processes that are exclusively designed to create, manage, distribute, use, store and revoke digital credentials. It is considered as an information infrastructure.
Most of the IoT networks use the public- key infrastructure to authenticate devices and see that the data is secure and private. The IoT network can be considered as a platform for IoT devices to generate and exchange critical security data. To deliver the data to the network for exchanging, the IoT device should sign the generated data by the digital public key and then deliver. This method could be expensive in regard to computing power and energy consumption. The PKI method consumes an immense amount of time and resources, which causes great delay and energy consumption as millions of devices on the IoT operates at the same time. To overcome this, Flowchain came up with PPKI (Pseudonymous PKI) for private blockchains and replace the traditional PKI method.
Before learning how exactly PPKI works, let’s give a glance at the hybrid blockchain. A hybrid blockchain is a combination of public and private blockchains. It combines the benefits of a permission and private blockchain with the security and transparency benefits of a public blockchain. This technique is generally proposed for efficient data privacy. The use cases of hybrid blockchain are as given below.
- To secure the data provenance, the public blockchain can store transactions in the hybrid blockchain.
- Private blockchain determines which transactions are public, and submit them to the public blockchain.
These are the main use cases of hybrid blockchain. Based on the business logic and design of the applications, public, private or hybrid blockchains can be used by the blockchain architect. Flowchian has introduced hybrid blockchain architecture to achieve inexpensive and secure blockchain for the IoT. The hybrid blockchain architecture is to enable fast authentication by eliminating traditional PKI methods. Understanding hybrid blockchain that overcomes the PKI method before knowing in-depth about Flowchain’s PPKI is advisable.
15–10–2019
