Infinitus (INF) — Unlike Traditional Methods
Losing stuff… it’s terrible and immediately generates a feeling of distress and helplessness. You cannot do anything to retrieve the object, you don’t even know where it is, except that it’s lost. But if that’s bad, imagine having an impregnable glass wall between you and the lost object: you can see it — it’s right in front of your eyes — but you cannot get to it.
That’s the feeling you have when you lose access to your crypto assets: you know where it is but you cannot get to it because an impregnable glass wall called blockchain is stopping you. This is where Infinitus comes in to save the day and to make your life easier by opening a door in the glass wall.
Problems With The Old Way Of Securing Sensitive Information
The “old” ways are… old but that alone doesn’t mean they are bad. What makes them bad (or let’s say “less secure”) is the vulnerability to cyber-attacks on one hand and the danger of losing access to the data on the other hand.
Cyber-attacks. These have long plagued the sensitive data sector and throughout recent history we’ve witnessed huge breaches that resulted in millions of accounts being compromised. Facebook — 87 million users compromised. Sony’s PlayStation Network — 77 million accounts compromised. Adult Friend Finder — 412 million. Yahoo — 3 billion accounts hacked!!! These are all huge companies and you would think they pay a lot of attention to their cyber security, yet they lost the users’ sensitive information. Bottom line: computers are hackable and that’s a fact. When you store your sensitive data with a company, you are actually storing it on someone else’s computer and you trust them to protect it.
Lost Access. To open our “vaults” where we store personal information, data and cryptocurrency, we use a password or a private key. If that is lost, we hit the impregnable glass wall and we cannot access the vault’s contents. If our data is stored with a centralized entity, we can reach out to them and ask for a password reset. You forget your Yahoo password? No problem, just hit a button and get a new one. But as you saw from the examples above, centralized entities can be hacked.
On the other hand, if we’re talking about crypto, it means that blockchain security is in place and as we know, the blockchain is decentralized and “unhackable”. In other words, if you forget your password or lose your private key, you cannot reach out to someone to have it reset and you cannot hack your way into your own crypto-wallet. It’s a two-edged sword: you know that nobody can access your wallet due to the unhackable nature of blockchain tech but that means you cannot access it either if you lose your password or private key.
So what’s the answer? There’s only one: don’t lose your password. Sure, but that may be easier said than done, at least if you’re using the “old” ways like writing it down, storing it in a cloud or using a password manager. If you write it down, you can easily misplace the piece of paper, cloud storages can be hacked and password managers are centralized applications, so they can be also hacked or can pose serious risks. For example, in 2017 LastPass, which is one of the most well known password managers, reported it was trying to fix a serious vulnerability that could allow password theft or computer malware infection.
Obviously we need a better solution!
The Differences And Benefits That Infinitus Brings To The Industry
Blockchain technology is entering multiple aspects of our lives and has become so much more than just cryptocurrency. Only recently, Commonwealth Bank and five major supply chain companies have conducted an experiment during which they’ve traded and tracked 17 tonnes of almonds using a blockchain platform that digitised documentation, operations and finance. The shipment went from Victoria, Australia to Hamburg, Germany and was tracked throughout the entire journey. By using IoT devices, the operators were able to monitor conditions (temperature, humidity, etc.); also, the documents required by customs were uploaded onto the Ethereum blockchain.
This is just one in many examples of blockchain approaching mass adoption, so it would be only normal that we start using it to store and protect our private data as well. And this is exactly what Infinitus has been designed to do! By making use of blockchain technology, Infinitus encrypts and then scatters your private data across a decentralized network, bringing the major benefit of decentralization.
This means that hacks are no longer a problem because the information is distributed in hundreds of locations, so a hack on either one would be irrelevant for the data’s overall integrity. The “old” solutions encrypt data and store it in a centralized manner, thus it’s unclear what would happen if the owning company would cease to exist or if it was sold.
The point is that you depend on others, you have to trust them with your data security. So, on one hand you have centralized solutions such as data banks, clouds, password managers, which can all be hacked as we’ve seen many times and on the other hand you have a decentralized solution, which eliminates single point failure and the trust issue. It’s literally Old vs New and in this case the differences are too big to be ignored. Infinitus is the first to use blockchain technology to secure sensitive data but it won’t be the only one, as probably the rest of the industry will soon adapt to the new blockchain standard.
Increased Security And User Friendliness
We live in the Digital Age and will always have passwords that require safekeeping. Crypto users will always have private keys, mnemonic phrases, recovery seeds and small files that need the same or higher security. The Infinitus dApp takes care of all that by offering a decentralized, blockchain solution to encrypt and store your sensitive data. There are different methods available, but none of the ones currently in use offers the same level of security, peace of mind and ease of use.
