Disruptor Daily has nominated SmartAxiom for an award for best use of blockchain technology in cybersecurity.
Security is a mess in the Internet-of-Things. There are already billions of connected devices and if they are secured at all, it’s by a server or cloud service. Organizations are finding such centralized security has a host of issues: high latency, single point of failure at the server, complex certificate and key management and a susceptibility to man-in-the-middle attacks.
SmartAxiom has developed a lightweight blockchain protocol they call BlockLock. It runs among the devices at the edge of the internet (gateways, controllers, WiFi routers) and creates trust between the nodes. When the edge nodes can trust each other, they can work together to secure themselves and the attached IoT devices – without the need for a security server. Since it’s a blockchain protocol, its uses a majority consensus mechanism, so the system operates fine even after the failure of a large minority of the nodes – giving it high reliability through redundancy. Since the nodes tend to be close together, the system delivers a fast local response and like most blockchain systems, it’s very secure. To break it you’d have to hack the majority of the local nodes between transactions, which is incredibly hard to do since we are in systems with events coming in less than 100ms.
For example, there are over 50 processors in a car and the top 6 or 7 are getting quite powerful. With our BlockLock blockchain running among the top 7, the car can protect itself from tampering or data spoofing – without additional hardware or external connectivity.
