Blockchain
Cutting-edge access management
and data-sharing technologies
Blockchain
With cutting-edge access management and data-sharing technologies, our blockchain solutions keep your business protected and secured.
What is blockchain?
Blockchain is a technology used for recordkeeping, which is useful for storing and sharing longitudinal data (i.e. data that span across time) in real-time.
As the name suggests, blockchain is a chain of blocks. Each block keeps data for a single user at a single time point. Take transaction data, for example, each block would contain information of the user, date, time, and the dollar amount. Information on the user is recorded with a digital signature so that no personal information is exposed. Each block comes with a unique code called a “hash”. Even if the data stored in two blocks are identical, they would still have two different hashes.
Why is blockchain useful?
Data are usually approved and stored by enterprises operating the services. It can be difficult and costly to store and protect these data from attacks and breaches.
What’s special about blockchain is that it does not require any specific party to manage the database, meaning that no one really owns or keeps the data. It is simply a network of users. Its open database allows anyone to view the data, but no one can modify them.
Every time a new piece of record is added, the data is approved and stored by a network of users connected by the blockchain. Once a new block is verified, it will be given a hash and added to the blockchain.
Why is blockchain secure?
Reason 1:
Every end device in the blockchain network has an identical copy of all the blocks, meaning that there could be thousands and even millions of copies of each block. If someone wants to hack into a block and change the recorded information, they would need to change every copy of the block in the whole network, which is close to impossible.
Reason 2:
All the blocks are stored in chronological order, each with a unique hash as well as the hash of the block before it. Even if a hacker was able to go change the information for every copy of a block (call it Block A) in a whole network when the information of a block is changed, the hash would also change, thus the hacker is really just creating a new block.
But creating such a new block is meaningless because the blockchain stores longitudinal data on a chain! The block that follows Block A still links back to Block A instead of the new block. Therefore, the hacker would need to go change the data in all the blocks that follow Block A to truly change the blockchain, which is indeed an impossible task to do.
What is blockchain used for?
Some of the common usages of blockchain include:
- Payments and fund transfers
- Access management (with digital key)
- IoT network management
- Data sharing
- Data backup
- Recordkeeping (e.g. sales, medical)
- Supply chains monitoring (with real-time inventory tracking)