Engineering news
Guardtime and Future Cities Catapult, a centre for smart city innovation, have announced a partnership to develop cybersecurity solutions for UK critical infrastructure.
The partnership will initially focus on building prototype applications to enhance resiliency, security and reliability of critical infrastructure, including projects on flood defence systems, nuclear power and the electricity distribution grid.
Guardtime created its Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) to tackle challenges of so-called 'perimeter-based security systems' and secure the integrity of systems in today’s increasingly connected world.
The software platform is built on an “industrial blockchain”, based on the technology that underpins the digital currency Bitcoin.
Blockchain technology works on a 'distributed consensus' model. It is essentially a record, or ledger, of digital events that is shared between many different 'parties' or computing nodes, but can only be updated by a majority consensus of the participants in the system. Once entered, information can never be erased. This means that a blockchain contains a certain and verifiable record of every single transaction ever made.
The Guardtime platform records the state of all KSI-instrumented digital assets by registering them in a global KSI Blockchain, generating a mathematically verifiable baseline image of the network – a 'Clean State Proof'. Once this state has been achieved, it becomes possible to continuously verify in real-time that the network remains in a the clean state, and act when a compromise is detected.
Blockchain systems have been creating a lot of buzz in the technology world, with Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, stating it was the most important invention since the internet itself.
This is because it is seen to be an incredibly secure, game changing technology. For example, if a blockchain event occurs, such as a cyber attack, the system made up of different computing nodes, which are geographically and computationally isolated from each other must show a “proof of work” — a cryptographic process for proving that the computer arrived at the correct outcome in the correct way.
Falsifying events in the blockchain would be the same as getting more than half of a group of people to lie in the exact same way about an event they witnessed, without any time to coordinate a lie beforehand.
Matthew Johnson, chief technology officer of Guardtime said: "As the world becomes more connected critical infrastructure will be even more exposed to cyberattack and today those tasked with defending infrastructure do not have the tools they need to guarantee the integrity of that infrastructure. We are thrilled to be working with Future Cities Catapult to design new blockchain based security solutions that can guarantee a level of operational resiliency not previously possible."
The partnership will address the concerns highlighted in a recent report by Chatham House, a UK think-tank, that highlighted cybersecurity concerns around nuclear power plants, with the industry harbouring a “culture of denial” about the risk of cyber hacking with many failing to protect themselves against digital attacks.
Dr Catherine Mulligan, head of digital strategy and economics at Future Cities Catapult, added: “Guardtime’s unique permissioned blockchain approach to large scale system integrity has tremendous potential to enhance the security of UK critical infrastructure and we are excited to work with the Guardtime team to build solutions that will play a key part in the government’s industrial strategy and showcase to the world how cities can be smarter in the future.”