Next-gen blockchain industrial IoT cybersecurity solution unveiled
The company says its two new blockchain technologies – a hierarchical-tree system and conditional consensus – now enable data-rich transactions across thousands of nodes to ensure scalability in the most expansive deployments, for the first time. The hierarchical system enables multiple simultaneous updates across the Fabric, regardless of location or connectivity, the new consensus protocol brings “supermajority consensus” to the blockchain, so decisions can be structured to protect all participants, including those in the minority, enabling secure collaboration, multi-party governance, and verification for the rich ecosystems within major industries.
“Robust cybersecurity is the necessary foundation for Industrial IoT operations, which are growing to include trillions of devices and interactions across multiple organizations and varying sites,” says Xage CEO, Duncan Greatwood. “With these technological innovations, we’re creating an unparalleled level of support for cooperation and protection at scale, empowering major industries as they undergo digital transformation.”
The new cybsecurity solution offers the following:
- Hierarchical Blockchain –– The hierarchical tree within the Xage Fabric allows local blockchain updates on any branch, while also supporting subsequent global, i.e. hierarchy-wide, resynchronization and reconciliation. Per-site, independent blockchains enable horizontal scaling of operations, without inline dependencies on a global blockchain or central IT resources. Xage’s hierarchical system ensures that a consensus is formed first purely among local nodes, allowing ledger updates to continue locally even when the site is disconnected, and then later local ledgers are synchronized to and reconciled with the global blockchain.
- To provide even greater protection, the global blockchain revalidates the transactions that were accepted locally and reverifies the integrity of the local blockchain as part of the reconciliation process. This ensures that no local compromise can compromise the global system, and allows the global system to override and “heal” any local issues that are uncovered during reconciliation.
- Supermajority Consensus –– New consensus protocol enables supermajority conditional consensus when multiple organizations are sharing confidential information with each other.
- For example, if one organization has 6000 nodes deployed within the security fabric, and another collaborating organization has 4000 nodes, the consensus may be configured so that the company with fewer nodes in the fabric won’t be automatically outvoted in establishing consensus for a decision to go through, but instead, a majority of the 6,000 nodes and a majority of the 4,000 nodes must vote “yes” for a decision to be accepted.
- Scalability –– These innovations support massive scalability improvements for the Xage Fabric, reducing the required computing footprint by 10x, and enabling fabric nodes to be deployed on very low cost and very low-powered compute environments. The number of nodes that can run at any single level of the hierarchy is increased by 10x, meaning that the Xage Security Fabric is now equipped to support trillions of industrial IoT devices and interactions. Furthermore, by handling security requests locally, the fabric enables horizontal scaling across as many sites as customers want to support.
- Fabric Preview –– Thanks to these innovations and scalability improvements, Xage is able to deliver a Fabric Preview that any customer can download, run and explore. Including four fabric nodes and three virtual devices bundled into a single virtual image, the Fabric Preview provides an entire high-performance blockchain-backed system, that users can install and run on a personal computer in minutes.
A free trial access Fabric Preview is available on request.
Related articles:
Blockchain IIoT security platform gets backing from GE, others
IoT security solution protects energy companies against cyberattacks
Blockchain project to test cybersecurity of distributed energy grid
Blockchain-protected industrial IoT security platform launched
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
