Can blockchain safeguard against cyber attacks?
TECHNOLOGY ITSELF IS TAMPER-PROOF BUT BE CAREFUL WITH THE APPS BUILT ON TOP OF IT
As cyber attacks become inevitable, security professionals have turned to the digital world for the “inoculant” that can send these cyber miscreants packing.
Tech companies and cloud providers have changed their cybersecurity game. Instead of the old gambit of trying to keep pace with the bad guys, they have come up with new — and improved — ways of analysing behaviour on a network, taking a holistic view of processes. As those familiar with chess might say: “See the whole board”.
Today, technologies like blockchain can be of help, said Necip Ozyucel, Cloud and Enterprise Group Lead at Microsoft Gulf. “blockchain has served as a foundation for transactional transparency for virtual currency bitcoin.”
Blockchain’s architecture consists of a distributed ledger, held by a community of willing participants. Since no one person or organisation is in possession of the entire transaction history — the creation of a bitcoin and its subsequent passing from hand to hand — no one can game the system.
Why is blockchain so smart? Because it tries to solve the difficult question of how to create trust between systems, and this fuels some interesting use cases which the world can use to power modern IT.
In short, it allows people or systems who don’t trust one another to share valuable data in a secure and tamper-proof way.
“Blockchain requires a shared consensus as to the nature of data, and that has hopeful implications for our cyber-vaccine search,” said Ozyucel. “By combining its architecture with AI [artificial intelligence] solutions and even the Internet of Things, we can use the encryption capabilities’ distributed nature and audit trail of blockchain to put an end to the concept of entry points.”
Nicolai Solling, chief technology officer at Help AG, said that blockchain technology has received extensive media coverage due to some of the applications built on the technology called crypto-currencies.
Blockchain fundamentals
“One of the fundamentals of blockchain is that every node participating in the network needs to process the block which gives security to the chain,” said Solling.
“But it is also the biggest Achilles heel when dealing with a vast number of computers out of your control. The actual transactions that can be done per second highly depend on the slowest node and the number of nodes as everyone needs to be in consensus.”
For the same reason, he said: “We are reaching to a level where private organisations are building their own blockchains, where they can control the speed of the nodes and quality of the networks.”
The likes of IBM, Amazon and Microsoft are all looking at how to utilise and deliver this sort of technology to clients as “Blockchain-as-a-Service” or BaaS.
Solling said that blockchain technology could be a help in cybersecurity as it is very secure from the perspective of tamperresistance. But if the application you build on top is insecure, you are back to “square one”.
Tarek Kuzbari, managing director for Middle East, Africa and South Asia at Group iB, said that blockchain is gaining traction today, but the key question is about the scalability, security, and sustainability of the technology.
“Cybercriminals target users of these technologies to achieve what they are looking for,” said Kuzbari. “The top five vectors of these attacks is phishing, which contributes 50 per cent of these attacks, followed by DDoS [distributed denial-of-service], deface of website, code vulnerabilities within smart contracts and the team [members of the organisation],” he said.
He added that phishing has been a major problem in cybersecurity for more than 20 years and it still exists. (Phishing is a targeted attack by hackers in an attempt to steal usernames, passwords and credit card details through emails.)
In blockchain, Kuzbari said that you have the same threats as cybersecurity. It still has the same challenges every company faces such as awareness, training, technology, using the latest equipment, collaborating with a security company to support them.
“What is the point of protecting your home with a strong door while leaving the window open? When everybody says that blockchain is secure, it means the door is secure. But that does not mean the home is secure,” said Kuzbari.
Cryptocurrencies have many times been the perfect way for cybercriminals to get paid.
“Any cybercriminal actually leaves traces of their transactions for as long as the blockchain is operating,” said Tarek Kuzbari of Group iB. “If you were to go to any criminal and say, “Here is some technology where we will be able to track you forever”, I don’t think they would use it.