Blockchain Compatibility With Privacy and Security
We have heard so much about Blockchain, but do we really know all about
its privacy and security. Privacy and security are the most important of
any technology and is really of great concern when technology is new
and growing so fast.
There should be a crystal clarity in terms of Privacy and security.
Privacy is a human right in many countries. Data in blockchain is stored
in blocks which are stored on different computers and how it is still
private? And if I want to delete my information where do I need to go?
There are so many such questions. No doubt Blockchain is good for a lot
many things but still, we need to reconsider a few aspects again to make
the system more reliable.
All the transaction in blockchain is publicly published without
encryption in many applications. This could be a personal or financial
data. Now if someone can easily access my personal information, where is
the Privacy of my data. This is a serious concern in countries like
Germany, the United Kingdom. As per the GDPR(General Data Protection
Regulation) policy in the United Kingdom, an individual has the right to
recall their consent and permanently delete or retrieve any personal
information they shared before. This doesn’t fit in the Blockchain
picture. Whatever information stored in the blockchain will be there
forever.
One solution to this problem is storing only encrypted data to the
blocks. However, this is also not an accurate and safe solution. If the
decryption key is lost, data associated with that will not be recovered.
It will be worse if data will be stolen or published as all the
information will be decrypted on blockchain which cannot be altered.
With these drawbacks, Blockchain can also help us in improving
cybersecurity strategies.
DDoS Attacks
Should there is a Blockchain system, it would be almost impossible to
complete DDoS attacks. A blockchain based DNS system will be transparent
and more secure. The distributed system will be tough to target, and
data cannot be altered too as blockchain has append-only nature.
Tampering Data
In blockchain, every transaction is distributed to all over the chain on
different blocks, it is impossible to manipulate the data in any case.
Something which is distributed all over the platform cannot be changed.
It will be hard to change a piece of information on all blocks. This
blockchain feature has a practical implementation in various countries
proving it one of the best solution. The immutable nature of Blockchain makes this technology considerable in many fields.
Privacy and challenges
Though the blockchain has many great implementations, the thought that
every transaction executed is visible on all the nodes and is not
private is fearful. zCash and Ethereum are working on this aspect to
make the transactions anonymous on the platform. This makes more sense
to the privacy of our data. Even though our data is encrypted, it will
reveal some metadata and the statistical analysis of which can provide
the pattern. Another very important challenge to blockchain is its
scalability.
Anything which is growing so fast has risk associated with it. We see
cyber threats and crime to such technologies every day. Though the
blockchain technology can empower other technologies and applications it
is very important to harden its own core system. The blockchain is
using its strength of decentralization very well. The blockchain is a smart technology
with use cases everywhere from the Internet of things to smart
contracts to currencies like Bitcoin. Whichever field it is in, it is
ruling.