Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Data Protection

R3’s Corda Blockchain Platform Goes Open-Source

Blockchain is variously described as the future of computing or a hype bubble that has already burst, depending on which author you read.

Blockchain is variously described as the future of computing or a hype bubble that has already burst, depending on which author you read. In the Fiancial Times (FT), 14 October, 2016, Oliver Bussmann wrote, “As the former group chief information officer of UBS, where we championed blockchain early on, and as an adviser to banks and fintech companies today, I am cautious. My experience tells me it may be a while before we see large-scale adoption in the financial industry.” This is not the hope of R3, a finance technology firm that includes a consortium of more than 70 of the world’s leading financial institutions.

This week R3 announced that its Corda platform source code will be released as open-source to the Hyperledger project — a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project seeking to advance blockchain technology. 

R3 does not automatically describe Corda as blockchain; it more usually describes it as a distributed ledger platform. The difference in terminology helps explain the confusion over blockchain potential. The technological success of the bitcoin blockchain has led people to consider that blockchain is a technology that can be applied in other areas. However, blockchain is a solution to the bitcoin requirement. Applying the solution for one requirement directly to other requirements will undoubtedly cause problems and issues.

R3’s CTO Richard Brown explains that Corda is the result of dismantling the conceptual components of blockchain and applying and adapting the relevant components to financial institution requirements. Taking this approach he finds a distributed ledger (rather than full blockchain) technology can provide an economic solution to the complex issues of financial agreements.

For example, says Brown, “We are not building a blockchain. Unlike other designs in this space, our starting point is individual agreements between firms (‘state objects’, governed by ‘contract code’ and associated ‘legal prose’). We reject the notion that all data should be copied to all participants, even if it is encrypted.”

Nevertheless, the resulting distributed ledger platform will be described by most as ‘blockchain’, and will offer its users the advantages offered by blockchain technology to Bitcoin. The security officer will welcome its authentication: “every action in the system is almost always associated with a private key; there is no concept of a ‘master key’ or ‘administrator password’ that gives God-like powers,” says Brown. “This is quite different to traditional enterprise systems where these super-user accounts are prevalent and petrifying from a security perspective.”

The businessman will welcome the huge reduction in reconciliation costs from manual methods to the minimal in blockchain transactions. “Numerous research reports put potential efficiency gains to financial services from blockchain at between $15bn and $20bn. Already today, using blockchain-based applications, companies could bring the cost of a cross-border transaction down from $25 to $1 or $2,” writes Bussmann in the FT.

What R3 is making available to the Hyperledger project is a financial services distributed ledger platform upon which banks and other institutions can build their own applications. “We want other banks and other parties to innovate with products that sit on top of the platform, but we don’t want everyone to create their own platform … because we’ll end up with lots of islands that can’t talk to each other,” said R3’s chief engineer, James Carlyle. 

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

“If we have one platform with lots of products on top, then we get something that’s more like the internet, where we still get innovation but we can still communicate with each other.”

Microsoft and Bank of America Merrill Lynch announced in September that they are working together to build and test frameworks for blockchain-powered exchanges between businesses and their customers and banks.

Written By

Kevin Townsend is a Senior Contributor at SecurityWeek. He has been writing about high tech issues since before the birth of Microsoft. For the last 15 years he has specialized in information security; and has had many thousands of articles published in dozens of different magazines – from The Times and the Financial Times to current and long-gone computer magazines.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Understand how to go beyond effectively communicating new security strategies and recommendations.

Register

Join us for an in depth exploration of the critical nature of software and vendor supply chain security issues with a focus on understanding how attacks against identity infrastructure come with major cascading effects.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Application Security

Cycode, a startup that provides solutions for protecting software source code, emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday with $4.6 million in seed funding.

Data Protection

The cryptopocalypse is the point at which quantum computing becomes powerful enough to use Shor’s algorithm to crack PKI encryption.

Artificial Intelligence

The CRYSTALS-Kyber public-key encryption and key encapsulation mechanism recommended by NIST for post-quantum cryptography has been broken using AI combined with side channel attacks.

Compliance

The three primary drivers for cyber regulations are voter privacy, the economy, and national security – with the complication that the first is often...

Application Security

Virtualization technology giant VMware on Tuesday shipped urgent updates to fix a trio of security problems in multiple software products, including a virtual machine...

Data Protection

While quantum-based attacks are still in the future, organizations must think about how to defend data in transit when encryption no longer works.

Application Security

Fortinet on Monday issued an emergency patch to cover a severe vulnerability in its FortiOS SSL-VPN product, warning that hackers have already exploited the...

Cybersecurity Funding

Los Gatos, Calif-based data protection and privacy firm Titaniam has raised $6 million seed funding from Refinery Ventures, with participation from Fusion Fund, Shasta...