Blockchain confidential data combination keeps trade data flowing
Shipping companies must keep accurate and secure data records, but face several challenges. The costs of implementing digital solutions can be prohibitive, and current systems can be inefficient, prone to errors and vulnerable to cyber attacks.
In response, GSBN is partnering with Decentriq to bring data protection technology to its blockchain consortium as a solution for the shipping industry.
An independent and not-for-profit technology consortium, GSBN (Global Shipping Business Network), is building a blockchain-enabled operating system for global trade. The partner, Decentriq, is a SaaS platform for businesses that offers clean rooms.
“Partnering with Decentriq allows us to cover a wider range of data sharing scenarios and expand the use cases of our ecosystems beyond blockchain. We believe the next generation of blockchain consortia will combine blockchain technology with other new technologies, such as confidential computing, which enable the aggregation of data from different sources and convert them to valuable insights while keeping them safe and secure,” says Edmund To, chief technology officer at GSBN.
GSBN provides shippers, carriers and logistics providers with a secure way to share shipping data. The platform uses blockchain technology with a strict access policy that controls information visibility by role. The policy strictly follows a need-to-know basis.
However, specific scenarios involving more than a single data contributor may require more complex data sharing processes. For example, the current platform does not allow the aggregation of data across many operators or terminals.
This is where Decentriq data clean rooms come in. Leveraging confidential computing (CC), they provide a trusted hardware-level execution environment that no one has access to.
By combining blockchain and Decentriq data cleanrooms, GSBN can guarantee data integrity and privacy, security and auditability throughout the data lifecycle – at rest, in transit and in use, whether on-chain or off-chain.
“CC is emerging as an inevitable technology to protect data in active use. While CC solves many problems around data integrity and data confidentiality in a very elegant and scalable way, it lacks some strong security guarantees on data immutability and ordering. Blockchain is perfectly suited to fill these shortcomings. It is great to see these technologies being fully integrated into a turnkey solution to revolutionize the global commerce industry,” explained Stefan Deml, Chief Technology Officer at Decentriq.
GSBN is currently developing use cases with Decentriq, such as sharing freight activity insights from multiple shipping lines with financial institutions.
Image credit: iStockphoto/pxel66
