[ad_1]
Lucy Wang believes that blockchain technology is the key to actualizing robust data security for the digital landscape. The co-founder of Lambda made the call recently while talking about the recent Hotel Marriott data breach.
Data violates in abundance
Violations that end up compromising user data are not a new phenomenon on the Internet. Almost every website with a significant volume of user information has fallen victim to hackers and other cybercrime syndicates.
Recently, Marriott International Hotel Group it has become the last significant name to admit to being the victim of numerous data breaches. A statement issued by the company said that from the beginning of 2014 up to 500 million customers had been hit by several hacks.
With the company's admission, hackers successfully compromised user information such as credit card details, addresses and even passport information. How could this happen? Well, all the data was addressed to the centralized servers, providing a single point of failure that could be exploited by agents on the Internet.
There are many within the decentralized technology landscape like Wang who believes that blockchain technology offers a solution to this problem. However, before going into such details, why should we worry?
Data is precious
Data is the currency of the digital economy and, as such, the data are valuable. However, the present Internet construct puts user data in the hands of companies that can do pretty much what they want with our valuable information. They can sell them to the government (for surveillance) or to other companies (for targeted advertising) that are both a horrible exploitation of user privacy.
When shopping, browsing websites, watching YouTube videos, reading various social information on the e-commerce platform, the algorithm will secretly monitor our behavior and also collect our various data. In a sense, "the data and the algorithm" know "us more than ourselves.They know that we prefer juice or cola, we like beautiful models or men with eight packets of abdominal muscles. Marriott also shows that under certain circumstances, "data and algorithms" could have the "right of control" of our wealth.
Data giants like Google, Apple, Facebook, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu attract their attention by providing various information, services and entertainment. And hotel giants like Huazhu and Marriott have our personal information and even credit card information. We have also seen that these "centralized" giants have used our data to make hundreds of billions of dollars. We are not at all like "centralized" giants.
Adopting Blockchain for data security
Under the centralized network, the giant has almost all of our private data, and the centralized internet has already heavily relied on the main network. Whether it's academic or technical, these problems can not be solved perfectly. In recent years, with the blockchain concept deeply rooted in the minds of people, the need to build a new decentralized network that can subvert the traditional client / server has gained more and more recognition.
However, most of the existing public chains are "ineffective" for data storage, lack of TPS, cross-cutting problems, governance problems, application development problems, etc. The nature of the blockchain is the decentralized distributed ledger and the data that can be stored is minimal (simple transaction records), other data can not be stored efficiently. Therefore, in the absence of underlying data support, the effective use of the blockchain is significantly limited. More specifically, decentralized data storage is the most critical part of the future application of the blockchain.
To provide useful solutions to the problem, blockchain technology must necessarily evolve with more robust and advanced features. Part of this improvement must take place at an algorithmic level as it exists in projects such as Lambda, with its Provable Data Possession (PDP) and Proofs of Retrievability (POR) protocols.
Recently, Ethereum World News reported the launch of the first Proof of Space-Time (PoST) project on GitHub. For Lucy Wang, the hope is that stakeholders will be aware of the need for tool blockchain in data security framework to prevent further large scale data breaches.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.
