Sick of Passwords? Here's How Blockchain Can Help, and Enhance Cybersecurity, to Boot. The blockchain revolution includes white hat hackers banding together and the promise of no more passwords.
By Andrew Medal Edited by Dan Bova
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Financial institutions, credit agencies, major corporations and small businesses are all in the news on a regular basis for security breaches (exemplified by this list of the top 17 security breaches from CSO that show the breadth of the issue).
Related: Protect Your Business! The 7 Cybersecurity Tools You Need as an Entrepreneur.
Because of these breaches, the average consumer needs to take measures to protect his or her individual information.
This is where blockchain technologies come in handy, because they're disrupting the cybersecurity field in terms of how they're better able to protect the individual user. Security and transparency are part of the overall promise of the block, as this IBM article explains.
Before an individual shares personal information or logs in to a favorite website, he or she must decide what's getting shared. Thanks to the blockchain, cybersecurity is better than ever. Companies are focusing on keeping your information safe, focusing on access, detecting cyber attacks, protecting connected devices and eliminating the need for passwords.
That's right! No more passwords
In an effort to get rid of those annoying passwords in your daily life and business dealings, REMME.io provides a secure and comprehensive blockchain-connected solution for authenticating identity: This solution has the potential to completely disrupt our password-heavy online lives by generating an individual SSL/TLS certificate rather than forcing users to log in manually.
REMME does this by using, as its foundation, Hyperledger Sawtooth, which is based on a public key infrastructure (PKI), and additional access management apps for user information.
Related: 3 Biggest Cybersecurity Threats Facing Small Businesses Right Now
In simpler terms, Hyperledger Sawtooth reflects the fact that traditional passwords aren't that secure, as they are prone to getting hacked or to users forgetting them or losing access. Instead of passwords, REMME provides a fully secured authentication, in the form of SSL stored in the blockchain, so there is no authentication server or database that could be breached or manipulated. By removing the need for passwords,REMME's solution removes the issue associated with them.
More good news! No more DDoS attacks
Gladius offers a new approach to fighting distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks happen when hackers take control of devices and direct them to a particular server.
Think about "zombie" traffic (so named because of the spike in recent years in useless traffic that comes from traffic with this Google nickname). Zombie traffic will overwhelm the bandwidth of the victim server and may lead to severe downtime and damage to a business's productivity and reputation.
In Q4 2017 alone, as this Secure List article describes, DDoS attacks took place in 84 countries, with the longest lasting for 146 hours. These attacks can be terribly costly: the average cost of one for enterprises was $2.3 million in 2017, the article estimates.
Certainly there's a lot at stake, but Gladius has a solution. Its approach involves using blockchain to build a network of users who can share bandwidth and resources to help one other combat DDoS attacks and accelerate the loading time of websites by deploying a wide network of caching devices (CDN).
In the event of an attack, victims can then draw on the bandwidth of their peers to help absorb the flood of traffic and prevent downtime; and, using this solution, users, in times of calm, can help to cache contents and serve websites.
In return, users who donate bandwidth to struggling members can be rewarded with crypto tokens. It's a new and exciting way of dealing with the DDoS threat and could create a new incentivized model for sharing resources.
White hat hackers join forces
As cyber-crime increases, the cybersecurity industry grows. It's now a huge and sprawling field, full of new companies and innovation. There are plenty of people with the skills to conduct cyber attacks of their own, who have chosen to fight for the good side and help defeat hackers.
Hacken wants to harness all this power and use blockchain to build a cybersecurity community that cares about ethics. Members of this community will be able to share resources and expertise in return for Hacken tokens.
For example, companies will be able to share information about their vulnerabilities, while white hat hackers figure out ways to resolve them. This information would then be publicly stored on the blockchain for future reference.
This kind of setup can not only help fight crime but also encourage investment in cybersecurity startups and help support this growing and valuable industry, for everyone's benefit.
The future of cybersecurity in 2018
Blockchain technologies in 2018 have the potential to disrupt the way we navigate cybersecurity by keeping your information safe, detecting cyberattacks before they happen, eliminating passwords completely and banding white hackers together to do good.
Related: 4 Vital Cyber Security Measures Every Safety-Conscious Entrepreneur Needs to Take
There's no doubt that blockchain can have a profound impact on cybersecurity since it is at its core a secure and encrypted database. And this database is immutable, transparent and -- above all -- resilient.
