Whitepaper: Secure Communications Using Blockchain

Whitepaper: Secure Communications Using Blockchain

Today's internet is broadly susceptible to centralized control, surveillance, and manipulation. Modern approaches offer immediate opportunity to upgrade internet protocols leveraging decentralization and blockchain technology to secure communications from the ill effects of bad actors and network failure. The whitepaper titled Secure Communications Using Blockchain outlines the challenges and opportunities involved in secure messaging.

Today's internet operates on underlying protocols and services that are susceptible to centralized control, surveillance, and manipulation. Invented during the first stage of the public internet, today’s standard model for networking serves only to establish connectivity. It fails to protect user privacy or data security.These weaknesses create a haven for bad actors, and hamper the general utility and security of the internet. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, this created a 'hackerpocolypse' where cybercrime costs will exceed $6 trillion annually by 2021, doubling up from $3 trillion in 2015.

The Cost of Data Breaches

Breaches are becoming more and more rampant. In 2019, the average cost to businesses affected by a data breach in the United States amounted to $8.19M, up from $7.91M in the previous year. The global average cost per data breach was $3.92M.And people are fed up. According to CSC, 70% of data is created by individuals, yet 80% of data is managed by companies—and the headlines keep exposing how often they fail to protect our data.The Yahoo hack affected 3 billion user accounts. The Equifax breach hit 145.5 million customers. From an industry perspective, social media witnessed the greatest number of compromised records, with 2.5 billion records compromised in the first half 2018 alone.In fact, cyberattacks are the fastest growing crime in the U.S. According to the University of Maryland, with cyber attack occuring every 39 seconds. And they are affecting more and more people.

The Cost of Securing Data

The increasing pervasiveness of these attacks, and the outrage of the people affected, forced government to create legislation to push companies to protect customer data better. Last year, the EU implemented General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Next January, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will go into effect. These regulations compel businesses to treat consumers as sovereigns of their own data. They need the right to be forgotten. They need to own their data destiny.Yet, we continue to build systems where companies own the data, and perpetuate information architectures that centralize data. This is an increasingly expensive proposition.According to Deloitte, businesses spend on average 10% of their IT budget annually—if there are no breaches—securing data in a patently unsecure environment.  For companies like JP Morgan Chase, this translates to over $600M a year. For US taxpayers, combating cybercrime will cost the Department of Defense $9,642M—up 10% from 2018.The cost of breaches is also increasing. In 2019, the average cost to businesses affected by a data breach in the United States rose to $8.19M, up from $7.91M in 2017. The global average cost per data breach was $3.92M. For financial services businesses, the costs of cybercrime is particularly steep—averaging of $18.3M per company surveyed by Accenture.Compliance costs are also skyrocketing, with a full third of enterprises over 1000 employees spending over $1M US per year to comply.

Modernizing Secure Communications with Blockchain

This is why it is time to modernize internet communications to be secure and sovereign by default—to comply with standards, and to meet the true purpose of customer demands.The advancements of the past decade paved the way forward for a new, publicly accessible, fair platform to modernize message passing. The whitepaper Secure Communications using Blockchain discusses these weaknesses and solutions in greater detail.Decentralization eliminates many central points of failure and control, creating a more stable backplane to establish connectivity and trust. It also provides critical data security services by default. This is something that will be essential as the Internet-of-Things and the internet in general becomes more pervasive. Importantly, it also builds in standards for data privacy and security that are essential for operating in today’s digital age.These tenets create an open, trustless environment that will allow users to communicate freely and safely by default.

Going Forward

Modernizing communication infrastructure to be secure and stable is now possible, thanks to the principles and technologies developed under the blockchain and decentralization banners. Components are built, and protocols and services are proven. Yet, to create a unified, secure messaging platform—these applications, protocols and services need to be assembled.Secure messaging communications using blockchain presents a tremendous opportunity to create a better, safer internet. If you'd like to understand how you can modernize your communications infrastructure with blockchain, check out the whitepaper Secure Communications using Blockchain or contact us at hello@provide.services.

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November 18, 2022