Do some research on your own and write at least a 2 page response to the followi

Question

Do some research on your own and write at least a 2 page response to the following questions:

1. What is blockchain? (not to be confused with Bitcoin, blockchain is the technology)

2. Can blockchain be used to improve security?

3. How do you think this will change our idea of security infrastructure?

4. How will blockchain change our incidents and breaches in the future?

5. Conclusion - What are your opinions of blockchain and what are your predictions regarding how long it would take to implement on a global scale? (that we no longer think of it as "new" technology)

Please write this in your own language

Explanation / Answer

Like the Internet, the Blockchain is an open, global infrastructure upon which other technologies and applications can be built. And like the Internet, it allows people to bypass traditional intermediaries in their dealings with each other, thereby lowering or even eliminating transaction costs. By using the blockchain, individuals can exchange money or purchase insurance securely without a bank account, even across national borders—a feature that could be transformative for the two billion people in the world currently underserved by financial institutions. Blockchain technology lets strangers record simple, enforceable contracts without a lawyer. It makes it possible to sell real estate, event tickets, stocks and almost any other kind of property or right without a broker.

Effectively it is a public ledger of all cryptocurrency transactions that have ever been executed. It can be said to be a continuously growing list of records, arranged in data batches called blocks, that use cryptographic validation to link themselves together. Being an independent, transparent, and permanent database coexisting in multiple locations and shared by a community, it’s sometimes referred to as a Mutual Distributed Ledger (MDL).Each block of this massive list of ever increasing records contains typically a hash pointer as a link to a previous block,a timestamp and transaction data.

To use conventional banking as an analogy, The blockchain is like a full history of the banking transactions.

Bitcoin transactions are entered chronologically in a blockchain just the way bank transactions are.

Blocks, meanwhile, are like individual bank statements.

Put like this, A Blockchain just sounds like a kind of database with built-in validation—which it is. However, the clever bit is that the ledger is not stored in a master location or managed by any particular body. Instead, it is said to be distributed, existing on multiple computers at the same time in such a way that anybody with an interest can maintain a copy of it. With a Blockchain, many people can write entries into these records of information, and only a community of users can control how the record of information is to be amended or to be updated.

Blockchain enhances Privacy, Security and Conveyance of Data.

The promise of blockchain’s distributed open ledger format is an “unhackable” network able to record and verify data transactions without typical third party validation. The potential is clear, Blockchain technology will constantly check and validate data communication flow with no single point of failure and offload authentication to a decentralized layer of security.

Using Blockchains can increase security on three fronts:

1.Blocking identity theft
2.Preventing data tampering
3.Stopping Denial of Service attacks.

In spite of these unique and valuable features, there are still impediments to the incorporation of blockchain technologies.Few of them include

1.Mining Power:

The first and major impediment to the growth and adoption of blockchain technologies is the concentration and consolidation of mining power.Bitcoin and Ethereum were intended to function as distributed and decentralized systems of coin mining and exchange. In practice, that hasn’t come to pass. Instead, the financial rewards offered by cryptocurrency systems created a huge incentive for expensive, concentrated coin mining operations featuring mining farms, rigs, and pools.

2.Storage :

The second factor is storage capacity. The blockchain protocols are designed in such a way that each node should maintain the same copy of the blockchain and the blockchain should contain every transaction from the beginning of time. This means that any new device, in order to become a node in the Bitcoin network, should download all the transactions right from the first block which was mined back in 2009.The same principle holds for other blockchain applications as well. Bitcoin’s blockchain size is more than 100GB and Ethereum’s blockchain size is approximately 50GB. For example, the Bitcoin network supports 3 transactions per second and the blockchain size grows 1MB for every 10 minutes.

3.Block Time:

The third factor is the block time, which is defined as the time taken by a node to validate all the broadcasted transactions, arrange all the legitimate transactions into a block, and find the correct nonce value that provides the desired block hash.Bitcoin’s block time is 10 minutes and Ethereum’s block time is 15 seconds. For many applications with cyber physical capabilities, even a latency of a few seconds might not be feasible.

Experts claim that, the Blockchain not only has a place in cryptocurrency exchanges but could also be used to improve security solutions. According to them, if Implemented correctly, the blockchain may provide the enterprise with more trust in their security systems.

The Blockchain technology can completely revolutionize data security industry and our idea of security infrastructure.

Traditional encryption for data-at-rest and data-in-flight rely on a robust encryption algorithm, centralized encryption key management, and thorough auditing to make sure everyone is playing by the rules. Blockchain has the capability to remove the need for a trusted third party with data sharing and enhance auditing capabilities for organizations to quickly spot inside and outside threats.When it comes to data breaches, the truth is, hackers often infiltrate a network days, weeks, or even months before they are able to access and exfiltrate sensitive data. Hackers often try to mask their footprints by modifying security logs. As many of these logs are just text files, once accessed, they can easily delete whole sections with a keystroke.With blockchain, its distributed ledger all but makes that impossible. If one node is changed, the other nodes detect that they are not in agreement with the tampered node and isolate it from the ledger network, thus alerting network administrators. Blockchain could be extremely efficient in retaining the integrity of security logs. Along with that, one of the best ways to detect malicious activity within your network is anomaly detection. With blockchain, each time a network’s sensitive data is retrieved the ‘who’ and the ‘when’ can be recorded within the distributed ledger. If any of those parameters do not conform to established norms, alerts can be registered within a company’s SIEM. If the activity proves malicious, a response team can move quickly to shut the internal or external threat out of the network to minimize any damage.

While blockchain's best-known, most used and highest-impact application is Bitcoin, the potential impact of the technology is much greater and wider than virtual currencies.Transactions of any kind are usually faster and cheaper for the user when completed via a Blockchain, and they also benefit from the protocol's security.

The Blockchain ecosystem is by no means perfect. It's still a nascent and controversial technology. Many people shy away from using it due to its perceived volatility. But recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest and investment in Blockchain technologies, as applications in industries like banking, financial services and technology are continuously being developed. Evolutions on the original Bitcoin technology, like Ethereum, have made significant progress, adding turing completeness to blockchains.

According to my estimates it might take another, 5 -10 years for the mainstream adoption of blockchain technologies on a global scale. However, with all the popular banks and companies in the FinTech sector jumping aboard the blockchain train, setting up labs, developing proofs of concept and filing patents, that long runway may end up much shorter than anybody expected.

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