Australian Blockchain company, Platform Secured Pty Ltd, is developing a Blockchain technology that will assist governments and financial institutions to transition seamlessly into the cryptocurrency technology.
Encryption or not?
According to the Founder and Co-Director of Platform Secured Pty Ltd, Thomas McAlister, his company will provide banks with integrated software packages which will essentially upgrade their systems in terms of payment networks, by creating a bypass for each customer.
It is a process which he claims will further encrypt the already encrypted financial data, in order to allow it to move along a separate network within the customer's one account.
Larry Christopher Bates of Bitland says:
“The current encryption system is outdated, corrupt and has already been broken. While the implications of the scale have not been made clear, I am 99 percent certain that there has been a massive breach of two factor authentication protocols, and that is why you see Google and Microsoft publicly lambasting each other.”
Bates explains that, based on hands-on experience in fighting the cyber-security war, that most of the major breaches occur long before the media pick them up. This he says, makes it difficult to differentiate when it is a warning about an impending breach or an attempt to keep a breach quiet to avoid panic.
Bates continues by saying that the social engineering and access control aspects of security were not taken as seriously. “You have people in executive positions who know nothing about cyber-security making decisions based on line-item budgets. In fact, the Keynesian approach to capital became the bane of “security” in tandem with too many uninformed executives,” he says.
The human factor
According to McAlister, what his company brings forward isn’t an overhaul of the entire process. He explains that their focus is on an effective and functional upgrade of the already existing system, which will allow for a seamless transition from the old to the impending new.
“There is no reinventing the wheel, it is a simple upgrade,” says McAlister. “Banks, unfortunately, are unable to use this technology to offer their customers due to some of the flaws the Blockchain has as part of its design. We spent 12 months on working on a way to ensure banks can offer this legally and practically and, most important, cost effectively to their customers. We believe we have achieved this and we expect to have completed development by July 2017.”
Bates, on the other hand, advocates for a cultural overhaul within the cyber security network. Bates points out that the major factor behind the unreliable existing system is the human factor. “Too many humans will put themselves and others at risk by taking shortcuts around security protocols,” he says.
He concludes by noting that despite how important it has become to upgrade the encryption, there must be a change in attitude by humans in order to achieve proper security within the ecosystem.
Security is paramount
McAlister continues by explaining that this technology is essentially providing a cyber security jacket on all things IoT, with partnerships that connect in private with their IBE 3.0 security as well as their security layers. He goes on to explain his company’s invention to be primarily intended for an improved cyber-security where an already compromised data can be re-encrypted and made to run along another parallel network.
“The RSA is not fool-proof and it has been hacked on many occasions and even as of late, governments are still being hacked, not to mention, SWIFT, Bitcoin exchanges and so on. This is not a new issue, since the inception of the internet (http), it has never been fully secure. The measures that have been put in place since the early 90s always had a back-door for hackers to enter. This is what we are out to fix,” concludes McAlister.
Decentralization and Education
In a contrary opinion, Christopher Franko of Borderless Technology, thinks that introducing new encryption is rather too bold a statement to make. However, he also notes that a new encryption will not solve the problem of corruption within the ecosystem.
Despite agreeing that corruption has infiltrated every level of society, Franko insists that re-encrypting data is not an option in solving such a problem. He explains that every system is only as secure as its weakest link.
Franko says to Cointelegraph:
“It really depends on where the bottlenecks in security are. Those systems are only as secure as their weakest link. How attackable are the people who have access to the keys needed to decrypt the data? Data encryption is ever evolving but data breaches aren't getting any less common.”
He concludes by offering his own solution to cyber-security, by saying that it can only be achieved through decentralization and adequate education.
“Decentralize the attack points. Then educate everyone who consumes or manipulates the data on better security practice,” he says.