Guardtime offices Guardtime is a cyber-security provider that uses blockchain systems to ensure the integrity of data. In a recent announcement , its technology will be used to protect the UK’s nuclear power stations, flood-defence mechanisms and other critical infrastructure.
The company has its roots in US defence systems and Estonia’s expertise in state-level digital security. Estonia has built a seamless digital infrastructure since it regained independence in 1991. In 2007, the country experienced a state-level cyberattack from Russia and did an impressive job of defending itself.
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This caught the attention of the US defence and intelligence services, which is how Guardtime CEO Mike Gault came to join forces with a contingent of Estonian cryptographers and form the company seven years ago. It has attracted former US defence personnel such as Matt Johnson, now chief technology officer (CTO), and business development chief Jamie Steiner. Steiner and Gault previously worked on Wall Street as traders, at JP Morgan and Barclays respectively, and it’s worth noting that Guardime had been looking at distributed consensus models – blockchains, in today’s parlance – before Bitcoin was actually invented.
Guardtime uses Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI), a blockchain technology that provides massive-scale data authentication without reliance on centralised trust authorities. Unlike traditional approaches that depend on asymmetric key cryptography, KSI uses only hash-function cryptography, allowing verification to rely only on the security of hash functions and the availability of a public ledger. In this way, Guardtime guarantees data integrity without the need to keep secrets.
Estonian insights
Mike Gault tells IBTimes: "For the last 40 years nobody has really figured out integrity, because they have tried to use the same tools: they have tried to keep secrets in order to verify that their data is correct. And it just doesn’t work. This was […]
