Blockchain technology has been slow to gain adoption in non-financial contexts, but it could turn out to have invaluable military applications. DARPA, the storied research unit of the US Department of Defense, is currently funding efforts to find out if blockchains could help secure highly sensitive data, with potential applications for everything from nuclear weapons to military satellites. The case for using a blockchain boils down to a concept in computer security known as “information integrity.” This September, DARPA, which stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the agency helped create the internet, among other things), awarded a $1.8 million contract to a computer security firm called Galois. The firm’s assignment is to formally verify—a sort of computer-code audit, using mathematics—a particular type of blockchain tech supplied by a company called Guardtime. Formal verification is one way to build nearly unhackable code, and it’s a big part of DARPA’s approach to security. If the verification goes well, it would inch DARPA closer to using some form of blockchain technology for the military. The prospect of the US military using a blockchain to secure critical data could spark a boom in uses of the technology outside finance. Investors poured $134 million into blockchain startups in the first quarter of 2016, according to research by trade publication CoinDesk. These firms have focused overwhelmingly on financial applications to date. But information security represents a huge new market for blockchain tech vendors, accounting for $75 billion in spending last year, and projected to hit $108 billion in 2019 Each party in the network has its own copy of the blockchain attached to every asset. As long as the chains are in sync, all parties can be confident that the asset or transaction is valid. Blockchain adds a persistent code and security layer to […]
