With the recent explosion of the price of Bitcoin, blockchain has reentered the mainstream as an investment vehicle. A less explored, but more important, application of blockchain is improving network security for military and civilian operations. While technology and cryptography are rapidly improving, rival nations and malicious actors have outpaced western governments. Some examples include the suspected Russian cyber attacks on Estonia or the 2020 hacks of the US Treasury and Commerce Department that led to hackers monitoring internal department emails. Other potential threats were elucidated through civilian conflict like the delisting of the application, Parlor, by AWS. While Parlor is irrelevant to national security, the danger of government websites on centralized cloud computing services is real. Blockchain offers solutions to many of these security issues.

Akash ($AKT) is a decentralized cloud service that supports AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure or Alibaba Cloud. By decentralizing web hosting services, it drastically increases the attack vectors required to shut down a network. As nodes operate across the globe, it is impossible to break the network through a single source. The US government is dangerously over utilizing AWS with 6,500 agencies supported on the platform across all classification levels. If Amazon decided to delist government websites, or individuals are bought off by foreign agents, a huge portion of government web services could be deactivated. Akash can’t be shut down by a single entity, and no one can stop a decentralized blockchain from supporting a website.

The fact that government emails are still hacked is a gross failure of sensitive individuals not using existing technology. An available vehicle for increasing privacy in encrypted interactions are Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). ZKPs function by one party proving “possession of certain information (e.g. private key) without having to reveal that information to another party and have any interaction. These proofs allow two parties to prove that a statement between a prover and verifier is true — without revealing any other information beyond the validity of the statement itself.” This introduces encrypted privacy to computational interactions, shielding the identity of users and protecting the conveyed information. Centralized groups like CTemplar already offer ZKP email accounts, but better security could be found by introducing ZKPs to functioning networks. Blockchains have achieved this feat, with ZCash ($ZEC) integrating ZKPs in financial transactions and, more recently, Tezos ($XTZ) introducing Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge Proofs (zk-SNARK) to conduct transactions on a shielded blockchain. Critically, Tezos developers have stated that they can implement ZKPs “for any program” and can envision a ZKP language to develop in.

There are countless additional examples of legitimate blockchain projects that can systematically decentralize and secure our networks; it’s time we take a serious look at them. While blockchain may have a bad reputation among institutional players (largely due to the perception it is used for illicit activities), if we fail to adapt and evolve, our security will continue to erode as other nations pass us.

*The author has no investment in any of the aforementioned blockchains

Sources:

1 https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/government/
2 https://medium.com/tezoscommons/zk-snarks-and-fine-tuned-privacy-is-coming-to-tezos-77a4422ad991