The benefits of blockchain technology in the field of cybersecurity are increasingly evident in the context of the digital transformation of Italian SMEs.
Blockchain represents an innovative approach to cybersecurity because it is a technology that allows systems to be designed according to the principle of 'security by design'. The security of blockchain technology is mainly based on three fundamental elements
- Confidentiality: blockchain offers extended functionalities to ensure user anonymity. User keys are the only link between a user and their data. However, these keys are easy to anonymise.
- Data integrity: blockchains are designed as ledgers in which each block is linked to neighbouring blocks using cryptographic hash functions. Therefore, once a transaction has been recorded on the blockchain, it cannot be modified or deleted. Any changes made to data already recorded are processed as new transactions.
- Availability: having a large number of nodes ensures the resilience of the blockchain even when some nodes are unavailable. And since every node in the network has a copy of the distributed ledger, the correct blockchain remains accessible to other peers even in the case of a compromised node.
Blockchain-based solutions are proving to be particularly effective and promising for increasing cybersecurity and preventing attacks. In particular, applying blockchain to cybersecurity has the great advantage of making it possible to decentralise sensitive data. The information circulating on the web today is of enormous value, which is why it is often the target of cyberattacks. Blockchain-based solutions store data on many nodes, which makes life much more difficult for cybercriminals, who can no longer access entire databases from a single point of access.
Blockchain applied to cybersecurity also enables the adoption of 'smarter' IoT devices (networked objects that interact by transmitting data and information, exchanging them between the internet and the real world), which are able to make security decisions independently, without the need for a central authority, for example by blocking nodes that behave differently and are therefore suspicious. This makes it more difficult for hackers to exploit vulnerabilities in peripheral devices to penetrate a network.
The use of blockchain also ensures that only interested and authorised parties have access to the correct data. The confidentiality of network participants is very high thanks to the public key cryptography that authenticates users.
The debate on the use of blockchain technologies in cybersecurity is always open. It is clear that providing incentives to help fight cybercrime by sharing information helps to recognise crime and neutralise them more quickly.
The main challenge is to make the technology easier to use, more effective and above all cheaper. Once these issues are resolved, blockchain will be able to offer great opportunities to maintain a high level of data security through reliable encryption mechanisms, data integrity, network resilience and scalability.
To find out how we use blockchain technology on our platform visit https://2meet2biz.com/it/blockchain