The Blockchain Journal

Here is a curated list of readings and resources that ignited our interest in realizing a decentralized Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) vision for the future. We included topics such as fundamentals, Web3, blockchain, web PKI, DNS, time, IoT security, light clients, Ethereum, as well as development tools and tutorials. We are also collecting feedback for our newly published research paper about BlockQuick, a super light client protocol for blockchain validation. DM us...

Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have each received a lot of attention from industry researchers and investors alike over the past few years. However, it is only recently that the two technologies have begun to be considered together allowing participants to reimagine the potential for both, blockchain and IoT.

The major benefit that IoT offers blockchain is in its ability to act as a bridge between the physical and the digital worlds. In...

Last month, the trade association for internet service providers in the U.K. has nominated Mozilla for this year’s award of Internet Villain because Mozilla plans to support DNS-over-HTTPS that would bypass U.K. filtering obligations and parental controls, undermining internet standards in the U.K.

At Diode, we think Mozilla’s DNS-over-HTTPS in general is a good move for increasing the privacy of end-users; however, it is not the best option for protecting an open internet as...

Picture this: you’re sitting in a coffee shop with your laptop, and find yourself trying to connect to the internet, like most people, using a public wifi connection provided by the coffee shop. Wouldn’t it be nice to book a hotel room over the weekend, you ask your partner?

You click on an online reservation website, search for a hotel room to book, and you’re looking forward to the vacation. You may not be aware...

OMG! So it happens again. PKI the Public Key Infrastructure is a centrally rooted security infrastructure to encrypt nearly all of todays internet traffic. And is being used to crack all traffic in Kazakhstan.

Yesterday on the 18h of July 2019, the state-owned telecommunications organization of Kazakhstan started to misuse this central infrastructure in the states initiative against free speech. The now dictatorship of Kazakhstan is forcing its users to install a custom Kazakhstan root...

On Tuesday (7/16), Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, gave a 30-minute presentation entitled, “Harberger taxes for virtual property.” In his presentation (18 slides in English and Mandarin) at the first event of RadicalxChange Taipei, Vitalik looked at what Harberger taxes are and what are the ways to apply Harberger taxes for domain names. Vitalik’s presentation starts at 1:50:47 in the YouTube video.

You just decided to start your next project using blockchain. That is awesome congrats! But now you face the many choices: Which blockchain platform and clients are technically suited for your use case?

Makers and IoT specialists know that when designing embedded systems it’s important to understand the technical parameters within which each component can work. The same is true when selecting the blockchain technology. Required storage capacity on the device, RAM usage, and bandwidth...

China social credit system: the method to reward or punish citizens for their behavior is unclear

First announced in 2014, the Chinese government has been implementing a controversial social credit system. The system uses secret algorithms to evaluate the behavior of Chinese citizens, monitor their banking and social media information such as communications on popular chat app WeChat, violation of traffic rules, and countless other factors and criteria that the government is reluctant to...

Download full paper here (PDF).

Diode’s CTO Dominic Letz published a paper recently to give an introduction of BlockQuick, a super light client protocol for blockchain validation on constrained devices. One of the key concepts behind the newly proposed BlockQuick is that it plans to adopt a consensus-based reputation scheme to accept blocks. This article explores how blockchain synchronization of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices can be achieved through BlockQuick consensus reputation table, as...

Earlier this month, Doug Madory, Oracle’s director of internet analysis, wrote in a blog post detailing a BGP route leak incident happened on Thursday, June 6. For approximately two hours, a massive amount of European Internet traffic was rerouted through China Telecom’s own servers. The Internet traffic was rerouted following a BGP route leak at Swiss data center colocation company Safe Host. Over 70,000 routes - comprising an estimated 368 millions IP addresses coming...

According to a report, Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov confirmed on Wednesday (June 12) that his popular messaging service experienced a “powerful” Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. The DDoS attack disrupted Telegram’s services for about an hour. He later tweeted that the IP addresses involved in the attack were coming mostly from China.

“IP addresses coming mostly from China. Historically, all state actor-sized DDoS (200-400 Gb/s of junk) we experienced coincided in time with protests...

[Note: This post is a follow-on discussion to topics discussed in Introducing Proof-Of-StakeWork and requires some background knowledge in blockchain technology.]

In the last post on Proof-Of-StakeWork we talked about some of the advantages and disadvantages of both Proof-Of-Work (POW) and Proof-Of-Stake (POS) so I won’t go into those details here. The purpose of this post is to more fully articulate the vision and motivation behind Proof-Of-StakeWork (POSW) and to provide a little...

In May, Diode’s CTO Dominic Letz published a paper introducing BlockQuick, a super light client protocol for blockchain validation on constrained devices. The paper shows that unlike other existing approaches such as proofs of proof-of-work (PoPoW) and FlyClient, Diode’s BlockQuick super light client protocol is capable of protecting against eclipse attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks on a peer-to-peer network. But what is an eclipse attack? Is it possible to prevent...

If you’ve been following our blog, you will have heard us mentioning the term decentralized public key infrastructure before. But you probably don’t know what it is or how it works, let alone why it matters so much. In this post, we will examine current approaches to the traditional centralized PKI, explore the basics of decentralized public key infrastructure (DPKI), and then show how blockchain-based DPKI can make an impact as the industry transitions...

- Click here if you just want to read the Paper -

In the last two posts of this series, we first introduced the governance issues in PKI and then the circular dependency between establishing trust in PKI certificates and establishing the current time on a connected device.

So let’s break that circular dependency between time and trust. The difference between trusting a person/an entity and trusting data is key here. How...

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network virtualization have been the disruptor technologies that were fundamental to the success of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Compute, and Azure during the last decade. Before that, there were plenty of rival cloud providers - for most of them, changing network configurations, adding/removing machines to a network required human interaction and would take hours or sometimes days. Dedicated networking, networking...

The Diode Network enables practical distributed trust for IoT communications (and for other modalities as well). The implications of this for distributed IT infrastructure are significant. However, as the reality of distributed infrastructure emerges, other more immediate applications on the way to fully distributed infrastructure are also interesting. One of these applications is distributed wireless network operations.

For star topology wireless networks, as exists in today’s cellular communications paradigm, there are four primary things...

[Note: This post requires background knowledge in blockchain technology. We have provided links to background information.]

After determining a blockchain project’s reason for existence, the next most important decision developers and entrepreneurs must consider is the mechanism through which their network will arrive at consensus. There are many different types of consensus protocols, but the vast majority of them can be placed into one of two buckets, Proof-of-Work (POW) or Proof-of-Stake (POS). Many...

“If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “ you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.”
“ I don’t know what you mean,” said Alice.
“ Of course you don’t !” the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. “ I dare say you never even spoke to Time ! Alice in Wonderland

In order to trust a time source, we need to validate its...

You may not be aware of this but if you are browsing the web or running IoT devices in your business or at your home, you are being protected by a 30-year-old security infrastructure. In this post, we will uncover the history of the internet PKI that holds most of the internet together today and highlight some of the most obvious threats and known flaws. This article is the first in a series investigating the...

In Today’s internet, the authenticity of content is secured by the internet PKI system and the domain name registries. To make it all work first the domain name server (DNS), second you - holding the certificate and the corresponding private key and third a certificate authority which signed your certificate all have to agree on the same data to create this security.

A single miss like a domain name server pointing to a different server...

The public was aghast back in early 2018 when PwC Bitcoin specialist Alex de Vries estimated that Bitcoin servers consume more than 22 terawatt-hours of electricity per year which is comparable to entire countries such as Austria and Ireland.

To many, this was a brewing crisis that if left unchecked would render blockchains unscalable and unsustainable Even Bitcoin’s strongest supporters recognized that the energy consumption issue presented a barrier to growth and mainstream...

On Monday, Bleeping Computer published an article about the disturbing revelation that Dark Matter, a cybersecurity firm based in the United Arab Emirates, has aspirations to become a trusted root certificate authority in one of the world’s most popular web browsers.

A certificate authority (CA) plays an important role in the public key infrastructure (PKI) which ensures secure communication over the internet. CAs are trusted entities that manage, issue and sign digital security certificates that...

After months of incubation we’re excited to start talking about our new, we believe groundbreaking, initiative: Diode^SM Incubating within Exosite, we’ve been working hard to fix some of the fundamental shortcomings of PKI that are underlying 99% of all Internet communication today.

For the first time now it becomes practical, with Diode, to use blockchain technology to eradicate the issues with PKI for IoT devices. Our technologies work even on low-end embedded devices and...