I’ve been a critic of Blockchain. Frankly I’ve never seen such a massed rush of blood to the head for a new technology. Breathless books are being churned out about “trust infrastructure” and an “Internet of Value”. They say Blockchain will keep politicians and business people honest, and enable “billions of excluded people to enter the global economy”.
Most pundits overlook the simple fact that Blockchain only does one thing: it lets you move Bitcoin (a digital bearer token) from one account to another without an umpire. And it doesn’t even do that very well, for the Proof of Work algorithm is stupendously inefficient. Blockchain can't magically make merchants keep up their side of a bargain. Surprise! You can still get ripped off paying with Bitcoin. Blockchain simply doesn’t do what the futurists think it does. In their hot flushes, they tend to be caught in a limbo between the real possibilities of distributed consensus today and a future that no one is seeing clearly.
But Blockchain does solve what was thought to be an impossible problem, and in the right hands, that insight can convert to real innovation. I’m happy to see some safe pairs of hands now emerging in the Blockchain storm.
One example is an investment being made by Ping Identity in Swirlds and its new “hashgraph” distributed consensus platform. Hashgraph has been designed from the ground up to deliver many of Blockchain’s vital properties (consensus on the order of events, and redundancy) in a far more efficient and robust manner.
And what is Ping doing with this platform? Well they’re not rushing out with vague promises to manufacture "trust" but instead they’re making babysteps on real problems in identity management. For starters, they’re applying the new hashgraph platform to Distributed Session Management (DSM). This is the challenge of verifiably shutting down all of a user’s multiple log-on sessions around the web when they take a break, suffer a hack, or lose their job. It's one of the great headaches of enterprise identity administration and is exploited in a great many cyberattacks.
Ping’s identity architects have carefully set out the problem they’re trying to solve, why it’s hard, and how existing approaches don’t deliver the desired security properties for session management. They then evaluated a number of consensus approaches - not just Blockchain but also Paxos and Raft – and discussed their limitations. The Ping team then landed on hashgraph, which appears to meet the needs, and also looks like it can deliver a range of advanced features.
In my view, Ping Identity’s work is the very model of mature security design. It’s an example of the care and attention to detail that other innovators should follow.
Swirld’s founder Dr Leemon Baird will be presenting hashgraph in more detail to the Cloud Identity Summit in New Orleans tomorrow (June 7th).