How Effective is Blockchain in ensuring Cybersecurity?

Blockchain technology is a structure that stores transactional records, also known as the block, of the public in several databases, known as the ‘chain’ in a network-connected through peer-to-peer nodes. The storage is generally referred to as a ‘digital ledger.’

Every transaction in this ledger is authorized by the owner’s digital signature that authenticates the transaction and safeguards it from tampering. Hence, digital ledger contains is high security.

In other words, the digital ledger is like a Google spreadsheet shared among numerous computers in a network, in which the transactional records are stored based on the actual purchase. The fascinating angle is that anybody can see the data, but they can’t corrupt it.

The main reason behind using blockchain is securing capital. For the past few years, people have put AI and Big Data into their fundraising decks because the words were en vogue. Investors loved the hype. In the last two years, both blockchain and IoT have been added as words to sprinkle across business presentations to conjure investors and investment like magic fairy dust.

The internet of things (IoT) is involved with significant cyberattacks, often associated with the abuse of vulnerable connected devices, such as surveillance cameras, to facilitate malicious activities. Concerns have been raised about the IoT’s capability to secure billions of devices connected to the unwieldy internet, calling for viable solutions to fill the security gap. In this case, blockchain can reduce the risk of IoT implementations. In principle, it would enable the protection of IoT networks in several ways, like forming a group consensus on aberrant network behaviors and quarantining any nodes that may be performing irregularly.

Here are some ways to apply blockchain to reinforce IoT and Cybersecurity:

Enhancing Network Security

Network security can be improved by using blockchain for consensus. Although data stored in a ledger can provide the basis for making decisions by these IoT devices, it doesn’t give them smarts. Any consensus algorithm that works around multiple IoT devices is possibly separate and distinct from the blockchain.

Storing Data

If one tends to store entire data in one place, it becomes unwieldy and prolonged. GDPR makes storing data an even trickier proposition. And pulling data from a blockchain is incredibly slow. Blockchain is a terrible replacement for a relational database.

Protecting Data

Blockchain provides disaster recovery options by distributing the data across nodes; therefore, there’s no single point of failure. That means hackers have multiple locations to go and attempt to steal the data. Cybercriminals don’t need to change any data to have an advantage; they need to steal it. If one wants to encrypt all of the data stored on the blockchain, it will take some more time.

Providing and Securing Messaging on IoT Devices

Blockchain is a superior technology that ensures the integrity of data and adds the ledger in real-time. It is designed to be distributed, decentralized, and immutable. There are necessary messaging capabilities built into most protocols related to achieving consensus. And trying to message into the ledger and read them back again is a nightmare.

Blockchain has both purpose and usefulness in the IoT realm. However, blockchain has little or no value to add to cybersecurity unless one tries to raise money from investors.