Hyperledger Fabric Enables Confidentiality In Blockchain For Business
The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric is one of the various Hyperledger projects and represents a blockchain for business framework implementation. It’s a permissioned distributed ledger that supports desired enterprise capabilities such as smart contracts, consensus, confidentiality, resiliency and scalability. Confidentiality enables life changing applications of the blockchain technology such as medical records management, real-time settlement of financial transactions and personal identity management. In short the “confidentiality” component is defined as the ability to control access to sensitive data.
Focusing on the business side of this “Confidentiality” component, this is a key feature that all business modules want to incorporate into their systems. Participants in a Business-to-Business (B2B) network might be extremely sensitive about how much information they share. The blockchain business networks should be designed in such a way that, it supports the confidentiality requirements of the use case at hand. Which means that we need to understand at a very deep level which network participant have access to what data under which conditions. And there lies another set of factors which are key known as – Subsets, Regulators and Flexibility.
Moving onto the technical side of things, this network requires a high level of sophistication around confidentiality-control and data security. The data at-rest from the ledger or the state database should rely on an encrypted highly available file system. Access control decisions regarding which user can execute which transactions, are based upon the user’s identity attributes. Thus making this a very tough cookie to crack.