Cambridge, 26 October 2018, Metrarc announced today that it had successfully completed a Innovate UK feasibility study entitled Blockchain device Metric ENhanced Security (IMmENSe) under the Theme of Distributed Ledgers and Blockchains.
The main aim of the £100k, 12 month project was to undertake a proof-of-concept study which would build upon the extensive experience of the Metrarc team of their pioneering platform technology of ICMetrics and develop an appropriate authentication/authorising nodes in permissioned blockchains for networked financial transactions.
The Company has reported that a GUI-based, proof-of -concept, Hyperledger demonstrator has been successfully produced, which clearly shows the potential of the system to detect the presence of compromised nodes based on the ICMetric Trusted Ring signatures. This was achieved in the fabric blockchain network over the BT Research Cloud Platform thereby appending only authentic financial transactions to the Fabric network. This is of significant interest to several commercial partners.
The blockchain market is now established and is expected to grow significantly and aggressively over the next few years. The security element is a key enabler for that growth and effective strategies must be applied to that end. Metrarc CEO Professor Klaus McDonald-Maier said ‘the ability to detect the presence of compromised nodes in any permissioned blockchain application is important for security, this work has shown that Trusted Ring signatures may be derived from permissioned blockchain nodes and whence the potential impact of our work is enormous.’
These results show a route forward for safe and secure permissioned blockchain networks, CTO Professor Gareth Howells commented ‘The focus of the Company is to exploit commercially these results and the fact that many of the techniques we have developed for combining the measure features are generic in nature. This gives rise to several other potential applications in distributed ledger technology which represents a major growth area in terms of market opportunity at the current time.’