It’s Time for Blockchain to Embrace the Level of Security Users Deserve
Blockchain technology is partly built on high security principles, but as pointed out in a recent DARPA analysis pointing out how vulnerable cryptocurrency technology is to tampering: It is becoming increasingly clear that this is not always the case.
Against this backdrop, blockchain providers far beyond the realm of cryptocurrencies and NFTs are offering users the level of security they need and, in some cases, the level of security they thought they already had. It’s time to provide users with
How Blockchain Security Got Where It Is Now
From a hacker’s perspective, cryptocurrencies have proven to be a gold mine. The latest trend among hackers is to target blockchain “bridges,” the tools used to transfer tokens between blockchains. In his first seven months of 2022 alone, more than $1 billion has been stolen from him from these blockchain bridges.
These compromises are often the result of key mismanagement. Empowering people, as blockchain ostensibly does, gives them a degree of freedom, but it also comes with responsibility. For example, even if an organization has a solid security foundation, malicious actors can still perform user-level trickery and trick users into signing or giving up their private keys. Rather than having a fundamental problem with blockchain as a technology, it just created an environment in which individuals unfamiliar with security could control something of high value. A target for sophisticated hackers.
The gap that needs to be filled is not building new protocols, but adding more control at the user level. Depending on the size of your organization, there may be five levels of approval. Certain size transactions may require approval from multiple people in different locations. Ethereum has dapps, which bring a certain level of programmability to the platform, but also poses the problem that people don’t know which apps they approve or what they sign.
