The Global Shipping Business Network (GSBN) has partnered with Decentriq to bring data privacy technology to its blockchain consortium.
The GSBN platform uses blockchain technology. According to GSBN and Decentriq, there is a strict access policy to govern the visibility of information by role. The policy as designed strictly follows a need-to-know basis. However, some scenarios require more complex data-sharing processes than from a single data contributor. For example, the current platform does not allow for aggregating data across many carriers or terminals.
Decentriq data clean rooms have been designed to address this problem. According to Decentriq, these data clean rooms leverage confidential computing, providing a trusted execution environment at the hardware level, which no one has access to.
While the GSBN Blockchain platform provides a tamper-proof record of the hashes of the encrypted data being submitted in the clean room, Decentriq guarantees secure and confidential processing of sensitive data, even when it’s off-chain.
In addition, the Decentriq platform allows for granular settings in the input, output, and permission. This introduces another layer of access control policy, which can be configured based on both roles and scenarios.
The settings are viewable by all data contributors before submitting data to the clean room and agreed upon by all participants before the data clean room is published. Once it’s published, the settings cannot be changed without the data contributor’s approval and all actions are logged so usage is restricted and monitored.
By combining blockchain and Decentriq data clean room, GSBN can guarantee not only data integrity but also privacy, security, and auditability during the whole data lifecycle: at rest, in transit, and in use whether on-chain or off-chain.
GSBN is currently developing use cases with Decentriq, such as the sharing of shipping activity insights from multiple shipping lines with financial institutions. By combining data clean rooms with the GSBN blockchain network, shipping lines can safely and effortlessly share their data insights without fear of disclosing the underlying sensitive details. Financial institutions can obtain key insights without having to devote extra resources to plough through the vast data from heterogeneous data vendors, according to Decentriq.
By combining the two technologies, GSBN and Decentriq can provide new insights without adding effort or time to both ends of the sharing while preserving maximum confidentiality.
“Collaboration with Decentriq allows us to cover a wider range of data-sharing scenarios and extend the use cases for our ecosystems beyond blockchain. We believe the next generation of blockchain consortiums will combine blockchain technology with other emerging technologies, such as confidential computing, enabling the aggregation of data from different sources and converting them into valuable insights while keeping them safe and secure,” said Edmund To, CTO of GSBN.
“Confidential Computing (CC) is emerging as an inevitable technology to protect data in active use. While CC solves many problems around data integrity and data confidentiality in a very elegant and scalable way, it lacks some strong security guarantees on data immutability and ordering. Blockchain is the perfect fit to fill those shortcomings. It is great to see those technologies getting fully integrated into a turn-key solution for revolutionising the global trade industry,” said Stefan Deml, CTO at Decentriq.
