How Blockchain Technology Can Secure Your Business Communications

Securing communications is a crucial point in any business. This allows keeping its information, its business models, its techniques, and its projects confidential in the face of competition. To ensure this, encryption is required.

Historically, encryption methods saw their first appearance during wars where the exchange of information was very sensitive. So-called symmetric methods have been used to encrypt the data. Among others, perhaps the best known, the César cipher, which is symmetric encryption by offset.
Symmetric encryption consists of using a single key that will be used for encryption and decryption. The unique key makes this type of encryption easier.
The challenge facing this type of encryption is how the transmitter and receiver can agree on the same key.
Indeed, a hacker can carry out MITM (Man In The Middle) attacks and recover the key exchanged between the transmitter and the receiver. As a result, all communications will no longer be secret, which affects the confidentiality of the exchanged data.

Figure 1- A hacker can recover the key exchanged between the transmitter and the receiver. As a result, all communications will no longer be confidential.

Another method has been devised o avoid this kind of attack. It is known as asymmetric encryption. Unlike the first method, asymmetric encryption uses two pairs of keys. Each entity (transmitter and receiver) has a pair of private and public keys.
The public key is used to encrypt the data, while the private key is used to decrypt it.
Public/private keys are mutually computable, this doesn’t allow sending the private key but only the public key. So even if a malicious hacker can recover the latter, he cannot decrypt encrypted content because he does not have the private key. To do so, and in addition to the public key, the hacker needs a private key.
Asymmetric encryption makes it possible to avoid sending encryption keys via the transmission channel and therefore avoid MITM attacks where the hacker can recover the key to be able to decrypt confidential data.
However, another type of attack can take place. A hacker can send a corrupt public key to one of the communicating entities and self-proclaim as a legitimate entity. The hacker can therefore communicate, create corrupted data, and receive confidential data.

Figure 2- A hacker can send a corrupt public key to one of the communicating entities and self-proclaim as a legitimate entity.

To overcome this problem, the concept of PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) was designed. Indeed, a PKI doesn’t allow any entity accepting keys only if they come from a certified legitimate source. This, therefore, prevents a hacker from being able to proclaim himself legitimate by sending his own corrupted key.

Figure 3- PKI allows any entity not to accept keys only if they come from a certified legitimate source.

This new concept was able to show several advantages, and avoid several attack scenarios.
Unfortunately, and again, research has been able to identify certain vulnerabilities in relation to the issuance of digital certificates by PKIs.

Researchers Hack Internet Security Infrastructure

Figure 4- PKI vulnerabilities

To remedy all this, Blockchain has taken place. It is a technology designed based on algorithms and cryptology techniques, which allows surpassing PKI infrastructures. From now on, the certified trusted authorities are the communicating entities themselves.

To return to our context, a company can invest in the Blockchain to protect the communication of its data, even if this technology can be expensive.

This new technology still makes it possible to 1/protect the exchange of information from MITM attacks 2/protect the exchange of information from attacks that introduce corrupted data using illegitimate source 3/prevent company communications from being dependent on a management key infrastructure, and therefore through transitivity, exposed to PKI vulnerabilities based attacks.

Figure 5- Blockchain is based on algorithms and cryptology techniques, which allows surpassing PKI infrastructures. From now on, the certified trusted authorities are the communicating entities themselves.