Richard Brown is the Chief Technology Officer at R3. He leads the team that has invented, designed and brought to market the Corda blockchain platform. He now also leads the team that’s building out their second major product line, called Conclave a platform to securely share and analyse data using confidential computing.

 

What is blockchain?

Previously Richard gave Insureblocks a definition of blockchain from an enterprise perspective. A blockchain like Corda is all about allowing multiple firms in a market to be in sync with each other about facts, they care about such as loans and trade deals. Documents which are shared between firms such as notification of loss for an insurance policy, will invariably evolve over time. The claim gets reviewed, processed and authorised. All those business processes are executed within a firm.  Other firms across the ecosystem that have a stake in those documents need to be in consensus about their status.

For Richard, blockchain is all about ensuring that all the participants in an inter firm business process are in sync and remain so. The key value proposition being that “what you see is what I see”. Since our last podcast together in April 2019, Richard believes that his original definition of blockchain has been mostly validated by projects R3 has successfully run such as Spunta, by ABI (the Italian Banking Association). Spunta is about ensuring Italian banks are in sync with each other, that their balances reconcile and all the details are correct.

 

Security on the web – the padlock on your browser

We rarely think about how computers work or what promises they make. This can lead to some unexpected or often problematic outcomes.

When browsing the web, including going onto social media sites like Facebook, we are trained to look out for that padlock next to that URL within our internet browser as it gives us a sense of security. What that padlock tells us is that the connection between ourselves and Facebook is secure. That we are talking to the real Facebook.com and that connection is with servers controlled by Facebook.com.

This means that whatever data you are exchanging with Facebook is protected in transit as it leaves your computer and goes across Facebook servers.

However, what it doesn't say is what Facebook will do with the data, it simply tells you that they are the ones who will receive it. Once Facebook receives that data they can do whatever they like with it. Something which of course has led to some press scandals as the Cambridge Analytica one.

Social media sites today haven’t deployed any technological measure to constrain or control how they use your data. As consumers we rely entirely on social and legal measures to constrain what they do with that data.

The padlock in the browser effectively gives us a false sense of security, because whilst it gives protection to the data as it moves it doesn’t do anything about how the data is ultimately used by the receiving party.

This problem of course isn’t just for consumers but also for businesses. Banks will route client orders to exchanges to buy or sell shares. Insurance companies will send data to government agencies or third party credit agencies.