The safety of data and online transactions has always been of paramount importance, especially in todays digital ecosystem. The internet is already facing numerous fraud cases across the digital ecosystem, with countless numbers of hackers regularly breaching systems.

The prevailing cybersecurity risks have put individuals and organizations reputations at stake, as the data collected from these hacking activities is misused for further fraudulent acts.

With everything now going digital and becoming vulnerable to hacking, one big question is whether it is possible to build a secured system online?

The answer to that question is yes, it's possible to build secured systems onlinewith Blockchain.

But before trusting and saving our precious data on Blockchains, lets understand what the technology really is about.

Many confidential data and information are still stored in e-formats, using a centralized database maintained on servers in a particular physical location. However, newer, more secure methods of storing confidential data and transactional information make use of a distributed ledger, which is essentially a shared database that exists across various computers on a peer-to-peer network.

Blockchain is a peer-to-peer network of distributed ledgers containing a growing list of data and transactional records, called blocks, that are linked using cryptography, which is a method of protecting information and communications through the use of codes, so that only authorized persons can read and process it. This means the list of records are secure on a Blockchain.

The transactions and data in a Blockchain, after a specific time period, get grouped in the form of a block that contains a timestamp and is further encrypted and stored in a decentralized database. This makes sure that the security, accuracy and authenticity of the data is intact and every block in the chain has a copy/timestamp of modifications.

Ultimately, the intended purpose of Blockchain, the revolutionary record-keeping technology, is to bring transparency, security, and decentralization in the storage and maintenance of data.

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There are at least three major reasons behind using this revolutionary technology:

Before Bitcoin and BitTorrent came together, people were used to centralized services. The idea is very simple: You have a unified entity that saves records and youd have to interact with one entity to get any of that data you required.

For example, when you search for something on Google, you send a query to the server which returns search results with the requested data. However, this data has several vulnerabilities:

In a decentralized system using Blockchain, however, information is shared with everyone in the network and they own it. It is not stored in a single centralized spot thats easier to target. That means the entire data cannot be affected all at once, which makes the data more secure.

With regard to Blockchain, immutability means the data, once entered in the system, cannot be fiddled with. This has proven very beneficial in many sectors, such as financial institutions and FinTech startups.

If you think about it, how many fraud cases could have been stopped if people just knew that the vital companys data that they were looking to fiddle with was out of their bounds.

Blockchain is a connected list or records containing data and a hash pointer. A hash pointer is like a typical pointer, but instead of just containing the address of the previous block, it also contains the hash of the data inside the previous block.

Hashing means taking an input string of any length and giving out an output of a fixed length. Attempting any small change in any of the data will change the hash functions drastically. This is exactly how Blockchain system are ensuring immutability.

Today, transparency is a concept that has been misunderstood by many. Why is that so?

Well, all the identifying information of a person is encrypted and safeguarded by complex cryptography, which is denoted only by their public address. For example, if you wanted to see anyones transaction record, you will not see as Mark sent 5 BTC, instead you will see it as 1MF1bhsPBkBzzz9vpFYEmvwT2TbyCt7NZJ sent 5 BTC.

Hence, even if the persons real identity is hidden, you can still see the records that were done by their public address. This is a unique feature of transparency within a financial system. And this kind of encryption helps financial institutions safely demonstrate their transparency.

With the application of blockchain and cryptocurrency technology, you can easily check the transactions of any institution via their public address. This has forced complete truthfulness from big institutions, which was previously not possible and they never dealt with before.

Photo: Wikimedia commons.

Some real benefits for this technology are:

Blockchain technology eliminates the involvement of third parties for processing or verifying transactions. The technology is actually helping in securing clients data in digital format.

For example, several online background verification companies are leveraging Blockchain technology to mitigate security breaches, effective utilization to prevent frauds, and allow easy verification of personal documents.

As already mentioned, the technology uses a hash function. This function works by creating a fixed length of alphanumeric characters irrespective of the actual file size. The character limit is 256-bits long, which means its possible to verify the authenticity of data and documents.

With Blockchain technology, a participant will need to verify as a genuine user only once in the network that they do transactions and not every time. This leads to quicker, smoother and more trustworthy transactions between users as every member is verified.

The hash sequence for every input is different and unique and it stores the details of exact time and date of transactions, with every detail of verification done on that record. As mentioned before, any change in the input will completely produce a different hash.

Compared to the old and time-consuming verification methods, Blockchain acts as a new dawn to the verification industry. Blockchain brings in more innovative, fast, and efficient ways to get the verification done, leading to time consumption moving from hours to merely minutes.

Blockchain gives the member options to securely show their data as per the existing needs and requirements. This gives individuals managing personal data of organizations more flexibility.

Moreover, not only is there transparency in the use of the technology, but also the privacy of personal data that a user does not want to share is also taken care of.

With this technology, a user can prove their authenticity without having to disclose their sensitive data and information, or providing any identifying documents to prove their identity.

Simply doing some tasks within Blockchain systems and networks that the person is able to do only if they are who they claim to be can verify a persons identity. Otherwise, failing to complete the task will lead to automatic rejection of their identity.

This concept is called Zero knowledge proof (ZKP) and it is very effective for authentication purposes, while assuring the privacy of personal data.

Given that the current market is characterized by stiff competition, adopting the revolutionary Blockchain technology in your business can give you a marked edge over the competition.

A Blockchain-based identity verification system, for example, can offer an efficient method for businesses to manage and verify details of job seekers, workers, and even clients in the business. The verified profiles not only build trust among business partners and stakeholders, but also remove the need for intervention of external background verification agencies.

Blockchain powered systems utilizes a decentralized repository of distributed ledgers for storing validated data that cannot be tampered with without it being noticed. The systems effectively enable a hybrid approach with their state-of-the-art technology that includes a Blockchain secured database and an easily verifiable and shareable data management system.

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The Real Benefits of Integrating Blockchain Tech to Secure Your Digital Data & Transactions - News & Features

Facing the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown, major retailers have had to depend more heavily on mobile apps to stay connected to customers and keep business moving.

For example, many coffee shops, restaurants and grocery stores are asking customers to make orders for pickup through their or food delivery mobile apps, and those stores whose physical locations are completely shuttered depend entirely on mobile apps to keep generating revenue.

In this rush to add new functionality and update mobile apps, improving the security posture of an app can no longer be overlooked. Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the pandemic and peoples increased reliance on mobile apps. A recent COVID-19 tracking app, for example, turned out to be ransomware.

Where should organizations start to improve mobile app security? Here are the broad areas that require the most attention:

Secure Data StorageIn many apps, sensitive data and personally identifiable information (PII) such as credit card numbers, passwords and other valuable information are stored in the clear. This data can be stored in different locations, including the apps sandbox, the in-app preferences, strings and resources.

This means that anyone who can gain unauthorized access to the app can read the data stored by it. Thieves are most interested in the data a phone stores, because it is much more valuable for the purpose of credential theft and fraud than is the phone itself.

To protect the data on a device, it must be encrypted. That way, even if a device is stolen or compromised, the data will be useless gibberish without the encryption key necessary to decode it. The cryptography employed should be at least as strong as the Advanced Encryption Standard using encryption keys that are 256 bits in length, known as AES-256 encryption.

Secure communicationsFor a retailers mobile app to be useful, it has to communicate via the Internet with other services, and those communications must be protected. Otherwise, mobile apps can fall prey to man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, in which a cybercriminal intercepts communications between a mobile user and the server theyre trying to reach. If successful, attackers can steal sensitive data and even change information to do things such as inject malware into the app.

To protect against MitM attacks, apps must enforce secure communications using transport layer security (TLS) and properly enforce security certificates, which verify the identity of the server to which the mobile app is connecting.

Protect against tampering and reverse engineeringApp makers also have to be concerned with the underlying code and intellectual property of their apps. Most are not protected against attempts to tamper, debug and reverse engineer apps a set of capabilities often referred to as app shielding.

Levels of protection vary widely, with some hackers being able to turn off these protections. This allows bad actors to create malicious apps that look and feel like the real app. They can then distribute these apps to unsuspecting users and wreak havoc.

Another important protection layer is code obfuscation, the process of modifying an executable so that it is no longer useful to a hacker but remains fully functional. When combined with app shielding, these two measures provide powerful protection for mobile apps.

These measures can take a great deal of time, expense and specialized skills to implement, which poses serious problems for development teams, who need to release apps quickly, especially during a crisis such as this one. As a result, many organizations choose to release apps that are vulnerable.

Thankfully, businesses dont have solely rely on manual implementation methods, as automated, AI-powered platforms now exist that can implement all of these security measures in minutes without any coding at all.

As businesses depend more and more on their mobile apps, its critical to ensure the security of both the app and its users. By implementing secure data storage, secure communications and anti-tampering measures, businesses protect both its customers and company from malicious attacks.

Tom Tovar is the CEO and co-creator of Appdome.

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Commentary: Mobile app security in the midst of a pandemic - Chain Store Age

The BBVA Foundation awarded three MIT professors Frontiers of Knowledge Awards for their work in climate change, biology and biomedicine, and quantum computation. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences Professor Kerry A. Emanuel, Department of Biology Professor David Sabatini, and Department of Mathematics Professor Peter Shor were recognized in the 12th edition of this annual award.

Kerry Emanuel

Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science, earned the BBVAs Climate Change award for his fundamental contributions to the understanding of tropical cyclones and how they are affected by climate change, according to the committees citation. By understanding the essential physics of atmospheric convection he has unraveled the behavior of tropical cyclones hurricanes and typhoons as our climate changes. He was also lauded for extraordinary effectiveness in communicating the science of climate change to the public and policymakers.

Emanuel is the co-founder (with Daniel H. Rothman) and co-director of the MIT Lorenz Center, a climate think tank that fosters creative approaches to learning how climate works. He was the first to link greater hurricane intensity to climate change-induced warming of sea surface waters.

It is hard to imagine an area of climate science where one persons leadership is so incontestable, says Bjorn Stevens, BBVA Foundation committee chairman and director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology.

Hurricanes have long been known as destructive natural events, but the underlying physics of them was still largely unknown. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, after completing degrees at MIT and later joining the EAPS faculty, Emanuel pinned down the mechanisms behind hurricanes. In his research detailing how warming surface oceans fuel storms and increase the intensity, he called them massive, natural machines that convert the heat they extract from the ocean into wind energy.

A changing climate will see more powerful hurricanes. Emanuel warns that this will complicate the already-tough task of making accurate forecasts, and predicts that hurricanes will spread into more regions of the planet.

His models currently predict a 5 percent increase in hurricane intensity (i.e., wind speed) for each 1-degree rise in ocean temperatures. Three degrees of warming would makehurricanes 15 percent more intense, but their destructive potential would actually triple; in other words, with this15percent increasein wind speed, thedamage would increase by around 45 percent, says Emanuel, the author of "Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes" (Oxford Unviersity Press, 2005) and "What We Know about Climate Change" (MIT Press, 2018).

Todays most intense hurricanes may have a wind speed at the surface of 85 meters per second, but by the end of this century, unless we curb greenhouse gas emissions, we could start to see speeds of up to 90-92 meters per second. A hurricanes destructive potential is determined by its wind speed, so in fact, the destructiveness of these storms for human populations would be considerably greater.

Emanuel says that the international community is not doing nearly enough to combat climate change. We need to stop listening to the voices of denial, and instead listen to our own children, who are crying out for us to act.

David Sabatini

Sabatini, an MIT professor of biology and member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, shares his Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biology and Biomedicine with Michael Hall of the University of Basel, for the discovery of a protein kinase that regulates cellular metabolism and growth.

Their discovery of mTOR is used in the study of a wide array of health conditions, including obesity, aging, cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, Alzheimers, and Parkinsons. Research has suggested that 60 percent of cancers have some mechanism for turning on the mTOR pathway, Sabatini says. I could never have imagined the implications of that first discovery.

Sabatini began his PhD thesis on understanding the mechanism of action of rapamycin, a natural anti-fungal agent proved to have immunosuppressive and anti-cancer properties. It is used to prevent organ rejection in transplant patients.

The two scientists arrived at their findings independently. Hall discovered the target of rapamycin (TOR) protein in yeast cells in 1993 during his time as a senior investigator; Sabatini isolated it in mammals while still a doctoral student, in 1994, and gave it the name mTOR.

In mammalian cells, mTOR which stands for mechanistic target of rapamycin, an immunosuppressant drug that inhibits cell growth is the keystone molecule in a pathway that regulates cellular metabolic processes in response to nutrients.

Sabatini explains that mTOR is a switch that turns on in the presence of nutrients, so the body can build material, and when there are no nutrients available it breaks the material down. The on/off switch of the mTOR switch controls a cascade of hundreds of molecular signals, many of which are still unknown to science.

The molecular mechanisms that regulate the growth of organisms and coordinate it with the availability of nutrients were unknown until two decades ago, said the committee.

After the molecule was isolated in yeast and mammals, both researchers began the task of unraveling its multiple organismal functions. Sabatinis lab has since identified most of the components of the mTOR pathway and shown how they contribute to the function of cells and organisms. His discoveries have opened avenues for identifying disease vulnerabilities and treatment targets for diverse conditions notably including key metabolic vulnerabilities in pancreatic and ovarian cancer cells and neurodevelopmental defects. He is currently working to exploit those vulnerabilities as targets for new therapies.

Rapamycin is used as an immunosuppressant to prevent rejection of transplanted organs and as an anti-cancer agent. In the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, it is used as a coating for coronary stents to stop new blockages forming in the bloodstream.

Because mTOR is a nutrient sensor, additional research points to caloric restriction for increasing longevity. TOR was the first known protein that influences longevity in all of the four species that scientists commonly use to study aging: yeast, worms, flies, and mice. We are just scratching the surface of possible mTOR applications, he says. I dont know if it will help us live to be 120, but I think it will have beneficial effects on different physiological systems, and I am practically sure that it will ameliorate aspects of aging-related diseases.

Peter Shor

Shor, the Morss Professor of Applied Mathematics, was recognized in the Basic Sciences category for his role in the development of quantum computation and cryptology. He shares this award with IBM Researchs chemical physicist Charles H. Bennett and University of Montreal computer scientist Gilles Brassard.

The award committeeremarked on the leap forward in quantum technologies, an advance that draws heavily on the new laureates pioneering contributions. The committee stated that their work spans multiple disciplines and brings together concepts from mathematics, physics, and computer science. Their ideas are playing a key role in the development of quantum technologies for communication and computation.

Bennett and Brassard invented quantum cryptography in the 1980s to ensure the physical inviolability of data communications. The importance of this work became apparent 10 years later when Shor discovered that a hypothetical quantum computer would render effectively useless the conventional cryptography systems underpinning the privacy and security of todays internet communications.

Bennett and Brassards BB84 protocol generally acknowledged as the first practical application of the science of quantum information underpins the security of all our internet communications and transactions, and is based on the existence of mathematical problems that computers cannot solve. Until, as the citation states, Shor discovered that quantum computers could factorize integers much faster than any supercomputer, therefore compromising the security of conventional cryptographic schemes.

Says Brassard, The importance of our work became much more evident after Shor destroyed everything else. Shors Algorithm is now one of the quantum algorithms that comprise the fast-developing language to be spoken by tomorrows quantum computers.

Another of Shors contributions is an algorithm used to correct quantum computer errors, an essential requirement for enabling and scaling quantum computations, the committee wrote.

Quantum computers are exposed to a large volume of noise, causing numerous errors. Everyone thought that you couldnt correct errors on quantum computers, recalls Shor, because as soon as you try to measure a quantum system you disturb it. In other words, if you try to measure the error so as to correct it, you disturb it and computation is interrupted. My algorithm showed that you can isolate and fix the error and still preserve the computation.

Quantum cryptography is one of the most advanced branches of quantum technology, which the laureates view as a long-term prospect. It will be five or 10 years before a quantum computer can do anything approaching useful, says Shor. With time, however, he is convinced that these machines will deliver revolutionary applications. For example, in biomedicine, it takes enormous amounts of computer time to simulate the behavior of molecules, he says. But quantum computers could achieve that, and help design new drugs.

The BBVA Foundation promotes knowledge based on research and artistic and cultural creation, and supports activity on the analysis of emerging issues in five strategic areas: environment, biomedicine and health, economy and society, basic sciences and technology, and culture. The Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, spanning eight prize categories, recognize research and creative work of excellence as embedded in theoretical advances, technological developments, or innovative artistic works and styles, as well as fundamental contributions in addressing key challenges of the 21st century.

Since its launch in 2009, the BBVA also has given awards to MITs Susan Solomon for climate change; Marvin Minsky, Adi Shamir,Silvio Micali,Shafi Goldwasser, and Ronald Rivest for information and computer technologies; Stephen Buchwald for basic sciences; Edward Boyden for biology and biomedicine; and Daron Acemoglu for economics.

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Kerry Emanuel, David Sabatini, and Peter Shor receive BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge awards - MIT News