How do you create absolute trust in an untrusted environment?

Trust in your Enterprise is Gospel’s tagline – but what do we actually mean by trust?  Trust is a concept that can have many levels of certainty and usually relies on some sort of faith.  So how do you create absolute trust using technology with no risk of betrayal?  Trent Kalisch-Smith explains some of the tech behind creating mathematical trust where no faith is required.What does it mean to create trust?
Trust is an age old concept. You might trust your neighbour to feed your cat but how can you be sure they don’t forget, or that they don’t actually despise your cat and would rather see it go hungry?
Whether it’s within your organisation or part of a complex supply chain across partners, trust is essential. Data is now the lifeblood of any business. It must be made available to the right people at the right time in order to maximise the value that can be extracted from it and streamline the processes that rely upon it. In the same way, people need to be trusted to handle data and not abuse these privileges.

---

In order for data to be trusted, it is vital to prove that it has not been altered by an unauthorised party along its lifecycle

---

In order for data to be trusted, it is vital to prove that it has not been altered by an unauthorised party along its lifecycle and that historical data hasn’t been changed. In order for you to trust that the right people have access to data, there must be a connection between them and the data. This is often based on their role, ownership of data or a specific task in a process.
Traditional technologies have not been able to provide this effectively, which has led to layers and layers of complexity being built up over time to try and preserve the integrity of the data. The resulting challenges in getting access to data has been referred to as the Data Paradox and has created the rise of shadow IT, where well meaning employees share data through non-approved and untraceable ways, because they are quick and easy.

How do you mathematically build trust?
Gospel is built on the latest in blockchain technology and developed using a consensus principle known as practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT). Without going into the complex nature of this technology, it essentially means that the same rules are enforced across a distributed network of untrusted partners, requiring them to inspect and approve all actions on data. Gospel uses this foundation to ensure that nobody can read or change data without consensus. This, combined with the tamper-proof nature of the blockchain provides absolute control of who can access what data, even when it flows across business perimeters.
We use blockchain’s immutability to not only prevent any changes to historical data, but also to record who has changed, viewed or attempted to view the data held. The distributed nature of our blockchain platform ensures that there is no single point of failure for any of these capabilities. No one participant can get access to more data than they have been permissioned and the network is even protected against a majority attack.

---

We use blockchain’s immutability to not only prevent any changes to historical data, but also to record who has changed, viewed or attempted to view the data held.

---

This builds mathematical trust and security and means everyone has access to the data they need, when they need it. No other solution does this to such a granular and contextual level, blockchain or otherwise.
Finally, Gospel makes it possible to provide simple access to data based on the connection between a person or system and the data. Our context based access controlsenable these relationships to be established with strict rules. This means that once someone has completed a task, access to data is shut off again.

Trust achieved. By building on the fundamental characteristics of blockchain to create a solution for enabling trust, we can free up data for its intended use and provide access with the assurance that it will always remain in the right hands.

Trent Kalish-Smith is Gospel’s Technical Sales Engineer

For 90 second overview of gospel click here.
Got any questions? Ask the team probably has it covered.