Last week, Steve Bassi, founder at Polyswarm, published an eye-opener blog on SC Media, clarifying how most of the issues in the cyber security industry can be solved with interoperability, and how in doing so Blockchain would be the most useful element in this.

To begin, it is important to understand that Polyswarm is the world’s first-known decentralized threat intelligence market. Bassi’s aim is to employ Ethereum Blockchain to solve the industrial issues with cyber security. His views on the subject become more important as with the growing prevalence of IoT, the need for cyber security is also growing, something that we’ve discussed in detail in one of our previous blogs.

The major issues with Cyber security

Quoting the stats from We Live Security, Bassi says that there are around 90 million cyber attacks around the globe and that 70 percent of the emerging ones remain completely undetected.

It is evident, that the shortage of resources and experts is the main issue that is leading to such seemingly insurmountable problems in the industry. However, bringing in more skills is a less efficient way of dealing with these problems. Furthermore, filling in the gap between demand and supply for cyber security experts is not a scalable solution either, considering the geographical differences between these two factors.

As Bassi has pointed out, the lack of skilled resources is not an issue for the global cyber security market. The US and Canada’s supply for such resources have exceeded by 50% compared to the countries’ demand, whereas, countries like UK and Israel are suffering severe recourse shortages. It makes the countries suffering an easy target for the future attacks, increasing the vulnerability of the entire system.

For all these reasons, Bassi states, that a real solution would be the one that is interoperable, scalable and something that surpasses all the geographic and political boundaries. His ‘proposed solution’ for the problem is ‘blockchain and smart contracts’.  In his words “These technologies allow us to redefine the economics of cyber security and advance the industry.”

Blockchain Induced Efficiency

The proposed solution in Bassi’s views is the something like what PolySwarm is already doing. The platform uses smart contracts to incentivize the contributors/experts for creating innovative solutions to the prevailing problems, with no middle person to charge the fees or distribute the reward unjustly.

The proposed platform will have market leaders like Symantec and Intel Security, who would make the platform resourceful from the start to provide a more ‘robust’ coverage to all the parties involved.

To simplify how such an ecosystem will function, let’s consider an example- An enterprise submits its malicious content for review and wants the system fixed. It also mentions that the reward associated with it simultaneously creates a smart contract for it. Many experts, then, can submit their solutions and the one that is the most accurate for solving the problem will automatically get rewarded.

It’s evident that this process will not only reduce the overhead costs involved in finding the fitting solution but will also encourage the experts to innovate with new ideas to solve a problem with greater assistance from the interoperability of the blockchain platform.

This system indeed sounds more lucrative and futuristic to solve many of the existing and foreseeable problems with cyber security market. In fact, Bassi states his complete confidence in it by penning that “we’ll see this new technology lead us to a safer, more secure world”.

Resources:

https://www.scmagazine.com/why-blockchain-and-not-gamers-is-the-future-of-cybersecurity/article/761863/

https://polyswarm.io/howitworks/index.html