The Isle of Man has announced that it will test blockchain technology to see if it can prevent IoT devices from compromise by hackers.
The project is in collaboration with startup firm Credits, according to a report by Financial News. According to Credits co-founder Nick Williamson, the technology could be used to assign unique identities to physical items to affirm authenticity.
“The idea behind [the experiment] is that IoT has a promise of assigning a unique, non-forgeable identity to physical items and what the Blockchain provides is the way of managing and maintaining an identity,” he told the publication.
Credits will offer its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) framework to enable enterprises, government and the public sector to build Blockchains to establish provenance, authentication and reconciliation. The framework should work with other legacy and Blockchain systems.
The framework has also been endorsed by the UK government which awarded it a contract under G-Cloud 8 to provide distributed ledger technology software and cloud-based services to enterprise and public sector bodies.
Isle of Man at the forefront with Blockchain
Peter Veash, CEO at The BIO Agency, told Internet of Business that the Isle of Man government has always been on the forefront of trialling new technologies.
“Blockchain is the next logical step. The technology isn’t just used for crypto-currencies like Bitcoin – the opportunities for it are limitless and the Internet of Things industry is definitely one that can benefit from it. Given that a Blockchain uses code that theoretically can’t be altered and keeps a record of every transaction, it is very hard to hack,” he said.
In a study written by EY earlier this year, Paul Brody, EY Americas strategy leader said that IoT and blockchain technologies were “kind of made for each other” and could become the “underlying infrastructure for many IoT networks”.
“Blockchain-powered industrial IoT networks will allow us to connect industrial assets — everything from shipping containers to MRI machines to construction equipment — into real-time digital marketplaces where we can make better use of them.”