According to 2018 Identity Fraud: Fraud Enters a New Era of Complexity from Javelin Strategy & Research, in 2017, there were 16.7 million victims of identity fraud, a record high that followed a previous record the year before . Such news are very common now a days, there are many cases of data leaks, thefts are being reported every day. But in most of the cases people even don’t know their data is being used by someone else for their own benefits. It’s happening because there is no control or policies for how the data should be used. Internet protocol suite only care of about sending data from A end to B end and it’s the primary function of this protocol, this protocol suit doesn’t care who is using this data. And users are paying big price due to absence of data policies.

Just few months back, I was searching for job and I updated my resume to one of the job portal along with my current and expected salary information. Within couple of days after I update the details, I started receiving calls from bank sales person for offering credit cards, personal loans etc. I realize that either job portal sites have sold my data to these bank sales persons or these bank sales persons might have registered themselves as recruiter/ HR of the XYZ company and stolen my info from job portal site. Here I was not having control over my own data, because the job portal site is not offering me the option to select or create my own data protection policy. This is just one example, in today’s world almost everything, from banking to social media, email communication is happening over the internet. And we are using 3rd party platform which don’t care about data protection policies.





COVA team decided to address this issue and they came up with smart policies where user will have full control over their data, user will be able to decide who and how long their data should be used. Covalent is a new addition to the Internet protocol suite that specifies and enforces how da-ta should be used. Under the Covalent protocol, data carries a "smart policy" and these policies will be user defined. COVA team have given some examples of the Example Data Usage Policies --

• that my credit card number may only be used once for a one-time charge. It will be erased from the server after the payment is completed.

• that a patient’s CT Scan may be processed by an aggregate function and not rendered individually.

• that my Snapchat photo may only be rendered individually and not be processed by facial recognition.

• that these text messages can only be viewed after tonight.

• that this e-book can only be shared 15 times.

• that a shopper’s mobile GPS data may not be used with her other data to construct an intrusive customer profiling.

• that k-anonymity or differential privacy is applied before my data can be used in aggregate.





A usual data usage policy is expressed in natural language and is only enforceable by law, which many times don’t work as expected. But COVA’s "smart policy" is specified in programming language and is enforceable by code. By implementing Smart Policies, the data can be properly managed, and users can add the explicit terms and conditions to the specific data.





There are three main technical aspects of the COVA protocol, TEE’s, Centrifuge and the Covalent Virtual Machine (CovaVM).

- TEE or Trusted Execution Environments is security and privacy solution, which will be protecting the user data from node owners. Node owners will not be able to read the data.

- Centrifuge is a programing language for writing Smart Policies. User don’t have to learn this programing language, they just need to mention the Events and Actions and Centrifuge will translate these data usage policies into the 'Smart policies'

- And these Smart Policies written in Centrifuge are enforced by CovaVM.





Here’s the list of official COVA sites, and their social media channels.

Website: http://www.covalent.ai

Telegram: https://t.me/covalentofficial

Twitter: https://twitter.com/covatoken

Medium: https://medium.com/@covatoken

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Covalent_Official/

Github: https://github.com/covalent-hq/wiki/wiki



