How PegaSys Orchestrate Solves 4 Key Security Challenges for Enterprise Blockchain Solutions

From private key management to access control, PegaSys’ new platform helps enterprises address critical security considerations when taking blockchain applications to production.

PegaSys Orchestrate is a platform that enables enterprises to easily build secure and reliable applications on the Ethereum blockchain. Orchestrate combines multiple business functionalities, from transaction management to advanced monitoring, into a single product, culminating the experience the PegaSys team has gathered building production-grade blockchain platforms with enterprises from diverse industries, including capital markets, supply chain, and trade finance.

If you want to learn more about Orchestrate’s features, read our previous blog post, “How Your Enterprise Can Build Production-Grade Blockchain Applications with Ease Using PegaSys Orchestrate,” or to speak directly with our team of blockchain experts.

1. Private Key Management

Private key management, sometimes referred to as “custody of private keys”, is critical for any blockchain platform. In a blockchain system, an identity is defined by a private key that allows the key holder to cryptographically sign transactions and interact with blockchain smart contracts. If an attacker gets access to a private key, they are then capable of signing any transaction in the name of the original private key holder.

Orchestrate offers compatibility with secure storage systems such as Hashicorp Vault, in which private keys either live in memory when signing a transaction or are stored encrypted on disk, tremendously limiting the possibilities of a private key being compromised. Hashicorp Vault is a good choice for storing the majority of private keys that are used on a daily basis(e.g. private key of an investor in a decentralized finance system), and it offers a good balance between security, user experience, and infrastructure cost.

For highly sensitive private keys, associated to accounts with elevated permissions over a smart contract (e.g. the private key of an asset issuer in a decentralized finance system), the best practice is to store the private key in an external cold storage systems such as a Ledger NanoS, which integrates with Orchestrate.