In a report published a few weeks back titled “Digital Modernization Strategy”, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) mentioned several improvements that can be made to enhance U.S.’s defenses on the information end. Among technologies mentioned such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing, blockchain adoption came on the cards of the DoD in order to build a secure, robust and efficient platform that can help the transfer of information between various game players in the national security ecosystem.

Besides the quest for developing information transfer platform using blockchain, the research wing of the DoD, The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has also set its plans to develop an unhackable code which could really benefit from the emergence of blockchain. As stated:

DARPA also has been trying to develop an unhackable code—which blockchain could facilitate—because the technology offers intelligence on hackers who try to break into secure databases.

The tech is being experimented upon so that secure message transfer and transparent transaction processing can be made as digitally secure as possible.

It is stated in the report regarding the platform to be built:

The application will be used in different ways, including facilitating communication between units and headquarters, and transmitting information between intelligence officers and the Pentagon.

This shows how a technology that just gained attention only a decade ago is now being experimented upon on the highest level of digital information space, national security. But why exactly is blockchain being revered as the technology of future alongside other juggernauts such as AI? The answer lies in the game-changing decentralization that blockchain brings.

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Unlike centralized technologies, blockchain does not give control of the network to any single party. Rather, many decentralized nodes synchronize to contribute computational power to maintain the network. The record of transactions is thus not kept by only a single entity like a bank, it is distributed and all nodes have access to the transaction record of the network.

This inherits the all-important feature of transparency in the network. Tampering the record becomes difficult as there is no one single party altering it. Instead, it becomes costly on the miners’ end as well. Bitcoin’s network is one of the biggest live examples of this tech in action.

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The network built on top of a blockchain is also trustless where the trust is put in code and mathematics and not a single party. This can help in tackling the rebellious attitude posed by any entity in the network. Thirdly, as mentioned in the report, blockchain networks are fault-tolerant as they help implement the decisions of honest nodes in the network rather than the few dishonest ones.

An effort to compromise the network thus requires significant costs on the malicious end. These features of transparency, trustlessness, decentralization, fault-tolerance, and immutability make blockchain a significant asset to be utilized in modern frameworks cybersecurity.

The report by US DoD has just put more validation in the overall profile of blockchain tech. Over the past few years, an enormous amount of monetary and intellectual capital has been flowing into this space. Big companies like BMW, Walmart, LVMH, Pepsi, etc. have been experimenting with the tech to make their frameworks more efficient.

Facebook is even launching a cryptocurrency of its own. Adoption of blockchain has highlighted that blockchain is not just limited to the financial world, it is here to stay and will likely find strong use-cases in various departments of the digital world from logistics to cybersecurity.

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