The research agency of the US Department of Defense seeks to develop a blockchain-based messaging system. The military will use the distributed ledger technology to protect secret information from hackers.

The project description has been published on the website of DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is a subsidiary of the US Department of Defense, responsible for the development of emerging technologies for the military use.

According to the notice, DARPA specialists will focus on creating a “specific decentralized messaging platform built on the framework of an existing blockchain framework.” The document explains:

“Legacy messaging and backoffice infrastructures, traditionally based on centralized, unencrypted hub-and spoke database architecture, are expensive, inefficient, brittle and subject to cyber attack. The overhead costs of maintaining such architectures is rising rapidly.”

DARPA considers the need to develop a secure messaging and transaction platform “critical”. As it is said in the notice, the future messenger is supposed to be accessible via a web browser or standalone native application. Message creation will be separated from its transfer and reception, thus making it way more difficult to tackle secret information. At the same time, this information will be accessible from anywhere to anyone having special keys to decrypt it.

The messaging system could be used in the Department of Defense back office correspondence, reducing exposure to hackers and needless delays. DARPA provides another example of possible utilisation of the new blockchain messenger. It suggests that Military Interdepartmental Purchase Requests (MIPR) could be implemented using the secure ledger.

The project will have three stages. The first one is creating “a model for the decentralized messaging platform” and “experimenting with encryption schemes.” The second phase will focus on developing and testing a working prototype. The third and the last stage is a full-scale implementation of the platform.

DARPA was founded in response to the soviet Sputnik launch in 1958. One of its earlier projects, ARPANET, is considered to be a predecessor of the Internet.

Last August, NBC News reported that Pentagon suffered a cyberattack accomplished by Russian hackers.

Elena Platonova