Omnitude Technology Review

Hyperledger Fabric 1.0+ provides significant flexibility in network and ledger design and management to allow the largest number of Blockchain use cases to implement the exact capabilities required. Key among these is data sequestration and encryption. In the business environment, not all data is necessarily available to all. Additionally, existing regulations may impact access and location requirements.

Hyperledger Fabric introduced the concept of Channels in version 1.0. This provides a middle abstraction layer between Business Networks and Smart Contracts. Channels can be utilised as topics (Not all business organisations may be interested in all topics), and/or as private ledgers between as few as 2 organisations. A particular organisation may not be interested in the more public topic of product shipment location, and 2 organisations may not wish to share their private contract pricing beyond themselves.

Another way to consider and approach the issue of data is around encryption. Hyperledger Fabric allows complex data models with extremely granular security. Think row and column level of a spreadsheet or traditional database analogy. However, if logic is performed in the Smart Contract, the data MUST be unencrypted. To satisfy all uses cases for data encryption, upcoming Hyperledger Fabric releases will be capable of several methods.

Data can be encrypted before Smart Contract execution. This is useful if you just need to store the value, but never execute any logic on the value. Data can be sent unencrypted to the Smart Contract which can execute logic on the value, and then encrypt the value before writing to the local ledger. This would be enforced by Fabric itself. Utilise hash values and location pointers and SideDBs.

Not all of these capabilities have been finalised by the Hyperledger development community, and Omnitude is reviewing and updating its architecture and design to plan how, when, and where we implement these new capabilities to deliver the best eCommerce blockchain solutions. Stay tuned.