Anna Bacher, MSc, CTO, Jaroona GmbH
The Jaroona project introduces a revolutionary new security node based protocol to protect blockchain against cyber-attacks.
Blockchain will benefit society in profound and diverse ways. By ensuring that value is correctly and safely exchanged between parties, blockchain technology will transform industries that rely on centralised assurance mechanisms, including critical services, such as financial institutions, healthcare providers, national and state authorities, land registers, energy sector, cyber-security defence, and others.
Before this potential can be realised, we must address and overcome the crucial security limitations that exist within blockchains.
Currently, a blockchain system is considered to be as secure as its consensus model.
The use of consensus models enables the securing of only blockchain ledger immutability against predefined adversarial conditions, but not the securing of smart contracts that are running on it, or of blockchain’s underlying technology.
Smart contracts can contain security vulnerabilities, bugs and malware that affect not only a party that places a smart contract into a blockchain, but also blockchain performance itself. Via security vulnerabilities, attackers can compromise a smart contract, forcing it to exhibit undesired behaviours, including crashing, sending monetary funds to unauthorised parties, initiating a distributed denial of service (DDos) attack on an underlying blockchain, or exposing user information. The blockchain underlying technology is also prone to software security exploits that open doors to cyber-attacks against blockchain and smart contracts.
To overcome these security limitations, we’re introducing a new, revolutionary type of blockchain node – the Jaroona Security Node (JSN). The JSN is a specialised node within the network, that uses artificial intelligence algorithms and neural networks for self-improving security features. It self-learns from previously detected security vulnerabilities to identify both good and malicious source code patterns, alerting traditional blockchain nodes when the probability of a security breach is above the consensus threshold. This combination of algorithms and neural networks is resilient to changes, mutations and input variables, making it incredibly efficient at catching cyber-security vulnerabilities and malware mutations. It is critical for any effective security solution because the number of mutations constitutes 80 per cent of all malware. We call it self-improving security.
Crucially, the JSN cyber-security protocol is designed not to affect the existing blockchain throughput, as JSN Nodes write the minimal nominal attack data on the main chain several times per week. The protocol is a highly scalable off-chain, layer two solution that, effectively, runs on top of a public or private blockchain and which is programming language agnostic.
The JSN protocol’s goal is to perform:
• Smart-contract source-code auditing
• Blockchain software source-code auditing
• Real-time smart-contract binary-code auditing
• Real-time threat-risk analysis on a specific blockchain and for a specific client on a specific blockchain
• Real-time incident response and the providing of warning alerts to traditional nodes and block producers
• Real-time attack prevention on a specific blockchain (e.g. stopping or re-routing malicious network traffic and placing vulnerable or malicious smart contract into a quarantine)
By introducing a new independent from the underlying blockchain security layer, we believe enterprises will adopt blockchain solutions rapidly due to the reassurance that transactions will be concluded in a secure and timely way.
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