How can blockchain revolutionize the future of cybersecurity?

The cyberattack landscape in recent years has grown exponentially. The last few years have seen an incredible rise of data breaches that caused significant financial losses and triggered business reputation. In this scenario, blockchain is starting to gain traction, emerging as a promising mitigation technology for cybersecurity. As a distributed ledger technology, the evolution of blockchain has been compared to the early growth of the Internet with several debates of its potential in multiple industries, including healthcare, finance, manufacturing, energy, and others.

Essentially, blockchain is known for its secure network of distributed ledger that keeps sensitive information safe. Besides this, technology makes people's everyday interactions with technology more accountable. Businesses can effectively integrate blockchains into their cybersecurity initiatives at their fingertips if they know where to consider them to safeguard critical and sensitive data, cryptocurrency and other digital assets, and smart contracts.

Let's have a look at the five most promising blockchain use cases for cybersecurity.

Decentralized Storage Solution to Critical Data

Data is undoubtedly a new oil for any business growth. As enterprises amass tons of sensitive data from distinct sources, they require solutions to store and process those data smartly and securely. Most businesses today still use centralized storage to store their data that is quite lucrative to cybercriminals. Thus, by leveraging blockchain-based storage solutions that provide decentralized storage capability, organizations can protect their digital information and assets. Decentralized storage platforms typically break apart the users' files and distribute them across multiple nodes on their network.

IoT Security

IoT and other connected devices have long been associated with security weaknesses and challenges. With the increasing proliferation of AI, hackers can now gain access to overall systems, a company or an individual uses through edge devices like smart switches. In this context, incorporating blockchain into the security framework of an IoT system allows IoT devices to communicate securely with other devices, encrypt machine-to-machine transactions using distributed key management techniques, and authenticate the integrity and legitimacy of software image updates, in addition to policy updates.

Mitigating DDoS Attacks

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic. These attacks have been observed to compromise connected devices such as webcams, smartphones, routers, vacuum robots, etc., to launch attacks. There are several new forms of DDoS attacks are emerging exponentially, including the Hide and Seek malware. It sustains itself even after a system has been rebooted. As an immutable and cryptographically secured, blockchain can be an effective solution for such attacks. Many blockchain service providers have claimed that their solutions can protect against DDoS attacks by allowing users to join distributed networks.

Enabling Multi-Signature Authentication Model

Username and password tampering is one of the critical threats for many businesses, employees, and individuals. Once a hacker gets granted access to the central domain containing many users' login credentials, they have a virtual vault filled with a gold mine of user information. Blockchain technology allows users to use a multi-signature authentication model that avoids usernames and passwords to validate a user by confirming that they have access to multiple devices.

Increased Security to DNS

The Domain Name System (DNS) refers to the foundation of how the Internet operates. It functions as a public directory linked to domain names with resources on the Internet, such as IP addresses. Owing to this, DNS is vulnerable to hackers who can exploit the connection between their IP address and the site to crash the site. Innumerable retailers and publications have witnessed such attacks resulted in the loss of loyal customers and business, and never to return due to a temporary shutdown caused. Blockchain can offer a preventative solution to thwart such kinds of attacks by decentralizing the DNS entries. Credited to its decentralized network capability, a user's domain information can be stored immutably on a distributed ledger, and the connection can be powered by immutable smart contracts.

It is evident that blockchain is emerging as a viable solution when it comes to securing businesses' critical data and digital assets from ever-growing cyberattacks.