📚 US Military Is Looking At Blockchain Technology To Secure Nuclear Weapons

Lasrick quotes a report from Quartz: Blockchain technology has been slow to gain adoption in non-financial contexts, but it could turn out to have invaluable military applications. DARPA, the storied research unit of the U.S. Department of Defense, is currently funding efforts to find out if blockchains could help secure highly sensitive data, with potential applications for everything from nuclear weapons to military satellites. The report adds: "The case for using a blockchain boils down to a concept in computer security known as 'information integrity.' That's basically being able to track when a system or piece of data has been viewed or modified. In DARPA's case, blockchain tech could offer crucial intelligence on whether a hacker has modified something in a database, or whether they're surveilling a particular military system. This September, DARPA, which stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the agency helped create the internet, among other things), awarded a $1.8 million contract to a computer security firm called Galois. The firm's assignment is to formally verify -- a sort of computer-code audit, using mathematics -- a particular type of blockchain tech supplied by a company called Guardtime. Formal verification is one way to build nearly unhackable code, and it's a big part of DARPA's approach to security. If the verification goes well, it could inch DARPA closer to using some form of blockchain technology for the military, DARPA's program manger behind the blockchain effort, Timothy Booher, said. 'We're certainly thinking through a lot of applications,' he says. 'As Galois does its verification work and we understand at a deep level the security properties of this [technology] then I would start to set up a series of meetings [with the rest of the agency] to start that dialog.'"

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