Home Chain

Blockchain This

I've been doing a lot of thinking about Blockchain recently because there have been several articles about how it might be the answer to Internet of Things security concerns among many, many other things.  Companies with names like Microsoft, Intel and IBM have started whole divisions and more, betting big that Blockchain style distributed security is how the world will work.  It is the ultimate panacea that will save us all from ourselves.



You'll pardon me if I'm a little skeptical.  Putting aside the whole issue of who created it, it's a story that has been told many times in the tech world: computers will solve everything, the internet will solve everything, social media will solve everything.  Each time, there's been a big push into the new space with lots of people throwing money at anyone selling the buzzword-of-the-bubble.  Each time, that new tech space has created many changes, even streamlining work and solving some market inefficiencies.  But with each one has come other issues: the computer revolutionized both number crunching and information viruses, the internet made more information available to more people faster but not always with source reliability (and porn), social media connected people together but not always to the people that they wanted to connect to.

In other words, I expect that Blockchain will help in many ways, but that there will be unforeseen repercussions.  Especially when one buzzword (Bitcoin) is married to another (Internet of Things).

Trust Me

With all of that in mind, I'm not going to give you a simple, ten word explanation of what Blockchain is.

Nope.  Sorry.  Not gonna do it.  Partly because many people who are way smarter than I am have already tried, so why re-invent the wheel.  Partly because, even with those explanations, I'm having trouble understanding the applications beyond finance, especially to the smart home space.  I get that the basic principle is to distribute the ledger of transactions so that everyone involved has a copy of exactly what happened and who has what, though the specific names are encrypted.  I get that by distributing the ledger of transactions, it makes it harder (maybe not quite impossible) for anyone to 'cook the books' because they would need to change that ledger on all connected systems without violating the encryption hash.  This engenders trust which is the ultimate backbone of any financial system (I trust my bank to issue me the funds in my account, they trust that my employer (when I have one) has the funds to pay me from their bank and so on).

But What About Smart Homes?

But what does trust and ledgers and all of that have to do with connected light bulbs, thermostats and locks?  Here's what I 'get' so far: everything that happens on a network can be seen as a transaction.  When you log into your smart home app, that is a transaction between you and the app.  The app keeps a record of that transaction, usually in a system log where it stays for a set period of time before being wiped by newer data.

That's all fine and good if the information stays local.  But most smart home products have some level of cloud or other remote access feature.  While this allows you to access things from anywhere you have an internet connection, it also means that anyone else might have that same access if they can hack that cloud and get the user information.  With a Blockchain style distributed trust system, all the user data is 1) encrypted though most systems do that already, but also 2) that encrypted database is distributed to all users of the system.  All of these copies of the data must agree that who owns what before a transaction can take place.  And every time a change (transaction) happens, not only does the whole system know, but a new hash key is generated, the unique identifier for that system at that time.

An example: You install a smart lock on your front door so that you can let friends in when you are away.  However, someone cracks the smart lock company's cloud and gets a hold of the user data for all people on that cloud.  By the time that they can make use of the data, legitimate users have used their system in unique ways and the hash key for their accounts has been updated.  It is supposed to be impossible for someone to replicate the hash key without exactly duplicating how and when the system is used thereby making their data invalid almost immediately.

And that's called 'writing your way to understanding' though hardly complete.  But it is as simple as I can figure it out.  I'm sure that I'll be revisiting this topic many times in the months to come.

If you have a better understanding of how Blockchains might be applied to smart homes, leave a comment below.