Blockchain Security: Permissioned, Permissionless or Both?

By Sherree DeCovny, Co-Founder and Research Principal ​​

​Global supply chains can be extremely complex, often involving many people, companies, nations and IT systems. With malicious attacks on the rise, the world’s companies can be categorized as those that have been hacked and those that will be hacked.
 
Blockchain is potentially a new paradigm for supply chain security, but it also presents new challenges for security. So how can participants on a blockchain secure information, and what might the underlying consensus architecture look like?
 
The starting point is to ensure data is secure, and access is well controlled, properly permissioned and appropriately granted. 

Consensus refers to how the computers maintain the blockchain and come to a general agreement on how the information is propagated in that distributed ledger. Within that environment, it’s possible to set up a firewall, and behind that a permissioned blockchain environment comprising different entities

Permissioned blockchains generally require some kind of authorization to access them, and perhaps include different access levels, such as read-only or read/write. Such authorizations are granted by an oversight function that is either controlled by one participant or several participants working in concert. Hence some level of relationship and trust is assumed between participants.

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