How blockchain and trusted execution enclaves can assist scientists worldwide
Certifying your research computational tasks has never been easier. Now you can easily collaborate with your peers, having blockchain validated proof regarding the computation tasks you run. Benefit from a boost in your research reproducibility as precise information that define your computational tasks are stored on the blockchain and provide strict confidentiality to your datasets and libraries.
We know that certifying the research data is important, but more importantly is certifying the whole process that generated the data in the first place. By certifying each computational task automatically, you open the door to quickly and safely make your research accessible for collaboration to your peers. The certificate is stored on the bloxberg, which is the blockchain with one of the highest level of integrity in the space.
Because of the way “Proof of eXecution” is implemented, you can delegate the data for processing to any 3rd party. The system maintains an audit trail for the tasks that ran, including environment related variables as well as details about the tasks that makes them unique. Reviewing the audit trail allows anyone to reproduce the research if they also have access to the confidential datasets. Now you can better focus on research and let the technology solve the reproducibility issues.
You can easy have your data encrypted and send it for processing to a delegated 3rd party. Our approach makes use of TEE (Trusted Execution Enclaves), a technology that isolates entire environments from the host operating system. This technology prevents the delegated processor from snooping or tampering with your confidential information.
The whole computational task runs inside the enclave, and there are guarantees from the hardware manufacturer that nothing can interfere with the process.
In our approach we leverage blockchain technology to store metadata comprising hashes of environments, libraries, code, datasets and results. There are checks at different layers during the process against these hashes to maintain a high level of data consistency during transit and at rest. The blockchain is the best medium of storage of such information, because it offers a high grade of integrity due to its immutability attribute. There are many blockchains that can be used for this purpose, however the blockchain by its nature, is to be trusted as much as the entities that run it are trusted. This is the reason why we have chosen bloxberg for this purpose, since it will assist in reaching the goals of the research community before anything else.
It’s very important for us that the research community use this extensively, therefore we seek and embrace open source technologies. Easily build an entire Docker environment and have it deployed for processing in minutes. Integrate easily Python coded computational tasks, R, Rust and Node.js using prebuild Docker environments.
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