Database security giant Oracle is turning its attention to blockchain technology to harness the full potential of the technology and optimize the security of its data centers.
In a publication by Maria Colgan, product manager at Oracle, the data security firm revealed its plans to integrate the fundamental principles of the technology blockchain and achieve much more secure and efficient data management, making the most of the power that blockchain offers through the public key cryptographyColgan said the company's primary mission is to keep cybercriminals away from data centers, where a large amount of private and confidential user information is stored.
Oracle infrastructures Oracle, one of the world's largest and most prominent database security companies, uses advanced security techniques such as passwords, firewalls, data encryption, and more to ensure that its business and data warehouses are protected. However, as Colgan says, Oracle is looking to a broader horizon, where it can not only ensure that cybercriminals do not have access to digital data warehouses, but also protect them from being modified, altered, and even deleted by those who have legitimate or illegal access to them.
The company's product manager said this is where Blockchain comes into play. This powerful technology, developed in 2009 by the enigmatic Satoshi Nakamoto to give life to Bitcoin, the largest and most important cryptocurrency in the markets, has achieved what developers have long been seeking: a unique and distributed registry, resistant to synchronization, that does not require the trust of third parties or of the members that make it up.
Colgan said that layering technologies like Blockchain on top of Oracle's conventional data security features provides an additional level of protection that prevents data from being modified or deleted unlawfully.
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Immutable tables for Oracle databases
The security company is looking at several potentially important principles and features in Blockchain that will help the company strengthen its data security, such as: immutability, cryptographic digests, cryptographic signatures, and distributed systems. For Oracle, these are elements that function as legitimate user credentials and prevent hackers and cybercriminals from altering stored data in any way.
Oracle is implementing these potential qualities by designing immutable tables, insert-only tables, which can be updated at any time with new information, without modifying existing data. In this way, the company ensures that people with privileged access to its data warehouses can only insert information into its databases, eliminating the possibility of data being changed, modified or deleted. As Oracle explains, with the integration of blockchain technology, not even database administrators will be able to modify them.
“With an immutable table, new data can be inserted, but existing data cannot be changed or deleted by anyone using the database, even database administrators (SYSDBA).”
Blockchain Tables
Additionally, to prevent illicit changes made by cybercriminals, Oracle is also implementing Blockchain tables, which replicate the way a blockchain mathematically links each block in the chain in linear sequence, one after the other using a function hash.
In Oracle, blockchain tables are also immutable tables that organize rows of data in a linear sequence. Each row in the table, except the first row, is mathematically linked, or chained, to the previous row, using a hash function as blockchain networks do. The hash function is automatically calculated at insertion time, based on the data in that row and the hash value of the previous row. In this way, each row is mathematically linked to the previous one, and any modification or change that is wanted to be made will break the chain and be immediately detected.
Oracle also explains that timestamps are recorded in the blockchain table, for each row in the insert.
Signing end-user data
To prevent data tampering at all costs, Oracle is also integrating cryptographic signatures, which allow end users to sign the data they insert cryptographically, using a private key which is never passed to the database. Thus, if a cybercriminal manages to steal a valid set of credentials and attempts to insert data illegally, without the private key the signature on the newly inserted data will not match and therefore will not be accepted.
These new features allow customers to leverage Oracle databases in a highly tamper-resistant manner without the need to distribute a ledger across multiple organizations on an ongoing basis; although Oracle does allow signing and distributing the cryptographic digest of an immutable table and blockchain table periodically to prevent risks of database replacement and large-scale cover-up.
The integration of Blockchain principles into Oracle technologies seeks to optimize the products and services offered by the firm, without this entailing complicated changes and high costs. In addition, immutable tables and Blockchain tables are integrated as free functions of Oracle Database, so any client can make use of these benefits.
Oracle is putting Blockchain to innovative use by integrating the essential elements of this technology into its databases, allowing it to strengthen its security and boost the value of this technology, as well as its implementation in business applications, and more.
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