This technological plan will allow companies to know the origin of hard disk drives in order to guarantee their originality
To avoid establishments of being scam victims, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) and the data storage firm Seagate announced their new project: create a blockchain-based system to combat counterfeit hard disk drives.
Both corporations gave the piece of news on November 8th in a press release. Their main objective helps to manufacturers, integrators and business partners to authenticate the origin of hard disk drives. Those data storage elements, when altered, have lower performance, which makes difficult to find the information stored there and could risk the employer’s job.
For this reason, different institutions resort to blockchains solutions to save specific information about the origin and authenticity of the products or services they want to protect.
In a blockchain platform, all parties —whether technology providers, service providers or end users— have access to an immutable record of events that encompasses the origin and lifecycle of the item.
Bruce Anderson, Global Managing Director of the electronics industry at IBM, commented: “The ability to combine blockchain with advanced cryptographic product identification technology points to the potential of blockchain to reinvent the lifecycle management processes of electronic products. Fake electronic components are a global problem that requires an effort in the whole ecosystem to face them”.
How Will Be the Mechanism
The IBM and Seagate solution will work by upgrading the IBM blockchain platform in the IBM cloud with product authentication data based on a Seagate’s security identification called Seagate Secure Electronic ID. It will create a unique identifier at the point of manufacture that is used to verify the hard disk drive identity at any time during its lifecycle.
Seagate will also provide a solution called “Certified Erase”, which “uses cryptographic erasure technology to produce a digital certificate for data debugging, which is electronically signed by the device under Seagate’s secure public key infrastructure and stored the information in the chain of blocks for the management of compliance with the new global data privacy laws”, according to what Anderson explained.
Along with these two layers of security, the framework of the ledger distributed with Hyperledger technology that supports IBM’s blockchain platform is oriented to allow that several parts add or edit data of the chain of blocks according to the level of access allowed.
About IBM
This American multinational technology and consulting company headquartered in Armonk, New York, has been working on different blockchain solutions for customers. Some weeks ago, it presented a patent for a blockchain-driven system that seeks to dissuade to augmented reality (AR) gamers from intruding into undesirable locations, which helps to maintain secure boundaries between AR objects and physical locations in the real world.
This year, IBM ranks second in the world for gathering more and more patents related to blockchain technology, in order to work in different projects, executed from this platform. It is expected that the solution for hard disk drives will help reduce data loss, approve the product warranty, as well as reduce the millionaire expenses caused by hard disk drives falsification.
By María Rodríguez
