No system is unhackable: but how can you tell if your systems and data have been breached?

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Every day, we rely on technology and the data that is driving that technology to be accurate. But as legitimate organizations have adopted digital, so too have criminals, who manipulate, hack and steal data, damaging trust and undermining confidence.

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For Ray Pomroy, Board Member at SoLVBL Inc, “trust” is the most important word of all:

“Our mission is to create trust fast so that you can use data at a speed which is exceptionally fast. We've designed a simple, relatively straightforward, very fast, low latency product that we would like to become the standard for data protection.”

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That product is Q by SoLVBL(™), a response to the hacking, ransomware attacks and data breaches that increasingly make the headlines. Pomroy says that there is a big question that every data-driven organization needs to ask itself:

“How do you know that people aren't in your system and they haven't maliciously altered the data for their own benefit? If digital forgery is occurring, you wouldn't know.”

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Rather than getting into an ever-escalating race with the hackers, Q stamps and ‘seals up’ the data with a highly cryptographic seal, allowing the legitimate user to quickly validate the provenance of that data. Pomroy says that the technique restores confidence in data:

“We don't pretend we can stop people getting into your systems. What we can do is we can detect it, solving digital fraud.”

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Q has undergone rigorous testing: Dr Sonam Kaul, Cryptographic Researcher and Assistant Professor at Toronto University worked with the SoLVBL product team as an independent cryptography consultant to carry out an exhaustive analysis of Q over the six months. Dr Kaul explains how it works:

“Q is a combination of signing countersign publications, storage and immutable publication all in one. First, it gives features of the private blockchain, such as speed and privacy. It also has the global reach and trust feature of the public blockchain. More importantly, Q has auditing features with which the client can verify data. It has some security features: identity, attribution and completeness. It has authoring, integrity and portability so the authentication itself is unforgeable.”

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Delivering these features with efficiency makes Q simple to use, secure and highly effective, working alongside existing IT infrastructure. Pomroy hopes that the system will be used to verify that data used by institutions is correct:

“If you're using data to run payments, hospital systems, or police evidence, you have to know that data is right. The governance structures around organizations should be asking how they can assure that data has not been altered or fraudulently tampered with. If they ask those questions, Q will give them the answers.“

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In a medical setting, such questions around data security are a matter of life and death. Steven McAuley, Chair and CEO at Empower Clinics says that protecting patients’ information is a top priority:

“We need to be able to track where our data is going and we have to know with certainty that it hasn't been breached. If, for whatever reason, we felt that there was some form of breach, we now have a mechanism to go back in and actually validate with certainty that the data was not altered in any form.”

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Empower is a new client, but the company is already discovering benefits of the Q system:

“We are learning early that it's quite easy to use: integration doesn't appear to be difficult, there’s good latency, good speed. We have a low cost of entry to get to a meaningful pilot, get proof of concepts, and then figure out where we invest and expand from there.”

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The future looks good for Q: Dr Kaul is looking at boosting the product’s scalability and quantium resistance. For Ray Pomroy new iterations and developments are part of the ongoing mission to create trust:

“We have to stay ahead of competition and the criminals, so there's no resting on laurels. We have lots of ideas that will do it faster, better, cheaper than today.”

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The only barrier, he says, is people’s willingness to see the scale of the problem that Q solves:

“No system is unhackable, yet it's still difficult to persuade people that their data actually is vulnerable. Using Q, you'll know immediately whether the data's authentic. We want to create trust fast for as many people as we possibly can. Stamp your data as you create it, verify it before you use it. If you do that, you can't go wrong.”

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