Blockchain Could Be Used For Surveillance

Bitcoin has been under the microscope in recent months after the currency was in the news several times for being used to aid in illicit activities. Many believe that the anonymity that cryptocurrencies provide makes their use attractive to criminals who need to cover their tracks; but Estonian-based

claims that blockchain, the ledger-like technology that bitcoin runs on, could do just the opposite.

Blockchain keeps a record of all bitcoin transactions in order to ensure that users are not making more than one transaction with the same bitcoin. This system, Guardtime execs say, could do the same for record keeping and sensitive information

When it comes to bitcoin, blockchain ledgers are impossible to tamper with because a copy of the blockchain is held by every client and in order to change a transaction, a hacker would need control of at least half of the world's blockchain copies. If blockchain were applied to sensitive files in an organization, every employee would have a copy of that ledger making it quite difficult for anyone, even a top level exec, to tamper with those files. Although the information in those files wouldn't be protected by blockchain itself, the movements in and out of each file would be logged in such a way that no one could deny accessing or changing a file.

Guardtime says it has already teamed up with

to create Black Lantern, a system that uses blockchain technology to monitor chunks of data and alert companies if they've been tampered with. The company said that as more and more devices are incorporated into the Internet of Things, security like Black Lantern will be necessary to ensure that outside vendors haven't tampered with the being sent back and forth.