Trusted Decentralized Systems

As the transition to digital evolves in the financial sector, more and more critical operations move to digital, changing the picture of traditional attackers. Now attackers (insider attackers or cyberattackers), may be tempted to break into the system to impact the credibility of the system’s stakeholders, or even worse (in the case of Central Bank Digital Currencies) of the entire country’s economy. Such an attacker can get access to the data the system manages, and/or compromise the security of the system (e.g., try to pass through invalid transactions). Putting in place mechanisms to minimize or prevent data leakage in such cases, but also prevent the compromise of the overall system operations, identifying and setting accountable the implicated nodes/entities become critical. Our team work to address these needs primarily in the context of emerging (regulated) tokenised assets space, including digital currencies, tokenised securities. More specifically, bringing together skills around applied and theoretical cryptography, distributed systems and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), and system security, the decentralised trust team is working towards bringing together transparency, regulation compliance, strong accountability and privacy in high-throughput transaction processing infrastructure that is resilient to failing or compromised nodes (i.e., nodes that go roque). In addition, as the world moves towards more collaborative business models into ecosystems, the decentralised trust team works with the community into interoperability standards and mechanisms at the transaction processing level as well as in the accountable, but privacy-preserving identity layer, largely employing Self-Sovereign Identity principles, mechanisms and standards.