Technology
Which technologies enable an Economy of Things? How are they applied accordingly?
Digital identity – secure collaboration with blockchain technology
12.05.2021 | Technology
Self-sovereign identities (SSI) are digital identities that are managed in a decentralized manner. This technology allows users to self-manage their digital identities without depending on third-party providers to store and centrally manage the data. The team behind the “Economy of Things” strategic advanced engineering project at Bosch Research is part of the IDunion consortium initiated by the German Federal Ministry of Economics. Policymakers and industry are working together to establish an open digital ecosystem for decentralized identity management so that people, companies and machines can interact safely and reliably in the Internet of Things based on artificial intelligence (AIoT). Already today, companies can use SSI for their corporate identity and master data management.
“Perun” is becoming a Hyperledger Labs project
07.12.2020 | Technology
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) such as blockchain are very memory and energy intensive when transactions need to be processed on a decentralized basis in real time. For a number of years, Bosch has been working with partners on a second-layer protocol known as “Perun”– a solution that facilitates DLT scalability in line with economic and ecological considerations. Technical university TU Darmstadt and Bosch Research have been collaborating on an initial open-source implementation as part of the “Direct State Transfer” project on GitHub. As the project is increasingly reaching technical maturity, the time has come for the next organizational step. The framework is being developed further as a Hyperledger Labs project under the name “Perun”. Hyperledger is an open-source community that focuses on developing a series of stable frameworks, tools, and libraries for enterprise-grade blockchain deployments.
The benefits of multi-party computation in an “Economy of Things”
17.09.2020 | Technology
Handling information in business negotiations and transactions on digital platforms is a particularly delicate task, as it involves specific and sensitive customer- and business-related data. Businesses frequently therefore turn to a third-party platform operator, who acts as a trusted central authority to regulate affairs. The platform operator promises to treat this business-critical information with the appropriate level of care as a central authority in the digital value-creation process. However, people are no longer the only participants in commercial processes on the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT-capable devices that can act autonomously, conduct business negotiations and complete transactions independently are inserting themselves into new forms of bartering. This is giving rise to wide-ranging digital markets where commercial processes are not limited to two participants and can instead involve many different parties. “If a single third party were the only central authority with market influence, it would open itself to the danger of corruption, manipulation and censorship, which could damage the system as a whole,” explains Denis Kramer, expert for multi-party computation in the “Economy of Things” (EoT) strategic advance engineering project at Bosch Research. He and the EoT team are therefore researching the decentralized approach of secure multi-party computation (MPC) in conjunction with distributed ledger technology (DLT). While both approaches are already used in other fields, they are new in the IoT context.
Master data and certificate management with self-sovereign identity
30.07.2020 | Technology
The team behind the “Economy of Things” strategic advance engineering project at Bosch Research is developing innovative concepts and software solutions for digital master data and certificate management that boost data quality and sovereignty. This includes using the principle of self-sovereign identity (SSI), which enables digital identities to be managed independently without relying on a central identity provider.
Trustworthy computing for more data sovereignty
23.07.2020 | Technology
Bosch has imposed high ethical standards for the handling of sensitive customer data. At the heart of this approach is the principle of data sovereignty – making sure people stay in control of their data. Through its research on trustworthy computing, Bosch aims to underpin its guiding principles with the use of appropriate technologies. The team behind the strategic advance engineering project Economy of Things (EoT) is supporting this approach through, on the one hand, distributed ledger technologies (DLT). These can be used to improve trust in digital offerings by ensuring the exchange of values between economic units no longer takes place via centralized platforms but instead on the basis of a localized and distributed protocol. On the other hand, the cryptographic processes in trustworthy computing, such as secure multi-party computation, are also part of the EoT project.
New open source project “Direct State Transfer” aims to make DLT applications scalable
26.11.2019 | Technology
Prototypical DLT applications already exist, but the technical requirements for sustainable business models are still missing, for example when it comes to scalability: Scalability is one of the great challenges with DLT, because ideally tens of thousands of transactions per second have to be processed in real time. This is very memory and energy intensive. The team of the strategic advance engineering project “Economy of Things” has set up the open source project “Direct State Transfer” (DST) as a solution to implement the so-called second-layer protocol “Perun”.
