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.

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.