DHS Conferred $199 Award Money to Digital Bazaar for Blockchain Technology Innovation
The Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has granted $199,984 as award money to the Blockchain startup Digital Bazaar based in Blacksburg, Virginia. As part of the S&T‘s Silicon Valley Innovation Program (SVIP), the award has been given for developing the blockchain technology for their system.
In its official proclamation, DHS stated that an existent paper-based system for its Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services departments is not feasible and is not compliant for issuance, validation, and verification of licenses and certifications.
The system is not convenient for large data exchange and is prone to loss, forgery, and counterfeiting of documents. Thus, the blockchain technology can be instrumental for security, destruction, interoperability, and for preventing breaching and imitating of data. S&T is hopeful that the new blockchain-based application will enhance the existent issues.
Digital Bazaar is developing an “Interoperability Enterprise Identity and Credential Life-cycle Management” project to integrate it with DHS’s sub-divisional departments to improve their operations and efficiency.
Anil John, the Technical Director of SVIP, commented,
Deploying innovative credential issuance technologies within mature organizations requires integration with existing technology and processes to manage the lifecycle of digital credentials.
He further added,
Digital Bazaar building out the enterprise credential lifecycle management capabilities of their existing platform while utilizing emerging W3C global standards mitigates enterprise risk in supporting and utilizing these standards within and across organizations.
SVIP is one of the initiatives of S&T, which offers funds to private sector partners for developing an innovative technology solution for the security of data and information.
Participant companies are offered up to $800,000 dilutive funding divided into four phases for building security solutions for homeland security use cases.
