ING Announces Development of Notary Service for Corda Open Source Blockchain

Headquartered in Amsterdam, ING Group that works as a leading financial service providing a firm has announced the launch of a “zero knowledge proof notary service,” which is curated to enhance the privacy and security of operations on Corda, the open-source blockchain solution.

Having being introduced to the world as a “blockchain breakthrough,” the new service will help in the evaluation of the validity of a particular transaction while keeping all the analytics hidden except that the transaction is valid.

In an official statement, ING stated that,

Like a notary whose job is to witness the signing of documents to validate them, the ‘zero knowledge proof notary’ evaluates whether a blockchain transaction is valid or not, but without seeing its contents.

Corda works as an efficient enterprise-grade open-source blockchain solution that allows businesses to trade directly in a strict private ecosystem via smart contracts. The platform, at present, provides two options- a validating and a non-validating notary. Despite the fact that Corda has established itself as a renowned DLT solution, ING stated that there remains a compromising state between a particular security domain and a particular privacy domain. ING countered this by saying that its notary will help in solving both the issues efficiently.

Mariana Gomez de la Villa, the program director of ING’s blockchain team, quoted,

In the case of the validating one, the notary sees the contents of a transaction before it determines if the information is correct, which means participants lose privacy.

The spearhead further added that,

A non-validating notary doesn’t see a transaction’s content, which creates a security risk where the notary could sign off the wrong transaction if a malicious participant builds an invalid transaction. However, it protects participants against double-spends, an attack where someone could spend the same asset twice, as does the validating notary.

The newly-launched proof-of-concept is the fourth undertaking of the ING’s DLT team. In 2017, the firm launched the zero-knowledge range proof, which validated that a secret number falls within the prescribed limits without revealing it.

In the second proof of concept solution, there was an addition of zero knowledge set memberships, which allowed validation of information like locations and names along with the numerical data. The third solution was named Bulletproofs, and it was claimed to be faster than the earlier versions and also didn’t require a trusted setup.

This week also witnessed the broadcast of the news concerning the partnership between Singapore-based Softbank, tech giant IBM, and blockchain firm TBCASoft. The trio is working to foster carriers to support blockchain technology through the Carrier Blockchain Study Group (CBSG) Consortium.