IBM and data storage firm Seagate have teamed-up to use blockchain technology to fight counterfeit hard drives. The two companies will use blockchain technology to uniquely identify hard drives and perhaps other related products to prevent counterfeiting.
The project is designed to use IBM’s Blockchain Platform to help manufacturers, integrators, and business partners in authenticating the provenance of hard disk drive products. This will bring a new level of multi-layered security protection to the data management industry.
This initiative involves updating the IBM Blockchain Platform on the IBM Cloud with product authentication data based on Seagate’s security solution Seagate Secure Electronic ID (eID). Seagate creates a unique identifier at the point of manufacture which can be used to verify the identity of a given hard drive at any point during its life cycle.
Source: IBM
Seagate will also provide its Certified Erase solution which Employs cryptographic erasure technology to produce a digital certificate of data purge, which is electronically signed by the device under the Seagate Secure public key infrastructure (PKI) and stored on the blockchain for compliance management with emerging global data privacy laws.
Along with these two security layers from Seagate, the Hyperledger-powered distributed ledger framework will enable network participants to append or edit blockchain data according to the level of their permissioned access.
“Blockchain technology can be extremely effective in confirming provenance and authenticity of assets,” commented Bruce Anderson, global managing director for the electronics industry at IBM, in a statement. “The ability to work with Seagate to combine blockchain with advanced cryptographic product identification technology is what sets this work apart and signals blockchain’s potential to reimagine the electronics product lifecycle management processes. Counterfeit electronics components are a global issue that requires an ecosystem-wide effort to address.”
IBM has been intensively pursuing blockchain technology development, last week it filed a patent for a blockchain-powered system that intends to deter augmented reality (AR) game players from intruding on undesirable locations. The tech giant currently ranks second globally in terms of the number of blockchain-related patents filed, second only to China’s Alibaba.
