Road to Success

Maritime blockchain platform GSBN (Global Shipping Business Network) has announced a partnership with Decentriq to add improved privacy technology to its trade data exchange system.

The GSBN platform uses blockchain technology to manage its access policies, with information visibility decided by role on the platform, on a need-to-know basis. However, the organisation notes that certain scenarios require more complex data sharing processes across multiple data contributors, for instance in aggregating data across many carriers or terminals, something the current infrastructure is not set up to handle.

The partnership with Decentriq aims to rectify this by introducing data clean rooms, leveraging a technology called confidential computing that provides a trusted execution environment at the hardware level that no-one has access to.

The GSBN blockchain platform will provide a tamper-proof record of the hashes of the encrypted data being submitted in the clean room, while Decentriq will offer secure confidential processing of the sensitive data, even when it’s off-chain.

In addition, the Decentriq platform allows for granular settings in input, output, and permissions, effectively introducing another layer of access control policies that can be configured based on roles and scenarios, GSBN says.

The settings are viewable by all data contributors before submitting data to the clean room and agreed upon by all participants before the data clean room is published. Once it’s published, the settings cannot be changed without the data contributors’ approval and all actions are logged so usage is restricted and monitored.

GSBN is currently developing use cases with Decentriq such as the sharing of shipping activity data from multiple shipping lines with financial institutions.

“Collaboration with Decentriq allows us to cover a wider range of data sharing scenarios and extend the use cases for our ecosystems beyond blockchain,” said Edmund To, CTO of GSBN.

“We believe (the) next generation of blockchain consortiums will combine blockchain technology with other emerging technologies, such as confidential computing, enabling the aggregation of data from different sources and converting them into valuable insights while keeping them safe and secure.”

GSBN will be hoping to succeed where fellow shipping blockchain system Tradelens has failed, after the Maersk/IBM platform announced last week that it would cease operation in 2023.