Blockchain for Veracity and Tamper Detection

As we have now have a fully operational digitized trading market, robust steps have been taken to protect document and file integrity and transparency by maintaining an independent audit trail of what happened in the trading process; thus providing full data provenance for all original documents, to who accessed the document over its lifetime, and whether it has been tampered with in anyway (unauthorized modification, deletion, replacement), thus mitigating the risk of all forms of digital fraud.

One of the main challenges is to ensure that the recorded and archived policy and claim documents, and correspondence, transactions, submission documents, are perpetually valid and have an audit trail which can be independently verified during the entire document lifecycle.

This is why we are utilising the solution provided by data integrity vendor Guardtime, the inventor of the standard Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) technology for securing all our online integrated file and document stores in the exchange so that data integrity can be applied end to end to mitigate the risk; and at the same time greatly reduce expenses in the event of any litigation.

KSI verifies the unique identification of the data, the time, location, and integrity and authenticity of any insurance document or data at any point. KSI uses Guardtime’s Blockchain technology that is already in production in the defence industry worldwide, to put a tamper seal on all member documents and specific/relevant data in use in the irX risk exchange platforms wherever deployed.

The tamper seal is part of the verification process that can tell in real time if document or data has been tampered with in anyway.

This means that existing trading initiatives resident in irX and new initiatives such as Insurance Linked Securities (ILS) can all be protected in perpetuity by KSI. An important factor to take into consideration is that once the data is registered on the blockchain the data security vendor no longer needs to be trusted and verification can be done mathematically.

KSI Blockchain was selected because it is massively scalable (and super fast) for electronic data authentication as it uses the properties of the blockchain to remove reliance on private cryptographic keys for the verification.

By using hashing functions and not only storing “process details” on the blockchain, the complexities of key management in the cloud is removed and it is possible to deploy on a very large scale across all irX exchanges.

KSI proves the time that the data was tamper sealed, can prove that the data has not been interfered with since the tamper seal plus what process generated the tamper seal right across the insurance value chain.

All “relevant” data is therefore stored in an immutable blockchain that also allows provides evidence that will stand up in court in event of a dispute. Forensic analysis of the “chain” also makes it easy to do anomaly detection as tools are available to quickly highlight suspicious events and possible perpetrators – including malicious insiders.