“Here’s this hopelessly geeky new technology. It’s too hard to understand and use. How could it ever break the mass market? Yet developers are excited, venture capital is pouring in, and industry players are taking note. Something big might be happening.”

That is exactly how the Web looked back in 1994 — right before it exploded. Two decades later, it’s beginning to feel like we might be at a similar liminal moment. Our new contender for the Next Big Thing is the blockchain — the baffling yet alluring innovation that underlies the Bitcoin digital currency.

Wait a minute and I’ll explain exactly how the blockchain works. (Or at least try.) For now, think of it as a way of transferring a digital message from one party to another, where both parties can count on the integrity of the message, even when they don’t trust, or even know, each other. Right now, these messages are mostly virtual cash. But they could be any kind of information.

On an Internet where your inbox is besieged with spam, your credit card number’s about to be poached, and you can’t possibly remember all your passwords, this could be extremely useful. But it could be even more.

There is a contingent on today’s Internet—a minority, perhaps, but influential—who believe that the industry took a wrong turn over the past decade. That an Internet dominated by a few big companies is an unhealthy one. That the centralized-computing paradigm—of privately owned data silos housed in giant server farms that harvest our personal data in order to sell ads—is one that needs to change.

The entrepreneurs, coders and crypto experts leading the blockchain charge — I shall call them blockchainiacs, because they need a name — see this new technology as an antidote, and they are hopped up on dizzying visions of a disrupted future. (One sure sign that this technology has achieved geek-cred critical mass: The tech publisher O’Reilly just announced a new conference on the topic.)

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Cryptography provides unbreakable data security between computer nodes, but leaves human owners helpless.

“The problem is cryptography, in order to be secure, requires heavy computer-assisted calculations to make it efficient and is very impractical for humans to do,’’ Queensland University of Technology researcher Xavier Boyen said. “We have a lot of new techniques that would be much more amenable to human operations while retaining the proven security that we seek in terms of mathematical cryptography.’’

Earlier this month, a US internet security firm revealed Russian criminals had stolen 1.2 billion ­internet user names and passwords, probably the largest such theft ever.

Associate Professor Boyen has received an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship worth almost $800,000 to build user-owned passwords.

“The goal is to come up with a fairly simple but secure way to get the person involved in the very act of authenticating with a remote server or something like that,’’ he said.

The project aims to build ­public-key ciphers that can be ­operated manually from a mental key in seconds to let users regain their internet privacy, even ­defending against spyware and malware lurking on their very own mobiles and computers. It would also build security protocols with full end-to-end coverage all the way to the human users.

Read More Here: theaustralian.com.au

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