This is the fifth in a series of articles called “Nevermined: Big Data. Small effort”, meant to outline the current challenges companies face in handling data and the very simple, but highly effective solutions offered by Nevermined, a cutting-edge data sharing blockchain technology.* #1*,* #2*,* #3**, *#4

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

We’re excited to announce a new feature in the Nevermined toolkit, one that we think will help with sharing and monetizing digital assets in a more trustless and frictionless way. We call it DSE (Decentralised Storage Encryption) and it makes it possible to store assets on public decentralised networks, while keeping the files private.

PRRRRRIVACY

Let’s zoom out for just one second. Nevermined exists because we want to make the sharing of data and assets easier, more secure and more governed. Our tech stack combines Federated Learning with blockchain (read more here), but one of the core components we’ve expanded upon is our Access Control. Traditional access control systems work well when the assets are stored on-premise or on a cloud service like Amazon. But less so on a decentralised storage solution like IPFS.

Our DSE module allows asset owners to add access conditions to their assets like verified users, price, etc. In the background, this creates a smart contract, which then acts as an immutable gateway. If /conditions not met/, Then Absolutely /no access/.

Let’s illustrate that with the real story of the work we did for VitaDAO.

NFT ON STEROIDS

In August 2021 we were part of some history making, as we helped a decentralised organisation, VitaDAO, bring NFT tech into the very real world of science labs. VitaDAO is a Life Sciences project that wants to decentralise the funding and the IP management of early stage Longevity research and we helped them with tokenising the IP of a research project in a safe and secure way.

You can read a detailed account of the project in this article, but know that tokenising a bio-pharma contract is a little more challenging than your average Bored Ape (no disrespect, frens). The requirements around privacy and the legalities are a little more, shall we say, ‘old school’.

While we used Ethereum for NFT contract creation and Arweave for storing the metadata, at the time we chose to host the main files of the research (think: PDFs) on an Amazon S3 server. Needless to say, this is far from ideal. This solution not only requires a fair amount of trust between VitaDAO and the users, but it also depends heavily on Amazon. If we stop paying AWS, the files will no longer be accessible.

Obviously, we considered storing it on IPFS. It would have improved the ‘eternal’ character of the files, but it would also make it publicly available. Decentralised storage doesn’t have access control by design. So if you have the URL pointing to the file, you can get access to it and download. In the competitive and high-stakes industry of advanced scientific research, this wasn’t an option.

But, guess what, now we can! Because DSE makes it possible to combine Privacy plus Conditional Access Control plus Decentralised Storage.

SNARKY

So how did we crack that nut?

The technical concept depends on zero-knowledge proof cryptography. More advanced technical readers should explore our documentation. But the gist of it is that a data owner can now use our Access Control module to first encrypt the asset and publish it on IPFS. (it’s a Poseidon hash, in case you were wondering).

Remember, publishing an asset through Nevermined means that our Gateway will monitor whether a request from a ‘buyer’ ticks the right boxes, as prescribed in the smart contract attached to the asset. If you do fulfill the conditions, an agreement is created. There, the DSE module first computes a shared secret (using ECDH) from the owner/provider’s private key and consumer’s public key. This secret is used to encrypt the key using MiMC. The encrypted key is then sent on-chain to the ‘buyer’ with the SNARK proof of correctness.

This means that, if you’re a ‘buyer’ of a digital asset, you don’t just get an NFT proving your ownership, you also receive the decryption key to the actual asset, which in true zero-knowledge fashion, is only known to the owner.

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

FOREVER AND EVER

DSE is good for use cases where files should be stored for ‘eternity’, but where access and/or ownership should be managed by Access Control.

IPFS is great at the former, Cloud services are pretty good at the latter.

DSE combines both.

Let’s take art NFTs as a use case. There are plenty of platforms where you can sell and buy the proof of ownership/authenticity aka the NFT. But where the actual source file of your art work is stored, isn’t always clear.

So imagine, you’re the Prado in Madrid and you just bought your first Beeple work. You will want the digital source files. Once you get them, you have the option to store it on your servers (risky) or on a cloud (safer, but you’re in a contract).

Now, imagine you want to rent out the art work, say to a Metaverse museum. Or you want to show ‘the real one’ online for a fee (aka the business model of museums), you could then leverage the power of our Access Control to safely (and eternally) store the encrypted image on a decentralised storage solution.

Or let’s take the angle of ‘eternity’. Regulators like information to be available for a long time. We know that in some countries, notaries have to keep the records of land and house sales for a certain period of time. Quite often that means paper.

Storing digital versions of these records in centralised servers comes with security risks. Storing them in Cloud services often comes with dependency, lock-ins and even political consequences. With our new feature, we can start moving towards a future where this data is stored and accessed in a decentralised manner. The ownership of your property is tokenised via an on-chain NFT, but the deeds (which should be private and only accessible to a few) could be kept on decentralised storage solutions.

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Needless to say we’re excited about adding DSE to the Nevermined stack. *If you have more questions or would like to set up a demo/call with our tech team, *do get in touch.

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