New enterprise platform secures digital assets in transit
Last month $40 million worth of Bitcoin was stolen in the Binance hack and it's estimated that more than $3 billion has been stolen over the last 18 months due to key theft and stolen credentials.
In order to guard against this type of theft, new company Fireblocks is launching an enterprise platform to protect crypto currency and other digital assets in transit.
"While Blockchain based assets by themselves are cryptographically secure, moving digital assets is a nightmare. After interviewing over 100 institutional customers, including hedge funds, broker-dealers, exchanges, and banks, we concluded that the current process is slow and highly susceptible to cyber attacks and human errors," says Michael Shaulov, CEO and co-founder of Fireblocks. "We built a platform that secures the process and simplifies the movement of funds into one or two steps."
Fireblocks works by creating a secure perimeter around internal wallets and transfers to other parties. This eliminates wallet compromise, deposit address spoofing and credential theft attacks. It can move digital assets on-chain without introducing unnecessary counterparty risk to third-party custodians, clearing-houses and side-chains. It allows hassle-free transfers to multiple exchanges, OTCs and customers while enforcing institutional authorization workflows.
Fireblocks' infrastructure creates a secure transfer environment for currencies, a secure ‘hot vault’ for currencies and assets, and an authorized workflow for assets. The Hot Vault makes a single point of compromise of private keys, either by hackers, physical breaches or insiders impossible by 'sharding' the keys across multiple servers so the full key is never available in a single location. This means the transfer of funds from the Hot Vault requires both Fireblocks co-signers and the mobile application held by the customer. Only authenticated deposit addresses within the Secure Transfer Environment can be signed.
Users begin by inputting all their accounts within their network into Fireblocks to easily transfer between them. Due to its support for a wide range of exchanges, OTCs, internal hot wallets and custodians, Fireblocks’ Secure Transfer Environment allows for dynamic authentication of deposit addresses, meaning transfers always reach the right destination without the need for manual and error-prone security and verification rituals.
An exchange's deposit address is protected and authenticated using a chip-set isolated SSL communication using secure storage of API keys to liquidity providers. This prevents network and host-based Man-in-the-Middle and spoofing attacks and guarantees that digital assets cannot be withdrawn out of network of accounts.
You can find out more on the Fireblocks site.
Image Credit: masterSergeant / depositphotos.com