Microsoft Unveils Coco: An Open-Source Blockchain Framework
Upwards to this point in its evolution, blockchain's potential for business has been largely hypothetical. Across the public blockchains underlying Bitcoin, Ether, and other cryptocurrencies, blockchain's decentralized network and immutable ledger technology has attracted lots of enterprise interest and development beyond the financial sector, all the big-name tech giants, and a host of other industries. What we haven't seen is many blockchain deployments in product. As expected, this is because the nascent tech hasn't been ready still.
Blockchain transaction speeds are too tedious, and making consensus changes to the underlying software is hard. Some other challenge is that the shared transaction history betwixt parties as well requires layers of additional obfuscation and encryption to go along data confidential. That's a lot of obstacles, but Microsoft wants to help the blockchain space jump all of these hurdles at once with the release of its Coco Framework, a new open-source foundation for enterprise blockchain networks.
Coco (short for Confidential Consortium) is an open-source framework Microsoft plans to release on GitHub in 2022. The visitor also published a manifesto-sized white paper this morning. Coco gives enterprises a distributed governance model for blockchain networks built into the software, assuasive networks to configure their own voting rules and vote on upgrades or new members in the aforementioned mode as validating a transaction. The framework also introduces a construct chosen a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which you can recollect of like a trusted black box for information. Using Coco, each node in an enterprise blockchain network would take a confidential calculating environment. Through the TEE, each node controls the encrypted data coming in and out for different transactions, smart contract agreements, and data exchanges between distributed applications (DApps) congenital on the blockchain.
"Nosotros call up blockchain is going to potentially transform but most every industry," said Marking Russinovich, Master Applied science Officer (CTO) of Microsoft Azure. "Simply for enterprises to procedure transactions in today's blockchain systems, there's high throughput and latency, and a lack of confidentiality requiring complex cryptography to obfuscate transactions. In supply chain, for instance, you don't want suppliers to be able to run across each other'southward inventories and orders. Coco gives you configurable constitutions to govern membership, and Trusted Execution Environments to get rid of today's distributed consensus algorithms and the mining requirements where latency is mixed in."
Coco integrates with existing blockchain networks and protocols, including Ethereum, JPMorgan Chase'southward Quorum platform, the R3 consortium'south Corda fiscal ledger, and Hyperledger Sawtooth. The framework essentially adds a new trust layer underneath permissioned or private blockchains. According to Russinovich, this eliminates the need for blockchain's compute-intensive Proof of Piece of work model, giving enterprises the ability to manage confidential data on a blockchain while speeding upwards performance to more ane,600 transactions per 2d.
"Processing transactions inside the TEE, in which all parties trust that code, can assist a distributed network attain centralized database levels of latency and throughput while handling votes directly in the blockchain," said Russinovich. "Votes are transactions. New members are transactions."
Inside Microsoft's Enterprise Blockchain Pipeline
Microsoft has been developing enterprise blockchain tech for the past several years, but the company built out its blockchain infrastructure in stages atop its Microsoft Azure cloud platform. By using tools such every bit Azure Resource Manager (for creating circuitous cloud apps) in combination with its Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform, the visitor built an environment designed to brand it easy for enterprises to spin upwards their own blockchain networks, and then develop, exam, and deploy cloud apps on superlative of them.
Then Microsoft added more identity and security features, integrating its BaaS platform with Microsoft Azure Active Directory, introducing new secure interoperability components called Cryptlets, and layering on network monitoring capabilities to watch out for anomalies and outages as well equally monitor transactions and node health.
Russinovich told PCMag that the goal is to create fully managed networks that are turnkey: ready-made private blockchain networks for use cases from finance to supply chain management and beyond. But he as well said that blockchain has limitations. The Coco Framework is the next pace in that blockchain tech stack.
The open-source framework volition be freely bachelor on GitHub in 2022, but Russinovich said Microsoft's BaaS platform will also include the ability to create TEEs hosted on its cloud infrastructure. It'due south all office of that new "trusted network" facilitating permissioned transactions on a distributed ledger.
"Coco is independent of Azure. But because of the distributed nature of the blockchain, somebody's going to have a Coco node on Azure, another will be in their own on-premises data center, etc.," explained Russinovich. "Information technology's finer creating a trust network between the nodes."
Every bit for what exactly these TEEs are, one case is Microsoft's Virtual Secure Mode (VSM). Microsoft has too worked with Intel to support the visitor'south Software Guard Extensions (SGX) as another TEE, and will work to support more than of these confidential computing "enclaves" going forrad.
"Software Baby-sit Extensions allow an application to create a protective enclave that'due south but accessible to that application," said Rick Echevarria, VP of Intel's Software and Services Grouping and GM of Platforms Security. "The processing is encrypted, the memory is encrypted, and there's no other process in your compute: no operating systems, nil else within that surroundings that can access the enclave. You bring data and compute into the TEE to go along it confidential while enabling that trust."
Each member or node in a blockchain built by using Coco would have a TEE. For blockchain to achieve mainstream commercial adoption, Russinovich said information technology needs not simply greater speed and scale but amend distributed governance and data confidentiality in how the network achieves consensus and verifies transactions. Coco introduces a number of innovations, simply the TEEs and distributed governance model exemplify how the framework approaches and modifies one of the primal tenets of blockchain: Proof of Work.
What Is Proof of Work?
Proof of Work is one of the core consensus rules pioneered by the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin mining is a competitive procedure, one which plays out like a lottery every time a new block is created. Every x minutes or and then, one of the decentralized nodes is randomly selected as a cake validator and will receive the reward (Bitcoin) for mining a new cake. For the Bitcoin miners competing to create and validate new blocks of transactions, Proof of Piece of work, a mechanism that measures compute cycles expended when a miner generates a hash, is the miner's lottery ticket.
"If you want to participate in new block cosmos, yous have to testify that you've consumed resources to enter what'south basically a lottery selecting the block validator for a given period," said Peter Van Valkenburgh, Manager of Inquiry at Coin Heart, a nonprofit system focused on the policy problems facing cryptocurrencies. "Because it'due south decentralized, you need a fair and meaningful way to selection one estimator on the network to set up the canonical record that wouldn't invoke a centralized potency or identification system."
"Proof of Work means that anyone who wants to be called for a period of time to validate a block and get the mining advantage will exist chosen randomly, like a lottery. But the trouble with a lottery is, you can purchase one ticket or a thousand. And then, in a consensus network like a blockchain, you need to brand these lottery tickets expensive," said Valkenburgh. "They tin't price dollars, and so the innovation is to brand it cost through compute cycles; running this algorithm with random data to generate a hash. I Proof of Work equals one lottery ticket."
This mechanism is key to the success of Bitcoin and countless other blockchain networks, core to maintaining distributed consensus and independent verifiability. The issue with Proof of Piece of work from a business viability perspective, as Microsoft's Russinovich explained, is that information technology's very inefficient. Coco re-imagines Proof of Work equally we know information technology, eliminating the demand for traditional mining and distributed consensus algorithms by providing that trusted surround underneath. Without the compute-intensive mining process, you lot go much faster transaction speeds.
"Proof of Work is great for a network where no 1 trusts anyone else, and you evidence that trustworthiness with a lot of computing piece of work in the way transactions are transmitted and verified on the Bitcoin or Ethereum network," said Russinovich. "What the TEE does—if you trust the environment and the code it's going to produce—is found that trust for this consortium network, and it's configurable for any given batch of transactions where y'all make up one's mind what information yous desire to share or make public."
Coco in Action
Coco'due south architecture breaks down into a couple different layers. At the base is that trust network made upwards of TEE nodes. In a higher place that, the distributed governance and configurable transaction mechanisms provided by the Coco Framework itself. Atop this foundation is where the blockchain networks themselves come in (Ethereum, Corda, Quorum, Hyperledger Sawtooth, and others). Finally, running on top of those are smart contracts and decentralized apps enabled by blockchain tech.
To test whether Coco actually accelerates transaction speeds to enterprise-grade levels of throughput and latency, Microsoft ran a demo of a blockchain network running on the Coco Framework against i using a private Ethereum blockchain. There was besides another demo featuring Mojix, a partner company using RFID and Internet of Things (IoT) tech for the retail supply concatenation and inventory management. The demo involved a smart contract transaction sending a buy social club from a retailer to a supplier.
Microsoft said it'due south optimizing the framework for consortiums of several hundred nodes, based on the number of parties that might make up a private enterprise blockchain network.The goal was to procedure ii,000 transactions per second.
There were a few stops and starts in the demos, but the end results were successful blockchain apps deployed in product: purchase orders sent and verified in minutes via smart contract, and more than 1,700 transactions candy on the Coco network compared to 15 on Ethereum (using a batch of actual transactions from the public Ethereum blockchain). Average latency was reduced from more than than 68,000 milliseconds (ms) on the Etherum network to a shade below 117 ms using Coco.
Amber Baldet, Executive Manager, Blockchain Program Lead for JPMorgan Chase, said Coco's cross-blockchain compatibility, trust and confidentiality innovations, and transaction dispatch are meaning. Baldet is as well the banking chair of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, and attended the Coco briefing representing Quorum.
"Broadly across industries, information sharing is what powers business," said Baldet. "We see a lot of opportunity in mutualization of infrastructure and being able to share information not only quickly but with a high degree of security and trust in the veracity of that transaction. Blockchain and distributed ledgers help us do that. Specifically in fiscal services, there's the added opportunity to transfer value within these systems, which could completely revolutionize capital markets and wholesale banking work in the futurity."
Baldet sees Coco as some other piece to layer additional degrees of security and performance on top of what Quorum, Corda, Hyperledger Sawtooth, and other enterprise blockchain protocols are already doing. The side by side hurdle, she said, will be integrating blockchains with legacy systems. Coco isn't an interoperability framework—you can't send transactions from one blockchain to another—but with the framework and TEEs equally a foundation, she said Coco has potential not only in legacy integrations but with cross-chain information transfer.
For Microsoft's Russinovich, Coco represents a shared resources to get enterprise blockchain distributions to that product-ready stage. Regardless of the ledger, be it Ethereum, Quorum, etc, Russinovich said solving for confidential information control and distributed governance is the key to blockchain's hereafter in concern.
"Coco and the TEEs turn confidentiality into an access command problem. You tin make information technology so parties in a bank or consortium tin can't come across any transaction but their own, only an auditor can come in and oversee the entire transaction log," said Russinovich. "Coco is the flexibility for multiple ledgers to integrate these capabilities. For Ethereum, nosotros only had to make modest tweaks to the open up-source code for existing smart contracts and DApps. This, we believe, will exist the foundation of blockchain for businesses."
Nearly Rob Marvin
Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/news/16951/microsoft-unveils-coco-an-open-source-blockchain-framework
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