PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 10, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today Xage Security revealed a next-generation cybersecurity solution to increase the scale of protection for trillions of industrial devices and applications across many organizations and locations at once. The company’s two new blockchain innovations – a hierarchical-tree system and conditional consensus – now enable data-rich transactions across thousands of nodes to ensure scalability in the most expansive deployments, for the first time. This enables Xage to expand its offering for customers and partners––furthering its mission to provide the secure foundation for industries at scale.

In 2017, Xage Security introduced the first and only blockchain-protected Security Fabric for industrial operations. Since then, Xage has built on its platform to develop the first tamperproof system and first universal access control for all industrial operations and devices. The company’s new hierarchical system enables multiple simultaneous updates across the Fabric, regardless of location or connectivity––and is a world-first for blockchain-protected security. Additionally, Xage has announced support for a new consensus protocol bringing “supermajority consensus” to the blockchain, so decisions can be structured to protect all participants, including those in the minority. This enables secure collaboration, multi-party governance, and verification for the rich ecosystems within major industries.

“Robust cybersecurity is the necessary foundation for Industrial IoT operations, which are growing to include trillions of devices and interactions across multiple organizations and varying sites. The Xage Fabric’s hierarchical blockchain and supermajority consensus ensure secure multi-party collaboration and governance, and improved operations and efficiency across rich industrial ecosystems,” said Xage CEO, Duncan Greatwood. “With these technological innovations, we’re creating an unparalleled level of support for cooperation and protection at scale, empowering major industries as they undergo digital transformation.”

Technical Details:

• Hierarchical Blockchain –– The hierarchical tree within the Xage Fabric allows local blockchain updates on any branch, while also supporting subsequent global, i.e. hierarchy-wide, resynchronization and reconciliation. Per-site, independent blockchains enable horizontal scaling of operations, without inline dependencies on a global blockchain or central IT resources. Xage’s hierarchical system ensures that a consensus is formed first purely among local nodes, allowing ledger updates to continue locally even when the site is disconnected, and then later local ledgers are synchronized to and reconciled with the global blockchain.
  • To provide even greater protection, the global blockchain revalidates the transactions that were accepted locally and reverifies the integrity of the local blockchain as part of the reconciliation process. This ensures that no local compromise can compromise the global system, and allows the global system to override and “heal” any local issues that are uncovered during reconciliation.
• Supermajority Consensus –– New consensus protocol enables supermajority conditional consensus when multiple organizations are sharing confidential information with each other.
  • For example, if one organization has 6000 nodes deployed within the security fabric, and another collaborating organization has 4000 nodes, the consensus may be configured so that the company with fewer nodes in the fabric won’t be automatically outvoted in establishing consensus for a decision to go through, but instead, a majority of the 6,000 nodes and a majority of the 4,000 nodes must vote “yes” for a decision to be accepted.
• Scalability –– These innovations support massive scalability improvements for the Xage Fabric, reducing the required computing footprint by 10x, and enabling fabric nodes to be deployed on very low cost and very low-powered compute environments. The number of nodes that can run at any single level of the hierarchy is increased by 10x, meaning that the Xage Security Fabric is now equipped to support trillions of industrial IoT devices and interactions. Furthermore, by handling security requests locally, the fabric enables horizontal scaling across as many sites as customers want to support.
• Fabric Preview –– Thanks to these innovations and scalability improvements, Xage is able to deliver a Fabric Preview that any customer can download, run and explore. Including four fabric nodes and three virtual devices bundled into a single virtual image, the Fabric Preview provides an entire high-performance blockchain-backed system, that users can install and run on a personal computer in minutes. To request the Fabric Preview, visit www.xage.com.