Over the last few years, enterprises have come to realize how blockchain, the technology that powers public networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, can be used to streamline their own business processes. However, they have also found that most existing blockchain protocols fail to meet several key enterprise requirements—including acceptable transaction throughput and latency, confidentiality, effective governance, and computational efficiency (i.e., the energy cost for mining/proof of work). Efforts to adapt existing public blockchain protocols or to create new protocols to meet these needs have generally traded one required enterprise attribute for another—such as improved confidentiality at the cost of greater complexity or lower performance.
The Coco Framework is an open-source system that enables high-scale, confidential blockchain networks that meet all key enterprise requirements—providing a means to accelerate production enterprise adoption of blockchain technology. Coco achieves this by re-evaluating existing assumptions for public blockchain protocols in the context of a confidential consortium, where nodes and actors (including voting members and other non-voting participants) are explicitly declared and controlled. Based on this new set of requirements, Coco brings together the power of existing blockchain protocols, trusted execution environments, distributed systems, and cryptography to enable enterprise-ready blockchain networks that deliver: • Throughput and latency approaching database speeds. • Richer, more flexible, business-specific confidentiality models. • Network policy management through distributed governance. • Support for non-deterministic transactions. • Reduced energy consumption.
Microsoft blockchain vision - enterprise smart contracts, coco framework and...Razi Rais
This presentation provides high level overview of Microsoft vision of blockchain.
Key topics covered are:
(1) Microsoft COCO Framework
(2) Microsoft Enterprise Smart Contracts
(3) Microsoft App Builder
Project Bletchley is a vision for Microsoft to deliver Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) that is open and flexible for all platforms, partners and customers. In this session, we will start by giving you an intro into Blockchain technology, what it is, how and where it can be used and talk about various examples and real world scenarios that can be built with it.
Blockchain Essentials and Blockchain on AzureNuri Cankaya
In this presentation I cover from the basics of Blockchain and deep-dive into the possibilities with Microsoft Azure on Blockchain projects.
What is Blockchain
Blockchain Disruption
Blockchain Business Scenarios
Microsoft’s Strategy on Blockchain
Blockchain 2.0: Smart Contracts
Blockchain 3.0: Cryptlets innovation
Blockchain on Microsoft Azure
Bletchley Project
Azure Blockchain Solutions
Blockchain is a leading technology that has brought in a wave of change. This distributed ledger technology forms the underlying technology for Bitcoin exchange, but over a period of time, Blockchain emerged as a mainstream technology, and now it finds a multitude of applications. Blockchain developers are in great demand across the different industrial segments; from food to finance, you can find a multitude of applications of Blockchain technology.
Blockchain Technology in Banking Services - A ReviewGokul Alex
My session for IIM Bengaluru for the Executive Leaders of Public Sector Banks in India about the principles, paradigms, platforms, protocols and potentials of Blockchain Technology in 2020.
Microsoft blockchain vision - enterprise smart contracts, coco framework and...Razi Rais
This presentation provides high level overview of Microsoft vision of blockchain.
Key topics covered are:
(1) Microsoft COCO Framework
(2) Microsoft Enterprise Smart Contracts
(3) Microsoft App Builder
Project Bletchley is a vision for Microsoft to deliver Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) that is open and flexible for all platforms, partners and customers. In this session, we will start by giving you an intro into Blockchain technology, what it is, how and where it can be used and talk about various examples and real world scenarios that can be built with it.
Blockchain Essentials and Blockchain on AzureNuri Cankaya
In this presentation I cover from the basics of Blockchain and deep-dive into the possibilities with Microsoft Azure on Blockchain projects.
What is Blockchain
Blockchain Disruption
Blockchain Business Scenarios
Microsoft’s Strategy on Blockchain
Blockchain 2.0: Smart Contracts
Blockchain 3.0: Cryptlets innovation
Blockchain on Microsoft Azure
Bletchley Project
Azure Blockchain Solutions
Blockchain is a leading technology that has brought in a wave of change. This distributed ledger technology forms the underlying technology for Bitcoin exchange, but over a period of time, Blockchain emerged as a mainstream technology, and now it finds a multitude of applications. Blockchain developers are in great demand across the different industrial segments; from food to finance, you can find a multitude of applications of Blockchain technology.
Blockchain Technology in Banking Services - A ReviewGokul Alex
My session for IIM Bengaluru for the Executive Leaders of Public Sector Banks in India about the principles, paradigms, platforms, protocols and potentials of Blockchain Technology in 2020.
-What is a Blockchain
-Blockchain as a Technology
-Do you actually need a Blockchain?
-Critical Aspects of Ecosystems
-Building Blocks of Blockchain
-The architecture of Current Systems
-Get in Touch
Blockchains and Smart Contracts: Architecture Design and Model-Driven Develop...Ingo Weber
Software Architecture and Business Process Management research by the AAP team, Data61, CSIRO (Sydney Australia):
1. Architectural concerns of developing applications around Blockchain
2. Model-driven development for blockchain smart contracts
3. Business process execution on blockchain (details on one case of 2.)
Blockchain Essentials for Business Leaders - Value Propositions and Advantage...Gokul Alex
This is an Executive Leadership Workshop Program by Gokul Alex on the fundamentals and frontiers of Blockchain which is a transformative technology covering key concepts such as value proposition design, competitive advantage, operating models, value streams, architecture frameworks etc. It is a distillation of essential concepts and emerging frontiers in the world of distributed ledger technologies.
Deja vu Security - Blockchain Security Summit - Adam CecchettiScott Strang
Deja vu Security and Peach Tech founder Adam Cecchetti slides from Deja vu Security's December 2017 Security Summit.
The Realities of Enterprise Blockchain
Blockchain is currently everywhere and on the minds of everyone from entrepreneurs to enterprise architects. This talk will explore some of the enterprise focused Blockchain technologies. It will overview how they can fit in the enterprise security ecosystem and what security, integrity, and transnational guarantees they can and cannot provide.
Blockchain and Smart Contracts (Series: Blockchain Basics)Financial Poise
Blockchain is a tool. Samson Williams likens blockchain to a group text message, in which each participant receives a distributed, time-stamped, tamper-resistant (and encrypted) record of data transactions. Each group text has these characteristics. Everyone in the group “sees” the data, and none can change or gainsay any group message. Smart contracts are computer code put on the blockchain (how, exactly?) that establishes self-executing terms and conditions of a transaction. Are smart contracts smart? If certain data comes in and fulfills a pre-set term or condition, then rights and responsibilities are formed, terminated, modified, or shifted among the parties. Ah certainty and transparency, but also ah garbage in and garbage out. Are some contractual terms not amenable to smart contracting? And are smart contracts necessarily contracts? If not, can they still be useful? If a smart contract is a contract, what is the governing document? Is it the words business people and lawyers use, or is it the code that is supposed to reflect the words?
To view the accompanying webinar, go to: https://www.financialpoise.com/financial-poise-webinars/blockchain-and-smart-contracts-2021/
Presentation from Bosch Connected World, providing an overview of Blockchain, applications within the IoT, and how to get started evaluating the potential benefits
My presentation prepared for the one-day national level workshop on "Blockchain Technologies" organised by the Department of Information Technology, Academy of Maritime Education and Training. The presentation covers the definition, classification, components, structure and working of ethereum and bitcoin blockchains.
***** Blockchain Training : https://www.edureka.co/blockchain-training *****
This Edureka video on "Blockchain Explained" is to guide you through the fundamentals of the new revolutionary technology called Blockchain and its defining concepts. Below are the topics covered in this tutorial:
1. History of blockchain
2. What is Blockchain
3. Traditional Transaction vs Blockchain
4. How Blockchain Works
5. Benefits of Blockchain
6. Blockchain Transaction Demo
Here is the link to the Blockchain blog series: https://goo.gl/DPoAHR
You can also refer this playlist on Blockchain: https://goo.gl/V5iayd
Get Rich with Blockchain & Cryptocurrencykeerthi678722
Another year has passed and virtual currency and other blockchain-based digital
assets continue to attract the attention of policymakers across the globe. A lack of
consistency in how policymakers are addressing concerns raised by the technology
is a major challenge for legal professionals who practice in this area.
The fundamental security properties of blockchain originate from both bitcoin architecture and cryptography advances. the proficiency of the cryptographic chain of blocks was advanced giving birth to various inborn security qualities.
Coco (Confidential Consortium) is an open source blockchain framework designed by Microsoft. Microsoft announced the ‘Coco’ in August 2017 in their whitepaper ‘Coco Framework Technical Overview’. The source code of the Coco framework is planned to publish in GitHub by 2018. Coco is not just a standalone blockchain protocol like Bitcoin or Ethereum rather it provides a platform for building trusted networks using any of the existing protocols. Of course, Coco is designed to be compatible with any existing blockchain protocols such as Ethereum, Corda, Hyperledger Fabric etc.
http://www.blockchainexpert.uk/blog/what-is-coco-blockchain-framework
-What is a Blockchain
-Blockchain as a Technology
-Do you actually need a Blockchain?
-Critical Aspects of Ecosystems
-Building Blocks of Blockchain
-The architecture of Current Systems
-Get in Touch
Blockchains and Smart Contracts: Architecture Design and Model-Driven Develop...Ingo Weber
Software Architecture and Business Process Management research by the AAP team, Data61, CSIRO (Sydney Australia):
1. Architectural concerns of developing applications around Blockchain
2. Model-driven development for blockchain smart contracts
3. Business process execution on blockchain (details on one case of 2.)
Blockchain Essentials for Business Leaders - Value Propositions and Advantage...Gokul Alex
This is an Executive Leadership Workshop Program by Gokul Alex on the fundamentals and frontiers of Blockchain which is a transformative technology covering key concepts such as value proposition design, competitive advantage, operating models, value streams, architecture frameworks etc. It is a distillation of essential concepts and emerging frontiers in the world of distributed ledger technologies.
Deja vu Security - Blockchain Security Summit - Adam CecchettiScott Strang
Deja vu Security and Peach Tech founder Adam Cecchetti slides from Deja vu Security's December 2017 Security Summit.
The Realities of Enterprise Blockchain
Blockchain is currently everywhere and on the minds of everyone from entrepreneurs to enterprise architects. This talk will explore some of the enterprise focused Blockchain technologies. It will overview how they can fit in the enterprise security ecosystem and what security, integrity, and transnational guarantees they can and cannot provide.
Blockchain and Smart Contracts (Series: Blockchain Basics)Financial Poise
Blockchain is a tool. Samson Williams likens blockchain to a group text message, in which each participant receives a distributed, time-stamped, tamper-resistant (and encrypted) record of data transactions. Each group text has these characteristics. Everyone in the group “sees” the data, and none can change or gainsay any group message. Smart contracts are computer code put on the blockchain (how, exactly?) that establishes self-executing terms and conditions of a transaction. Are smart contracts smart? If certain data comes in and fulfills a pre-set term or condition, then rights and responsibilities are formed, terminated, modified, or shifted among the parties. Ah certainty and transparency, but also ah garbage in and garbage out. Are some contractual terms not amenable to smart contracting? And are smart contracts necessarily contracts? If not, can they still be useful? If a smart contract is a contract, what is the governing document? Is it the words business people and lawyers use, or is it the code that is supposed to reflect the words?
To view the accompanying webinar, go to: https://www.financialpoise.com/financial-poise-webinars/blockchain-and-smart-contracts-2021/
Presentation from Bosch Connected World, providing an overview of Blockchain, applications within the IoT, and how to get started evaluating the potential benefits
My presentation prepared for the one-day national level workshop on "Blockchain Technologies" organised by the Department of Information Technology, Academy of Maritime Education and Training. The presentation covers the definition, classification, components, structure and working of ethereum and bitcoin blockchains.
***** Blockchain Training : https://www.edureka.co/blockchain-training *****
This Edureka video on "Blockchain Explained" is to guide you through the fundamentals of the new revolutionary technology called Blockchain and its defining concepts. Below are the topics covered in this tutorial:
1. History of blockchain
2. What is Blockchain
3. Traditional Transaction vs Blockchain
4. How Blockchain Works
5. Benefits of Blockchain
6. Blockchain Transaction Demo
Here is the link to the Blockchain blog series: https://goo.gl/DPoAHR
You can also refer this playlist on Blockchain: https://goo.gl/V5iayd
Get Rich with Blockchain & Cryptocurrencykeerthi678722
Another year has passed and virtual currency and other blockchain-based digital
assets continue to attract the attention of policymakers across the globe. A lack of
consistency in how policymakers are addressing concerns raised by the technology
is a major challenge for legal professionals who practice in this area.
The fundamental security properties of blockchain originate from both bitcoin architecture and cryptography advances. the proficiency of the cryptographic chain of blocks was advanced giving birth to various inborn security qualities.
Coco (Confidential Consortium) is an open source blockchain framework designed by Microsoft. Microsoft announced the ‘Coco’ in August 2017 in their whitepaper ‘Coco Framework Technical Overview’. The source code of the Coco framework is planned to publish in GitHub by 2018. Coco is not just a standalone blockchain protocol like Bitcoin or Ethereum rather it provides a platform for building trusted networks using any of the existing protocols. Of course, Coco is designed to be compatible with any existing blockchain protocols such as Ethereum, Corda, Hyperledger Fabric etc.
http://www.blockchainexpert.uk/blog/what-is-coco-blockchain-framework
computerweekly.com 17-23 September 2019 16W hen people int.docxmccormicknadine86
computerweekly.com 17-23 September 2019 16
W hen people interact with each other, for example via financial transactions, sharing legal docu-ments or trading through supply chains, they need a high level of confidence that the data
recording their interaction is accurate and true.
A distributed ledger makes it possible to build applications
where multiple parties can execute transactions online without
the need to trust a central authority or indeed each other.
Over the past few years, the number of use cases for distributed
ledgers, and their more specialised form, blockchains, has been
increasing, as has the technology to support the underlying infra-
structure and build applications on top of it.
With a distributed ledger, every user has their own full, or in some
cases partial, copy of the database, referred to as a node, which
can be a physical device, a virtual machine or a software container.
Each node runs the relevant software to provide the infrastruc-
ture management and the relevant application, including the
ability to complete “smart contracts” that negotiate the direct
exchange of assets between participating nodes.
consensus
For a transaction to proceed, all nodes must verify a transaction
and agree its order on the ledger.
Doing so is termed “consensus”, which is necessary, for exam-
ple, to avoid double counting or overspending when it comes to
financial assets.
Consensus involves four steps, from the transaction being
initiated to it being committed on all nodes with a timestamp
InsIde blockchaIn and Its
varIous applIcatIons
Bob Tarzey explores the technology around
blockchain shaping how businesses use data
BUYER’S GUIDE TO BLOCKCHAIN | PART 2 OF 3
G
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EN
S
IK
O
R
K
A
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D
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Home
http://www.computerweekly.com
https://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/blockchain
https://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/definition/virtual-machine
https://www.techtarget.com/contributor/Bob-Tarzey
computerweekly.com 17-23 September 2019 17
Home
News
How IT departments
can find different
ways to upskill in
the new economy
Travel company Clarity
bakes ThoughtSpot
search and AI functions
into analytics tool
Digital factory
approach signals a new
departure for Network
Rail’s IT strategy
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide
to blockchain
Delivering cloud in the
financial services sector
How 5G will transform
your business
Downtime
providing a unique cryptographic signature. These steps can be
completed in seconds or minutes, depending on the technology.
Blockchains are distinguished from other distributed ledgers in
being updated by adding blocks of new transactions to create an
immutable tamper-proof log of sensitive activity.
The right to write blocks may require proof-of-work – which
can be time and resource intensive – the aim being to prevent, for
example, mass updates by bots.
Nomenclature has become confusing as the two terms, dis-
tributed ledger and blo ...
How Integrated Process Management Completes the Blockchain JigsawCognizant
Blockchains, or distributed ledger technology, makes digital transactions safer for all parties, assuming that organizations apply traditional business orchestration and integrated process management to tightly connect legacy systems of record with emerging blockchain networks, promoting trust and true collaboration across their value chains.
Details in how InfiniteChain is the most practical solution to connect your centralized environment with public blockchain. Ethereum-based InfiniteChain addresses the blockchain bottleneck of privacy, transaction speed and block bloat.
Much like any other business model, blockchain in telecom also should take the time to investigate how blockchain applications can disrupt the core and adjacent business operations and business functions of the telecom industry.
A blockchain is essentially a distributed database of records or public ledger of all transactions or digital events that have been executed and shared among participating parties. Each transaction in the public ledger is verified by consensus of a majority of the participants in the system. And, once entered, information can never be erased. The blockchain contains a certain and verifiable record of every single transaction ever made. To use a basic analogy, it is easy to steal a cookie from a cookie jar, kept in a secluded place than stealing the cookie from a cookie jar kept in a marketplace, being observed by thousands of people. In the report, it distinguishes between multiple types of blockchains and explains the two biggest platforms, namely Bitcoin and Ethereum. While introducing those two platforms we explain the most important technology and algorithms used such as proof of work concept. Some of the security issues and solutions are also covered. We conclude with some concrete Ethereum based applications that demonstrate the usage of blockchain technology beyond cryptocurrency and illustrate current developments in this field.
Custom Blockchain App Development_ A Comprehensive Guide for 2024.pdfJPLoft Solutions
Blockchain technology is not an euphemism that has generated much interest in the field. It's a digital ledger that records secure transactions and the ability to be transparent. It makes records and transactions immune to cyber-attacks.
Blockchain's Smart Contracts: Driving the Next Wave of Innovation Across Manu...Cognizant
By eliminating intermediaries and by enabling smart contracts with embedded, trusted business rules, blockchain offers extraordinary opportunities for manufacturing on every level of the supply chain. To profitably ride this wave of disruptive innovation, any stakeholder in the manufacturing value chain should be familiar with the basics and guidelines for proceeding.
Most people have heard of Bitcoin, and also know that blockchain is one of the underlying concepts behind this cryptocurrency. However, the ability to share information via a shared, trusted distributed network with embedded business logic also has many potential benefits for an enterprise deployment.
Blockchain- The Quiet Disruptor - A Guide and a primer to launch Blockchain &...JP Batra
This is a guide and a primer to help you get ready to bring Blockchain technology solutions to your company. Titled "Blockchain - The Quiet Disruptor!" as presented at Global Blockchain Summit in Westminster, Colorado, this is a guide first develops a foundation through a high level understanding of:
* Inefficiencies we are used to, and how Blockchain removes them or reduces their impact
* Main strengths of Blockchain technology
* Public vs. Private Blockchain at a high level
* Business level view of how the technology works, or it's interworking
* Myths surrounding Blockchain, e.g., Blockchain vs Bitcoin, Blockchain vs. DLT as a summary table
* Various consortiums and alliances that developed platforms for use in their industries represented as a table
After foundational work, the presentation and the narratives tie all the foundational blocks together through a hypothetical Healthcare Insurance use case. It also describes the importance of technology selection, Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Proof of Concept (POC) to test the applicability of Blockchain to a use case one may have developed.
Links have been added to supporting articles to get one prepared for developing their own use cases and help their company gain a competitive advantage or respond fast to competitor threats.
The ecosystem supporting blockchain technology has matured to the point where the rollout of multiple enterprise blockchain solutions is imminent. This is technology that cannot be ignored by any industry as it poses both a threat and an opportunity for organisations. This paper outlines the potential of blockchain technology.
Investing in AI transformation today
The modern business advantage: Uncovering deep insights with AI
Organizations around the world have come to recognize AI as the transformative technology that enables them to gain real business advantage.
AI’s ability to organize vast quantities of data allows those who implement it to uncover deep business insights, augment human expertise, drive
operational efficiency, transform their products, and better serve their customers
Last year’s Global Risks Report warned of a world
that would not easily rebound from continued
shocks. As 2024 begins, the 19th edition of
the report is set against a backdrop of rapidly
accelerating technological change and economic
uncertainty, as the world is plagued by a duo of
dangerous crises: climate and conflict.
Underlying geopolitical tensions combined with the
eruption of active hostilities in multiple regions is
contributing to an unstable global order characterized
by polarizing narratives, eroding trust and insecurity.
At the same time, countries are grappling with the
impacts of record-breaking extreme weather, as
climate-change adaptation efforts and resources
fall short of the type, scale and intensity of climaterelated events already taking place. Cost-of-living
pressures continue to bite, amidst persistently
elevated inflation and interest rates and continued
economic uncertainty in much of the world.
Despondent headlines are borderless, shared
regularly and widely, and a sense of frustration at
the status quo is increasingly palpable. Together,
this leaves ample room for accelerating risks – like
misinformation and disinformation – to propagate
in societies that have already been politically and
economically weakened in recent years.
Just as natural ecosystems can be pushed to the
limit and become something fundamentally new;
such systemic shifts are also taking place across
other spheres: geostrategic, demographic and
technological. This year, we explore the rise of global
risks against the backdrop of these “structural
forces” as well as the tectonic clashes between
them. The next set of global conditions may not
necessarily be better or worse than the last, but the
transition will not be an easy one.
The report explores the global risk landscape in this
phase of transition and governance systems being
stretched beyond their limit. It analyses the most
severe perceived risks to economies and societies
over two and 10 years, in the context of these
influential forces. Could we catapult to a 3°C world
as the impacts of climate change intrinsically rewrite
the planet? Have we reached the peak of human
development for large parts of the global population,
given deteriorating debt and geo-economic
conditions? Could we face an explosion of criminality
and corruption that feeds on more fragile states and
more vulnerable populations? Will an “arms race” in
experimental technologies present existential threats
to humanity?
These transnational risks will become harder to
handle as global cooperation erodes. In this year’s
Global Risks Perception Survey, two-thirds of
respondents predict that a multipolar order will
dominate in the next 10 years, as middle and
great powers set and enforce – but also contest
- current rules and norms. The report considers
the implications of this fragmented world, where
preparedness for global risks is ever more critical but
is hindered by lack o
A big convergence of language, multimodal perception, action, and world modeling is a key step toward artificial general intelligence. In this work, we introduce
KOSMOS-12
, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that can perceive
general modalities, learn in context (i.e., few-shot), and follow instructions (i.e.,
zero-shot). Specifically, we train KOSMOS-1 from scratch on web-scale multimodal corpora, including arbitrarily interleaved text and images, image-caption
pairs, and text data. We evaluate various settings, including zero-shot, few-shot,
and multimodal chain-of-thought prompting, on a wide range of tasks without
any gradient updates or finetuning. Experimental results show that KOSMOS-1
achieves impressive performance on (i) language understanding, generation, and
even OCR-free NLP (directly fed with document images), (ii) perception-language
tasks, including multimodal dialogue, image captioning, visual question answering,
and (iii) vision tasks, such as image recognition with descriptions (specifying
classification via text instructions). We also show that MLLMs can benefit from
cross-modal transfer, i.e., transfer knowledge from language to multimodal, and
from multimodal to language. In addition, we introduce a dataset of Raven IQ test,
which diagnoses the nonverbal reasoning capability of MLLMs.
We present a causal speech enhancement model working on the
raw waveform that runs in real-time on a laptop CPU. The proposed model is based on an encoder-decoder architecture with
skip-connections. It is optimized on both time and frequency
domains, using multiple loss functions. Empirical evidence
shows that it is capable of removing various kinds of background noise including stationary and non-stationary noises,
as well as room reverb. Additionally, we suggest a set of
data augmentation techniques applied directly on the raw waveform which further improve model performance and its generalization abilities. We perform evaluations on several standard
benchmarks, both using objective metrics and human judgements. The proposed model matches state-of-the-art performance of both causal and non causal methods while working
directly on the raw waveform.
Index Terms: Speech enhancement, speech denoising, neural
networks, raw waveform
Artificial neural networks are the heart of machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence
protocols. Historically, the simplest implementation of an artificial neuron traces back to the classical
Rosenblatt’s “perceptron”, but its long term practical applications may be hindered by the fast scal-
ing up of computational complexity, especially relevant for the training of multilayered perceptron
networks. Here we introduce a quantum information-based algorithm implementing the quantum
computer version of a perceptron, which shows exponential advantage in encoding resources over
alternative realizations. We experimentally test a few qubits version of this model on an actual
small-scale quantum processor, which gives remarkably good answers against the expected results.
We show that this quantum model of a perceptron can be used as an elementary nonlinear classifier
of simple patterns, as a first step towards practical training of artificial quantum neural networks
to be efficiently implemented on near-term quantum processing hardware
En los ̇ltimos 20 aÒos la Enfermedad de Alzheimer pasÛ de ser el paradigma
del envejecimiento normal -aunque prematuro y acelerado-, del cerebro,
para convertirse en una enfermedad autÈntica, nosolÛgicamente bien defini-
da y con una clara raÌz genÈtica. La enfermedad afecta hoy a m·s de 20
millones de personas, tiene enormes consecuencias sobre la economÌa de los
paÌses y constituye uno de los temas de investigaciÛn m·s activos en el ·rea
de salud.
Este artÌculo revisa el conocimiento actual sobre el tema. En esta primera
parte se analizan su epidemiologÌa, patogenia y genÈtica; se enumeran los
temas prioritarios de investigaciÛn; se revisa su relaciÛn con el concepto de
muerte celular programada (apoptosis) y se enumeran los elementos indis-
pensables para el diagnÛstico.
Palabras Clave
:Enfermedad de Alzhaimer; Demencia; GenÈtica; TerapÈuti-
ca.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities are growing at an unprecedented rate. These technologies have many widely beneficial applications, ranging from machine translation to medical image analysis. Countless more such applications are being developed and can be expected over the long term. Less attention has historically been paid to the ways in which artificial intelligence can be used maliciously. This report surveys the landscape of potential security threats from malicious uses of artificial intelligence technologies, and proposes ways to better forecast, prevent, and mitigate these threats. We analyze, but do not conclusively resolve, the question of what the long-term equilibrium between attackers and defenders will be. We focus instead on what sorts of attacks we are likely to see soon if adequate defenses are not developed.
There is an increasing interest in exploiting mobile sensing technologies and machine learning techniques for mental health monitoring and intervention. Researchers have effectively used contextual information, such as mobility, communication and mobile phone usage patterns for quantifying individuals’ mood and wellbeing. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of neural network models for predicting users’ level of stress by using the location information collected by smartphones. We characterize the mobility patterns of individuals using the GPS metricspresentedintheliteratureandemploythesemetricsasinputtothenetwork. We evaluate our approach on the open-source StudentLife dataset. Moreover, we discuss the challenges and trade-offs involved in building machine learning models for digital mental health and highlight potential future work in this direction.
La Hipertensión, es una de las mayores enfermedades que sufren los Hispanohablantes en el planeta . Es grato poder colocar este documento al público y haber podido hacer parte del equipo , ojalá sirvan a muchos las implementaciones. idioma más hablado según el foro Económico mundial - Me refiero al español ó castellano según sea -
segundo idioma y haber podido hacer parte de este equipo. Genuinamente, espero que se curen la mayor cantidad de personas con . Espero genuinamente puedan hacer algúna donación a este esfuerzo grupal. Espero Compartamos este "Paper" así como compartimos memes - En el sentido literal de la significancia-
** Refierase a Wikipedia sino tiene un diccionario a mano.
To thrive in the 21st century, students need more than traditional academic learning. They must be adept at collaboration, communication and problem-solving, which are some of the skills developed through social and emotional learning (SEL). Coupled with mastery of traditional skills, social and emotional proficiency will equip students to succeed in the swiftly evolving digital economy. In 2015, the World Economic Forum published a report that focused on the pressing issue of the 21st-century skills gap and ways to address it through technology (New Vision for Education: Unlocking the Potential of Technology). In that report, we defined a set of 16 crucial proficiencies for education in the 21st century. Those skills include six “foundational literacies”, such as literacy, numeracy and scientific literacy, and 10 skills that we labelled either “competencies” or “character qualities”. Competencies are the means by which students approach complex challenges; they include collaboration, communication and critical thinking and problem-solving. Character qualities are the ways in which students approach their changing environment; they include curiosity, adaptability and social and cultural awareness (see Exhibit 1).
In our current report, New Vision for Education: Fostering Social and Emotional Learning through Technology, we follow up on our 2015 report by exploring how these competencies and character qualities do more than simply deepen 21st-century skills. Together, they lie at the heart of SEL and are every bit as important as the foundational skills required for traditional academic learning. Although many stakeholders have defined SEL more narrowly, we believe the definition of SEL is evolving. We define SEL broadly to encompass the 10 competencies and character qualities.1 As is the case with traditional academic learning, technology can be invaluable at enabling SEL.
La expresión “futuro del trabajo” es actualmente uno de los conceptos más populares en las búsquedas en Google. Los numerosos avances tecnológicos de los últimos tiempos están modificando rápidamente la frontera entre las actividades realizadas por los seres humanos y las ejecutadas por las máquinas, lo cual está transformando el mundo del trabajo. Existe un creciente número de estudios e iniciativas que se están llevando a cabo con el objeto de analizar qué significan estos cambios en nuestro trabajo, en nuestros ingresos, en el futuro de nuestros hijos, en nuestras empresas y en nuestros gobiernos. Estos análisis se conducen principalmente desde la óptica de las economías avanzadas, y mucho menos desde la perspectiva de las economías en desarrollo y emergentes. Sin embargo, las diferencias en materia de difusión tecnológica, de estructuras económicas y demográficas, de niveles de educación y patrones
migratorios inciden de manera significativa en la manera en que estos cambios pueden afectar a los países en desarrollo y emergentes. Este estudio, El futuro del trabajo: perspectivas regionales, se centra en las repercusiones probables de estas tendencias en las economías en desarrollo y emergentes de África; Asia; Europa del Este, Asia Central y el Mediterráneo Sur y Oriental, y América Latina y el Caribe. Se trata de un esfuerzo mancomunado de los cuatro principales bancos regionales de desarrollo: el African Development Bank Group, el Asian Development Bank, el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo y el European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. En el estudio se destacan las oportunidades que los cambios en la dinámica del trabajo podrían crear en nuestras regiones. El progreso tecnológico permitiría a los países con los que trabajamos crecer y alcanzar rápidamente mejores niveles de vida que en el pasado
Superada la Guerra Fría, el orden mundial dirigido por Estados Unidos se ve cuestionado por China y Rusia, dos potencias revisionistas que están acercando sus alineamientos estratégicos. China está en camino de convertirse en la mayor economía del mundo y en una potencia militar formidable a la que irrita la hegemonía de Estados Unidos. Parece que China, más que derrocar el orden mundial establecido, busca remodelarlo, especialmente en Asia, con la instauración de un orden sinocéntrico en el que todos los países del área asiática ponganlos intereses chinos por delante de los suyos propios. Está por ver si China tendrá las capacidades para conseguirlo, evitando el conflicto con Estados Unidos.
The increasing use of electronic forms of communication presents
new opportunities in the study of mental health, including the
ability to investigate the manifestations of psychiatric diseases un-
obtrusively and in the setting of patients’ daily lives. A pilot study to
explore the possible connections between bipolar affective disorder
and mobile phone usage was conducted. In this study, participants
were provided a mobile phone to use as their primary phone. This
phone was loaded with a custom keyboard that collected metadata
consisting of keypress entry time and accelerometer movement.
Individual character data with the exceptions of the backspace key
and space bar were not collected due to privacy concerns. We pro-
pose an end-to-end deep architecture based on late fusion, named
DeepMood, to model the multi-view metadata for the prediction
of mood scores. Experimental results show that 90.31% prediction
accuracy on the depression score can be achieved based on session-
level mobile phone typing dynamics which is typically less than
one minute. It demonstrates the feasibility of using mobile phone
metadata to infer mood disturbance and severity
Defin
ing artificial intelligence is no easy matter. Since the mid
-
20th century when it
was first
recognized
as a specific field of research, AI has always been envisioned as
an evolving boundary, rather than a settled research field. Fundamentally, it refers
to
a programme whose ambitious objective is to understand and reproduce human
cognition; creating cognitive processes comparable to those found in human beings.
Therefore, we are naturally dealing with a wide scope here, both in terms of the
technical proced
ures that can be employed and the various disciplines that can be
called upon: mathematics, information technology, cognitive sciences, etc. There is
a great variety of approaches when it comes to AI: ontological, reinforcement
learning, adversarial learni
ng and neural networks, to name just a few. Most of them
have been known for decades and many of the algorithms used today were
developed in the ’60s and ’70s.
Since the 1956 Dartmouth conference, artificial intelligence has alternated between
periods of
great enthusiasm and disillusionment, impressive progress and frustrating
failures. Yet, it has relentlessly pushed back the limits of what was only thought to
be achievable by human beings. Along the way, AI research has achieved significant
successes: o
utperforming human beings in complex games (chess, Go),
understanding natural language, etc. It has also played a critical role in the history
of mathematics and information technology. Consider how many softwares that we
now take for granted once represen
ted a major breakthrough in AI: chess game
apps, online translation programmes, etc
Vast
amounts
of
data, faster processing
power,
and
increas
-
ingly smarter algorithms are powering artificial intelligence
(AI) applications and associated use cases across
consumer,
finance, healthcare, manufacturing, transportation & logistics,
and government sectors around the world
-
enabling smarter
&
intelligent applications to speak, listen, and make decisions
in unprecedented ways. As AI technologies and deployments
sweep through virtually
every
industry, a wide range
of
use
cases are beginning to illustrate the potential business
oppor
-
tunities, a
nd inspire changes to existing business processes
leading to newer business
models.
In this paper, we propose an Attentional Generative Ad-
versarial Network (AttnGAN) that allows attention-driven,
multi-stage refinement for fine-grained text-to-image gener-
ation. With a novel attentional generative network, the At-
tnGAN can synthesize fine-grained details at different sub-
regions of the image by paying attentions to the relevant
words in the natural language description. In addition, a
deep attentional multimodal similarity model is proposed to
compute a fine-grained image-text matching loss for train-
ing the generator. The proposed AttnGAN significantly out-
performs the previous state of the art, boosting the best re-
ported inception score by 14.14% on the CUB dataset and
170.25% on the more challenging COCO dataset. A de-
tailed analysis is also performed by visualizing the atten-
tion layers of the AttnGAN. It for the first time shows that
the layered attentional GAN is able to automatically select
the condition at the word level for generating different parts
of the image
The Hamilton Project • Brookings i
Seven Facts on Noncognitive Skills
from Education to the Labor Market
Introduction
Cognitive skills—that is, math and reading skills that are measured by standardized tests—are generally
understood to be of critical importance in the labor market. Most people find it intuitive and indeed
unsurprising that cognitive skills, as measured by standardized tests, are important for students’ later-life
outcomes. For example, earnings tend to be higher for those with higher levels of cognitive skills. What is
less well understood—and is the focus of these economic facts—is that noncognitive skills are also integral to
educational performance and labor-market outcomes.
Due in large part to research pioneered in economics by Nobel laureate James J. Heckman, there is a robust and
growing body of evidence that noncognitive skills function similarly to cognitive skills, strongly improving
labor-market outcomes. These noncognitive skills—often referred to in the economics literature as soft skills and
elsewhere as social, emotional, and behavioral skills—include qualities like perseverance, conscientiousness,
and self-control, as well as social skills and leadership ability (Duckworth and Yeager 2015). The value of these
qualities in the labor market has increased over time as the mix of jobs has shifted toward positions requiring
noncognitive skills. Evidence suggests that the labor-market payoffs to noncognitive skills have been increasing
over time and the payoffs are particularly strong for individuals who possess both cognitive and noncognitive
skills (Deming 2015; Weinberger 2014).
Although we draw a conceptual distinction between noncognitive skills and cognitive skills, it is not possible to
disentangle these concepts fully. All noncognitive skills involve cognition, and some portion of performance on
cognitive tasks is made possible by noncognitive skills. For the purposes of this document, the term “cognitive
skills” encompasses intelligence; the ability to process, learn, think, and reason; and substantive knowledge
as reflected in indicators of academic achievement. Since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, education
policy has focused on accountability policies aimed at improving cognitive skills and closing test score gaps
across groups. These policies have been largely successful, particularly for math achievement (Dee and Jacob
2011; Wong, Cook, and Steiner 2009) and among students most exposed to accountability pressure (Neal and
Schanzenbach 2010). What has received less attention in policy debates is the importance of noncognitive skills.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
Essentials of Automations: Optimizing FME Workflows with ParametersSafe Software
Are you looking to streamline your workflows and boost your projects’ efficiency? Do you find yourself searching for ways to add flexibility and control over your FME workflows? If so, you’re in the right place.
Join us for an insightful dive into the world of FME parameters, a critical element in optimizing workflow efficiency. This webinar marks the beginning of our three-part “Essentials of Automation” series. This first webinar is designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to utilize parameters effectively: enhancing the flexibility, maintainability, and user control of your FME projects.
Here’s what you’ll gain:
- Essentials of FME Parameters: Understand the pivotal role of parameters, including Reader/Writer, Transformer, User, and FME Flow categories. Discover how they are the key to unlocking automation and optimization within your workflows.
- Practical Applications in FME Form: Delve into key user parameter types including choice, connections, and file URLs. Allow users to control how a workflow runs, making your workflows more reusable. Learn to import values and deliver the best user experience for your workflows while enhancing accuracy.
- Optimization Strategies in FME Flow: Explore the creation and strategic deployment of parameters in FME Flow, including the use of deployment and geometry parameters, to maximize workflow efficiency.
- Pro Tips for Success: Gain insights on parameterizing connections and leveraging new features like Conditional Visibility for clarity and simplicity.
We’ll wrap up with a glimpse into future webinars, followed by a Q&A session to address your specific questions surrounding this topic.
Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your FME expertise and drive your projects to new heights of efficiency.
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Key Trends Shaping the Future of Infrastructure.pdfCheryl Hung
Keynote at DIGIT West Expo, Glasgow on 29 May 2024.
Cheryl Hung, ochery.com
Sr Director, Infrastructure Ecosystem, Arm.
The key trends across hardware, cloud and open-source; exploring how these areas are likely to mature and develop over the short and long-term, and then considering how organisations can position themselves to adapt and thrive.
Slack (or Teams) Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Soluti...Jeffrey Haguewood
Sidekick Solutions uses Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Solutions Apricot) and automation solutions to integrate data for business workflows.
We believe integration and automation are essential to user experience and the promise of efficient work through technology. Automation is the critical ingredient to realizing that full vision. We develop integration products and services for Bonterra Case Management software to support the deployment of automations for a variety of use cases.
This video focuses on the notifications, alerts, and approval requests using Slack for Bonterra Impact Management. The solutions covered in this webinar can also be deployed for Microsoft Teams.
Interested in deploying notification automations for Bonterra Impact Management? Contact us at sales@sidekicksolutionsllc.com to discuss next steps.
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Search and Society: Reimagining Information Access for Radical FuturesBhaskar Mitra
The field of Information retrieval (IR) is currently undergoing a transformative shift, at least partly due to the emerging applications of generative AI to information access. In this talk, we will deliberate on the sociotechnical implications of generative AI for information access. We will argue that there is both a critical necessity and an exciting opportunity for the IR community to re-center our research agendas on societal needs while dismantling the artificial separation between the work on fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in IR and the rest of IR research. Instead of adopting a reactionary strategy of trying to mitigate potential social harms from emerging technologies, the community should aim to proactively set the research agenda for the kinds of systems we should build inspired by diverse explicitly stated sociotechnical imaginaries. The sociotechnical imaginaries that underpin the design and development of information access technologies needs to be explicitly articulated, and we need to develop theories of change in context of these diverse perspectives. Our guiding future imaginaries must be informed by other academic fields, such as democratic theory and critical theory, and should be co-developed with social science scholars, legal scholars, civil rights and social justice activists, and artists, among others.
2. (c) 2017 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This document is provided "as-is." Information and
views expressed in this document, including URL and other Internet Web site references, may change
without notice. You bear the risk of using it.
This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any Microsoft
product. You may copy and use this document for your internal, reference purposes.
3. Contents
Executive Summary.......................................................................................................................................1
Facilitating Enterprise Blockchain Adoption.................................................................................................2
The Coco Framework....................................................................................................................................4
Actors and Identity........................................................................................................................................8
Network Creation and Governance ............................................................................................................10
Transaction Workflow.................................................................................................................................14
Confidentiality and Integrity.......................................................................................................................18
Mitigating Compromise ..............................................................................................................................21
Functional Prototype and Demos ...............................................................................................................22
Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................24
4. 1
Executive Summary
Over the last few years, enterprises have come to realize how blockchain, the technology that powers
public networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, can be used to streamline their own business processes.
However, they have also found that most existing blockchain protocols fail to meet several key enterprise
requirements—including acceptable transaction throughput and latency, confidentiality, effective
governance, and computational efficiency (i.e., the energy cost for mining/proof of work). Efforts to adapt
existing public blockchain protocols or to create new protocols to meet these needs have generally traded
one required enterprise attribute for another—such as improved confidentiality at the cost of greater
complexity or lower performance.
The Coco Framework is an open-source system that enables high-scale, confidential blockchain networks
that meet all key enterprise requirements—providing a means to accelerate production enterprise
adoption of blockchain technology. Coco achieves this by re-evaluating existing assumptions for public
blockchain protocols in the context of a confidential consortium, where nodes and actors (including voting
members and other non-voting participants) are explicitly declared and controlled. Based on this new set
of requirements, Coco brings together the power of existing blockchain protocols, trusted execution
environments, distributed systems, and cryptography to enable enterprise-ready blockchain networks
that deliver:
• Throughput and latency approaching database speeds.
• Richer, more flexible, business-specific confidentiality models.
• Network policy management through distributed governance.
• Support for non-deterministic transactions.
• Reduced energy consumption.
It is important to note that Coco is not a standalone blockchain protocol; rather, it provides a trusted
foundation with which existing blockchain protocols such as Ethereum, Quorum, Corda, or Hyperledger
Sawtooth1
can be integrated to deliver complete, enterprise-ready ledger solutions. Coco is designed to
be open and compatible with any blockchain protocol.
This paper reexamines the requirements for a blockchain network in the context of a confidential
consortium. It then introduces the Coco Framework, including network topology and system architecture,
network creation and governance, transaction flow, and architectural variations. It also examines how
scalability, confidentiality, and distributed governance are achieved, along with security considerations
and how security risk can be mitigated. Finally, it discusses the current working implementation of Coco,
including initial performance findings.
1
Ethereum; Quorum by J. P. Morgan; Corda by R3; Hyperledger Sawtooth by Intel.
5. 2
Facilitating Enterprise Blockchain Adoption
Blockchain technology is poised to become the next transformational computing paradigm. It promises to
disrupt existing business processes, to reduce the friction of doing business, and to unlock new business
models—especially shared processes across organizations. According to Gartner, “the business value-add
of blockchain will grow to slightly more than $176 billion by 2025, and then it will exceed $3.1 trillion by
2030.”2
Given such benefits, in our rapidly evolving digital economy, it won’t be long before blockchain
technology is a key foundation for distributed enterprise and consumer applications.
Framing the Problem
Blockchain technology is already generating strong interest among enterprises across almost every
industry. However, as enterprises look to apply blockchain technology to meet their business needs, they
have come to realize that most existing blockchain protocols fail to meet key enterprise requirements in
areas such as performance, confidentiality, governance, and required processing power. This is because
they were designed to function—and to achieve consensus—in a potentially hostile environment, where
anonymous, untrusted actors can execute transactions or propose block commits. As such, to prevent
malicious behavior, transactions are “in the clear” for all to see, every node in the network executes every
transaction, and Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithms must be employed. All of these
“safeguards,” while necessary to ensure the integrity of public blockchain networks, require tradeoffs in
terms of key enterprise requirements such as scalability and confidentiality.
For instance, the public Ethereum network has an average processing rate of 20 transactions per second,
with a typical transaction latency of around 10-20 seconds.3
By contrast, the Visa credit card processing
system averages 2000 transactions per second.4
In addition, all Ethereum transactions, smart contract
code, and state are in the clear—visible to anyone who joins the network.
Processing power required for public blockchain networks—and associated energy costs—are also
prohibitive to enterprise scenarios. According to Digiconomist5
, the annual energy consumption of the
Bitcoin network is equal to 14.96 terawatt-hours (TWh), with estimated annualized mining (transaction
processing) costs of more than US$747 million. Put another way, the Bitcoin network consumes enough
energy to power more than 1.3 million U.S. households.
There have been efforts to adapt public blockchain network protocols or to create new protocols to meet
the needs of the enterprise. However, so far, these approaches have not met all enterprise requirements;
most have required undesirable tradeoffs in terms of complexity or performance. For example, while
approaches exist that leverage zero-knowledge proofs 6
or other advanced cryptography to hide
transaction details, they are complex and require computational space and time tradeoffs making them
unsuitable for high-volume applications, or they rely on a trusted source to bootstrap crypto material.
2
Gartner, Forecast: Blockchain Business Value, Worldwide, 2017-2030. Gartner. 02 March 2017. ID:
G00325744.
3
https://etherscan.io/chart/tx
4
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability
5
http://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
6
ZCash and Hawk are two such systems.
6. 3
Other schemes introduce rigidity because confidential channels require “commitments” of tokenized
resources, making them inaccessible outside the channel while the channel is active.
A Consortium-First Approach
Adapting existing, public blockchain technology to the needs of the enterprise (or, more accurately, to a
consortium of enterprises) begins with re-examining the environment in which the blockchain must
operate. In a public blockchain network, anyone can transact on the network, actors on the network are
pseudo-anonymous and untrusted, and anyone can add nodes to the network—with full access to the
ledger and with the ability to participate in consensus.
In contrast, in a consortium blockchain network, member identities and nodes are known and controlled.
Actors are often equally mature, with robust and highly controlled IT environments, security policies, and
other enterprise characteristics.
So how can we take advantage of these differences to meet the needs of the enterprise? Fundamentally,
the trust relationship between the actors in a consortium need not be changed. However, if we can create
a trusted network of physical nodes without requiring the actors that control those nodes to trust one
another, we can control what code is run and guarantee the correctness of its output—thereby simplifying
consensus and reducing duplicative validation. This is the approach that Microsoft has taken in developing
the Coco Framework, which is described in the remainder of this paper.
7. 4
The Coco Framework
The Coco Framework is an open-source system that enables high-scale, confidential blockchain networks.
It meets all key enterprise requirements, providing a means to accelerate production adoption of
blockchain technology. Coco achieves this through the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs) such
as Intel’s SGX and Windows Virtual Secure Mode (VSM), enabling the creation of a trusted network of
physical nodes on which to run a distributed ledger.
With Coco, enterprises can benefit from:
• Throughput and latency approaching database speeds. Through its use of TEEs, Coco creates a
network of trusted nodes that reduces the problem from Byzantine fault tolerance to crash fault
tolerance. This simplifies consensus and thus improves transaction speed and latency—all without
compromising security or assuming trust.
• Richer, more flexible confidentiality models. Coco uses industry standard authorization and
authentication to safeguard data access. Transactions, smart contract code, and smart contract state
can be processed in the clear yet revealed only to authorized parties, without requiring complicated
confidentiality schemes.
• Network policy management through distributed governance. Coco provides a network
constitution to express and manage consortium policies. Expression of network policies can be
codified, and policies can be managed through standard ledger-like transactions.
• Non-deterministic transactions. With Coco, because the results of code execution can be trusted,
smart contract code need only be executed by a single node in the network. When the network is
configured in this manner, transactions can have non-deterministic results (e.g. by incorporating
randomness in calculations) and can even interact directly with trusted external systems.
• Reduced energy usage. Coco improves energy consumption by eliminating computationally
intensive consensus algorithms, such as proof of work.
Conceptual Overview
It is important to note that Coco is not a standalone blockchain protocol; rather, as illustrated in Figure 1,
it provides a trusted foundation that delivers efficient consensus algorithms and flexible confidentiality
schemes—a framework with which existing blockchain protocols such as Ethereum, Quorum, Corda, or
Hyperledger Sawtooth can be integrated to deliver complete, enterprise-ready ledger solutions.
8. 5
Figure 1: High-level overview of a Coco system.
Coco was designed to provide secure, reliable base components that any blockchain protocol can use.
Figure 2 illustrates the separation/overlap between Coco and a blockchain protocol, with the Coco
components shaded in green. At its core, Coco:
• Implements a consistent, distributed, persistent store (such as a key-value store) that is replicated
across TEEs—containing both the application (business transaction) ledger and the Coco
administrative ledger used for network policy management. While there are logically two ledgers,
both are recorded within a single store to maintain relative ordering across all transactions in the
network.
• Provides secure node-to-node and application-to-node communication.
• Enables arbitrary confidentiality models with easy-to-use primitives.
• Provides a codified governance model to support arbitrary, distributed policy management.
Coco relies on the specific blockchain protocol for the distributed ledger model, as well as core transaction
and smart contract code processing.
9. 6
Figure 2: Logical components of a blockchain protocol (Coco components are shaded in Green).
High-Level Architecture
A Coco system is a distributed network of trusted validating nodes (VNs), each of which run the Coco
Framework and the integrated blockchain protocol. VNs accept transactions and participate in the
network’s consensus algorithm. Depending on the chosen consensus algorithm, one or some VNs process
transactions and execute smart contract code.
Loosely, the VNs in a Coco network are similar in function to the mining nodes in a public blockchain
network—though the acts of “mining” and communication in a Coco network are very different. Unlike
public blockchain networks, each VN in a Coco network is fully trusted because VNs can verify the identity
of all other VNs and validate the code they run through TEE attestation at runtime.
As illustrated in Figure 3, a VN can be decomposed into several logical sub-components. These are divided
across the host (the potentially untrusted hypervisor and operating system of the node) and the enclave,
which is a protected, secure container within the TEE. All sensitive components of the system run inside
the enclave and are responsible for maintaining integrity, confidentiality, and security of the ledger.
• Coco interface (host) – the host process that implements the transport layer interface to which the
client and other VNs connect. This host process also interfaces with the operating system and other
external services on behalf of the enclave. (While the host itself is required to maintain availability
of the VN and persistence of the data stored in the ledger, it has no responsibility for maintaining
integrity, confidentiality, or security of the ledger.)
• Coco core (enclave) – the interface between the host and all other functionality within the enclave.
• Persistent store (enclave) – the single, globally ordered, on-disk representation of the application
ledger and the Coco administrative ledger. (There is an in-memory copy for fast access; durability is
achieved via a persistent store.)
10. 7
• Coco configuration state (enclave) – the Coco state machine implementation that supports creation
of the network constitution and all subsequent updates.
• Blockchain core and adapter (enclave) – the logic to process transactions and execute smart contract
code, as well as the glue to integrate the blockchain protocol into the rest of the Coco system.
Figure 3: Coco architecture.
11. 8
Actors and Identity
There are two types of actors in a Coco network, members and participants. At a high level:
• Members are the governing bodies of a consortium, with collective control over who can transact on
the network and its governance—including network membership, the code that runs in the TEEs, and
the definition of network policies. Members run VNs and can transact on the network. Members also
define the initial configuration and setup of a Coco network and, throughout the lifetime of the
network, can propose changes to its configuration and vote on changes proposed by other members.
Further, each member receives a share of the network’s shared network key (described later), which
allows a quorum of members to collaboratively restore the network in the event of a catastrophic
failure. In a consortium of banks, members could be large, global, systemically important financial
institutions (GSIFIs).
• Participants, unlike members, cannot vote and thus have no operational control over who can
directly access the network or its governance. Participants are determined by the network’s
members and, like members, participants can transact on the network. They also can, and likely do,
run their own VNs. In a consortium of banks, participants could be a group of domestic systemically
important banks (D-SIBs) that transact between themselves and the GSIFIs.
It’s worth noting that, depending on the purpose and policies of the consortium, a Coco network doesn’t
necessarily need to have both types of actors. For example, a consortium may decide that all parties within
it should be members, with equal responsibilities and permissions. Similarly, each actor could have both
member and participant identities, as a means of separating business and administrative transactions.
Every member and participant has a private/public key pair (PrivKeyMi, PubKeyMi and PrivKeyPi, PubKeyPi,
respectively) and is identified in the Coco network with an organization-wide X.509 certificate. An
intermediate certificate can be used to uniquely identify the organization and all users within it,
abstracting actor-specific certificate policies and roll-over from the Coco system. Within the organization,
to maintain fine-grained control, different departments that are participating in different consortiums
(and thus different Coco networks) can have different certificates to minimize cross-network access. This
allows for easy integration with existing corporate systems and public-key infrastructures (PKIs).
End users, such as a bank’s customers, do not have an identity in the Coco network and cannot transact
on the network directly. Instead, they interact with it through the front-end systems of members or
participants.
In a typical scenario, as illustrated in Figure 4, end-users are authenticated and authorized using existing
enterprise identity management mechanisms, such as Active Directory (AD) or Azure Active Directory
(AAD). The end user submits a transaction to a front-end system. The front-end system then submits the
transaction to the Coco network using the member’s or participant’s Coco identity (PrivKeyMi or PrivKeyPi),
which is stored in a local or cloud-based key management system, such as a hardware security module
(HSM).
13. 10
Network Creation and Governance
Coco describes and manages network policies through a network constitution (described below) and a
process of distributed voting. This allows consortium rules and agreements to be codified in the system,
similar to how contracts are codified in smart contract code.
Any member can start a network by bootstrapping the first VN. After that, proposals for changes to the
Coco network constitution (such as adding or deleting a member) can be submitted by any member for a
vote. Like application transactions, such Coco administrative tasks are submitted as transactions to the
Coco network.
Network Constitution
In a Coco network, the network constitution is the complete expression of network policies. At a
minimum, these include the membership list, VN list, code manifest, TEE manifest, and voting policies.
• The membership list is a list of all approved actors (members and participants) in the network. A
member, M1, is represented by its private/public key pair (PrivKeyM1, PubKeyM1). If M1 to Mi are
members in the consortium, the member list would be represented by the public key set {PubKeyM1,
… PubKeyMi}. Only each member’s public key certificate is uploaded into the Coco network. Each
member’s private key remains in the originating key management system, which can be on-premises
or in the cloud. Participants are handled in the same way as members.
• The Code manifest is the specification of all approved code that can run within the Coco network—
including but not limited to Coco Framework versions, blockchain protocols, and specific blockchain
protocol versions. Any one code identity is represented as a single measurement.
• The TEE manifest is the specification of all approved trusted execution environments—hardware or
software. VNs in a Coco network can run different TEEs, provided that all TEEs employed are
acceptable per the TEE manifest. In such a mixed TEE environment, network security is only as strong
as the weakest TEE mechanism employed.
• The VN list is a list of all approved validating nodes in the network. A VN is represented in the Coco
network by a signed tuple that includes the member’s identity, the address (either DNS name or IP
address) of the physical node, and the public key corresponding to the private key generated within
the enclave to uniquely identify the VN/secure enclave pair. For the first VN of the first member,
VNM1_1 = {PubKeyM1, address of VNM1_1, PubKeyVN_M1_1}SPrivKey_M1.
• Any change to the network constitution, such as additions or removals to the membership or VN
lists, must be done through a voting process (described later). The criteria for a vote to be accepted
is known as the voting policy, and is also expressed in the network constitution. Options for a voting
policy can include unanimous, M of N, one of N, etc. Similarly, policies on whether vote submission
can be automated if it meets certain criteria can be expressed. For example, vote submission could
be automated so that every member could add a specified number of VNs, provided that the VNs
are running majority-endorsed code.
These are the fundamental policies a Coco network implements; we plan to support additional policies
over time.
14. 11
Bringing up the Network
Any member can start a network by bootstrapping the first VN and uploading a genesis network
constitution. The member who starts the network has no extra privileges compared to subsequent
members who join the network.
Bootstrapping a VN
To bootstrap a VN, a member or participant performs the following steps:
1. Sets up a server or virtual machine with a TEE and installs a Coco Framework-supported operating
system.
2. Installs the Coco Framework and desired blockchain protocol. The software is installed on the server,
which in turn creates an enclave in the TEE to run sensitive Coco and blockchain functionality. The
TEE generates an attestation of its hardware/software mechanism and the code running inside the
enclave, which the actor uses to verify that all is as expected. A private/public key pair is generated
within the enclave and the public key is included as part of the attestation to represent the enclave’s
identity.
3. Uploads the network constitution to the VN.
4. Establishes a secure communication channel between each front-end application and the VN.
5. Uploads its private/public key shares, which are used for data integrity and confidentiality (described
later).
The above process for bootstrapping a VN is the same whether it is the first VN in the network or a
subsequent VN. Subsequent VNs will discover other VNs in network using the VN list and attempt to
establish secure node-to-node connections with them. Secure connections are only established with other
VNs if they are in the VN list and the TEE for each other VN can provide a valid attestation.
Member, Participant, and Node Management
After the network is up and running, any existing member can propose a vote to add a new member or
participant; add a new VN belonging to an existing member or participant; or remove a member,
participant, or VN.
Adding a New Member or Participant
Multiple members and/or participants can be defined in the genesis network constitution, in which case
they do not need to be added after the network is up and running. New members or participants who are
not defined in the genesis network constitution can be added by existing members.
Regardless of whether a new member or participant is being added, the process is the same. Here’s how
the process works for a new member:
1. The new member, MJ, creates a VN using the process described above. To do this, the new member
must receive a copy of the current network constitution to use during bootstrap from an existing
member. This happens outside of the Coco system today, through whatever secure means the
members communicate. (While having a copy of the network constitution does not mean a rogue
15. 12
entity can join the network, the network constitution does contain sensitive information, meaning
care should be taken in sharing it with others.)
2. After the new member’s VN is ready to join the network, an existing member Mi proposes a vote,
providing MJ’s identity and MJ’s first VN to admit to the network: {PubKeyMj, VNMj_1}. If the vote is
successful, the member, MJ, is added to the membership list and its node (VNMj_1) is added to the VN
list.
3. After the member is admitted to the network, it will receive the current network constitution and
blockchain state from another member VN and ensure the constitution matches its own version.
To simplify the above process, on bootstrap (Step 1 above), a new member’s VN can receive the current
network constitution from the network itself to avoid passing it outside of the system. In this case, in Step
3, Mj must have a chance to approve the network constitution after the VN is setup, but before the VN
downloads data or processes transactions, to avoid the case where Mj does not approve of the
constitution at the time of Mj’s admission.
Technically, the addition of an actor (member or participant) and its first VN can be decoupled if the new
actor wants to be added to the membership list before its first VN is ready; however, in this case, a second
voting proposal must be made through another member’s infrastructure to add the new actor’s first VN
to the VN list.
Similarly, if the new actor bootstraps its first VN too early, that VN will be rejected when initiating
connections with existing VNs in the network because the new actor’s VN is not yet in the VN list. The
lookup and connection attempt will need to be re-initiated after the vote has completed and the new
actor’s VN has been added to the VN list.
Adding New VNs for Existing Actors
Similar to adding a new member, a member may propose a vote on the addition of a new VN belonging
to an existing actor. The proposal can be made by any actor, not just the one who owns the VN. The voting
process is the same, and the new VN cannot join the network until the vote is successful.
Removing Actors or VNs
The process to remove an actor or VN is also similar. The actor or VN is not officially removed from the
membership list or VN list until voting is completed and the vote is processed, meaning that the actor or
VN will still have access to the network during that time.
Voting
Any member can propose a change to any of the policies specified in the network constitution for a vote,
in a manner similar to how members and VNs are added or deleted through voting. Members can also
propose values for policies that were not specified in the genesis network constitution, provided that the
policy is supported by the Coco system. Similarly, members can propose to remove policies from the
network constitution. Updates to the Coco Framework code and blockchain protocol code are also
proposed and voted on. Even the voting policy itself can be changed through this process. (A vote to
change the voting policy would use the old voting policy; if the vote succeeds, the next vote will use the
new voting policy.)
16. 13
When a proposal for a change to the network constitution is submitted, all existing members are notified
and must vote. Each member gets one vote, regardless of the number of VNs it has in the network. Each
member’s vote is a Coco administrative transaction and, as such, is submitted, processed, and finally
recorded in the Coco administrative ledger.
After a quorum of members have voted, the Coco system determines the result of the vote based on the
designated voting policy. Members can vote at any time, meaning that the delay before the result of a
vote is determined depends entirely upon how quickly members vote and the voting policies expressed
in the network constitution. Changes to any network policy do not take effect until the quorum has
finished voting and the change approved.
17. 14
Transaction Workflow
After a Coco network is established, it can accept transactions from members or participants. There are
two types of transactions:
• Application transactions, the main set of business transactions through the network.
• Coco administrative transactions, such as adding a member.
The Coco Framework uses similar workflows to receive and process both types of transactions, including
how consensus is achieved. (Recall that, while there are logically two ledgers, both are recorded within a
single store to maintain relative ordering across all transactions in the network.)
Regardless of transaction type, Coco uses secure communication channels for all application-to-node and
node-to-node traffic to protect confidentiality. Coco also supports encryption and authentication at the
application layer instead of the transport layer.
Application Transaction Workflow
Figure 5 illustrates the workflow for an application transaction:
1. Before sending transactions, an application (such as an Ethereum DApp) establishes an
authenticated, encrypted connection with a VN in the network. The application can establish the
connection directly with the VN or through an intermediate front-end system, depending on the
security and key management design goals for the DApp and the front-end.
2. When the Coco Framework receives a transaction, it decrypts it, then routes it to the appropriate
blockchain adaptor for the protocol. (The connection is accepted by the host, but is decrypted and
processed inside the enclave. Through this approach, interactions at the networking and operating
system layers on the host side of the VN take place without visibility into the data payload or the
ability to tamper with it.)
3. The adapter starts a transaction set and interacts with components of the blockchain protocol sub-
system (such as block generation logic and Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM) to process the
transaction.
4. The adapter commits the transaction set via a distributed store, which persists and replicates all state
changes across the network using the configured consensus algorithm. Processing of a single
transaction may result in several state changes.
The Coco Framework supports batching of application transactions, however, this trades-off higher
throughput for higher latency. When the adapter processes a batched set of transactions, it collects all
updates in the transaction set before committing them to the distributed store.
18. 15
Figure 5. Workflow for an application transaction.
Coco Administrative Transaction Workflow
The workflow for processing a Coco administrative transaction is similar to the above; the only difference
is that the transaction is handled by the portion of the Coco Framework that handles governance instead
of the blockchain core.
Achieving Consensus
In a Coco network, consensus is required for all updates to the distributed store, including application
transactions, smart contract state, and administrative transactions. While consensus is a fundamental
aspect of any distributed network, compared to public blockchain networks, a Coco network is unique in
that every VN fully trusts every other VN in the network.
Because of this, no need exists to defend against Byzantine faults, such as malicious messages, and
blockchain updates that do not conflict with existing state maintained by a VN can be unequivocally
accepted. The end result: Coco does not require wasteful, compute-intensive algorithms for proof-of-
work, potentially unfair proof-of-stake algorithms, or latency-inducing time-bound algorithms. Defense-
in-depth measures to mitigate the risk of TEE compromise or hardware errors in execution are covered
later in this document, under Security and Compromise.
The Coco Framework is designed to support pluggable consensus algorithms—with plans to initially
integrate Paxos-like consensus algorithms and Caesar consensus, an algorithm from Microsoft Research.
Coco networks can be built with other consensus algorithms; to achieve efficient agreement and
maximum throughput, ideal implementations should take advantage of the fact that a message received
over a secure channel from a trusted VN is itself trusted.
COCO RPC Request
eBlockchain RPC Request
E.g. Ethereum request:
{"jsonrpc":"2.0",
"method":"eth_sendRawTransaction",
"params":["0xd46e8dd67c5d32be8d46e
8dd67c5d32be8058bb8eb970870f07244
5675058bb8eb970870f072445675"]}
Coco
Blockchain
Adapter
(Ethereum)
Coco VNDApp
Host
Enclave (TEE)
RPC Handler
Persistent
replicated
store
Blockchain Core
(Ethereum)
Block generation
In-memory state
representation
EVM
...
Host
part
Enclave
part
TLS
1 2
3
4
Coco
VN
Coco Network
Coco
State
TLS
19. 16
Regardless of the consensus algorithm employed, consensus can be achieved as quickly as durability and
serializability requirements are met for the algorithm. Distributing transactions throughout the network
can be performed using multi-cast, broadcast trees, or any other protocol deemed efficient for the size
and topology of the physical Coco network.
Paxos Consensus
With Paxos consensus, one VN is elected the leader. All other VNs are followers that simply accept
transactions and forward them to the leader for processing. After the leader processes the transaction,
thanks to the use of TEEs in Coco, followers can simply accept the transaction results from the leader.
Paxos consensus (and Paxos-like algorithms, such as Raft) are highly efficient for a smaller number of
nodes, and are traditionally limited by the median latency between nodes. As such, the suitability of
Paxos-like consensus algorithms for a Coco network is dependent on the number of VNs—which, in turn,
depends on the number of actors in the consortium and the number of nodes per actor.
In future versions of Coco, node scalability could be addressed by adopting distributed systems research
such as Flexible Paxos—the simple observation that it is not necessary to require all quorums in Paxos to
intersect. It is sufficient to require that the quorum used by the leader election phase will overlap with
the quorums used by previous replication phases. This allows Coco to trade slower leader elections (an
uncommon event) for faster replication (a common event).
Node scalability could also be addressed through distributed transaction support, using approaches such
as optimistic commits and dependent commits on followers. This allows all nodes, not just the leader, to
process transactions, spreading the computational load across the Coco network.
More information on Paxos can be found here and more information on Raft can be found here.
Caesar Consensus
Caesar consensus is a new consensus algorithm for architecting secure and efficient consortium
blockchain networks. It leverages the cryptographic properties of a blockchain to enable nodes in the
blockchain network to reach consensus on a valid ledger. Caesar consensus supports flexible fault
tolerance models for network nodes—including crash, Byzantine, a mix of both, or near-total compromise
(i.e., all-but-one-node compromises).
In a Coco network, Caesar consensus can be used with traditional fault tolerance algorithms (such as
Paxos) to help provide additional security and compromise detection, such as in the event of a TEE
compromise. Under such a combined approach, rather than unequivocally accepting transactions from a
leader node, follower nodes store small bits of cryptographic information (called heartbeat transactions)
within the distributed ledger to enable distributed consensus, which also tracks progress and keeps the
leader accountable. If misbehavior is detected, follower nodes can come together to eject the leader from
the network, upon which another leader is elected. (Recall that, in a Coco network, the leader can only
act maliciously if its TEE is compromised. Caesar consensus detects such a compromise and initiates a
failover protocol to start a new leader, which in turn addresses the compromise.)
More information on Caesar consensus can be found in Section 3.4 of this paper.
20. 17
Secure Communication
Coco enforces secure application-to-node and node-to-node communication channels, both of which use
mutually authenticated TLS connections that terminate in the enclave. (Technically, there are two
application-to-node communication channels—one for application transactions and another for Coco
administrative transactions.)
This ensures that only valid members and participants can submit, process, and view network
transactions, and that only valid VNs can join the network. Similarly, because data is encrypted across all
connections and is only in the clear within the enclave, host-level access to a VN does not allow for
inspection of network traffic.
21. 18
Confidentiality and Integrity
A Coco network’s persistent state—meaning the state that’s written to durable storage—includes three
types of data: application transactions, smart contract state, and administrative transactions. All are
protected to ensure network confidentiality and data integrity—i.e., to ensure that only valid actors on
the Coco network can access the data, and that the data is unaltered. Coco also supports fine-grained data
access control, as required to accommodate business requirements for more granular confidentiality—
such as 2+ party confidentiality.
Network Confidentiality and Data Integrity
At a minimum, Coco protects ledger entries to ensure that no entity outside of the network can view or
manipulate the persistent state. Through the use of threshold encryption (described below), Coco can
achieve network confidentiality and data integrity without granting any single actor full control.
Within an enclave on the VN, data can be processed in the clear to simplify computation and increase
performance. However, given that the TEE has limited secure memory, data that is written to the
persistent store must pass through the untrusted host before it is eventually written to disk. Coco
addresses this by writing-out all data from the enclave in encrypted and integrity-protected form using
authenticated encryption. This ensures that the data can only be accessed through the Coco Framework,
thereby ensuring proper access control, protecting against unauthorized direct access to the host or disk,
and ensuring that tampered data is detected.
The encrypted data on disk can be backed-up to other on-premises or cloud storage, as required to ensure
high availability and protect against malicious (or unintended) data deletion.
Encrypting Persistent State
To encrypt persistent state, Coco generates a symmetric session key (Keysession) within the enclave of the
VN that is designated as the leader within the consensus algorithm. The key is generated across a defined
epoch (a fixed period of time set by members in the network constitution), with the specific duration of
the epoch determined by the consortium after weighing the tradeoffs between increased security and the
operational overhead of more frequent key generation. Other changes to network state, such as actor
addition or removal, will also force a transition of epoch.
The symmetric session key is itself encrypted and written to the Coco administrative ledger for
persistence. The symmetric session key also is maintained in memory for a fixed period of time
(configurable in the network constitution); if not in memory, the key is retrieved and decrypted as needed.
The process that Coco uses to encrypt and persist session keys leverages an entirely independent
asymmetric threshold cryptosystem established expressly for this purpose. Under this approach, N actors
exchange material to establish an M of N threshold encryption scheme as follows:
1. Each actor generates a private key share (PrivKeyShareMi or PrivKeySharePi), creates a corresponding
public key share (PubKeyShareMi or PubKeySharePi), and uploads both to its VN. If desired, to avoid
having to move the private/public key share between systems, this step can be done within the Coco
system on the VN.
22. 19
2. The VNs each share their actor’s public key share (PubKeyShareMi or PubKeySharePi) with other VNs.
The private key share (PrivKeyShareMi or PrivKeySharePi) remains only on each actor’s nodes.
3. Each VN then uses the shared public key share material (PubKeyShareMi or PubKeySharePi ) to form a
single epoch public key—called the public shared network key—to encrypt the symmetric session
key (Keysession). A simple derivation for an N of N scheme could be to multiply all public key shares
together: ∏ PubKeyShare 𝑍𝑖
𝑁
𝑖=1 . More sophisticated derivations can be used for M of N schemes
where M < N.
A threshold encryption of the symmetric session key allows for:
• Access Control: A malicious VN cannot decrypt the data on its own; it instead needs to acquire partial
decryptions from other M-1 other actors’ VNs in the network before such an attempt can be made.
• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: In the event of a catastrophic failure, actors can work
together to decrypt data outside of Coco by combining their decrypted shares of the symmetric
session key (Keysession). (With a sufficiently large M, it is unlikely that enough actors could maliciously
collude to decrypt data under other, non-warranted circumstances.)
• Auditing: Auditors can request decrypted shares of the symmetric session key without needing the
full private shared network key or relying on a single actor to provide the data.
Decrypting Persistent State
M of N actors are needed to decrypt the symmetric session key (Keysession), where M is configurable from
1 to N. To decrypt, the leader must request and acquire M of N decrypted shares of the symmetric session
key. The VN can then combine the decrypted shares to form the complete decryption of the symmetric
session key. It is important to note that the private key shares (PrivKeyShareMi or PrivKeySharePi) are never
combined within the Coco network, thus never revealing the full private shared network key.
It’s worth noting that, while M can equal N, or can even be 1, a typical Coco implementation will require
that M be at least ½N+1 to ensure that confidentiality will remain protected provided a majority of actors
do not collude. This also ensures that the network can continue to operate as long as it can maintain
connections with VNs representing at least M+1 actors, enabling it to continue operating even when the
VNs of one or more actors are withdrawn or partitioned from the network.
2+ Party Confidentiality
Limiting transaction visibility to valid actors on the network may not be sufficient when two or more actors
within the network need to transact privately, such as for regulatory reasons. To provide the ability for an
actor to designate a transaction between itself and one or more other actors as confidential, support for
such an expression should be present (or added) in the integrated blockchain protocol.
Through the use of TEEs, this turns into a standard data access control problem. Once again, the
transactions can be processed in the clear within the enclave, and then stored in an encrypted format
outside of the enclave. The VNs then only allow the actors involved in the transaction to see it. The same
model can apply to smart contract code and smart contract state, not simply transaction data. We discuss
how this can be implemented for Ethereum later in this paper, under Functional Prototype and Demos.
Additional security measures may be needed for certain types of transactions. Nothing in Coco prevents
an application from using additional confidentiality techniques, such as homomorphic encryption, to
23. 20
encrypt transactions before they are submitted to the network; this simply becomes another layer on top
of Coco-specific network and 2+ party confidentiality.
With the above 2+ party approach, the data resides on all VNs even though it is only visible to some. In
some regulatory scenarios, however, transaction data simply cannot reside on all nodes in the network.
To address this, in addition to standard 2+ party confidentiality as described above, point-to-point models
can be integrated into a Coco system.
24. 21
Mitigating Compromise
Coco VNs trust their peers, enabling highly efficient, scalable, and performant transaction processing.
However, this approach presents a potential vulnerability. If the TEE on a VN is compromised, an attacker
could potentially access private data and post spurious transactions. This is unlike traditional blockchain
implementations, in which the compromise of a single node is a localized failure that does not affect the
broader network. In considering this, there are a number of measures that can be taken to substantially
mitigate the risks associated with TEE compromise:
Compile-Time Techniques
Compile-time techniques can be employed to eliminate classes of bugs that could be used to compromise
the TEE, as described in Section 7 of VC3: Trustworthy Data Analytics in the Cloud using SGX.
Minimizing the Trusted Code Base
Minimizing the potential attack surface reduces the risk of compromise. This can be done by factoring the
code running within the enclave into two parts:
• Manager enclave. The manager enclave is responsible for sensitive operations, including private key
management, cryptographic processing, and governance logic. This code is bounded in size and need
not vary with each blockchain integration. Furthermore, it can be formally verified and heavily
audited.
• Worker enclave. The worker enclave hosts the blockchain protocol code and calls the manager
enclave for sensitive operations. If the worker enclave is compromised, an attacker could access any
plaintext data that resides in the worker enclave’s memory, but could not directly access keys,
independently decrypt data on disk, or propose or approve changes to the network.
Alternatively, software-fault isolation techniques can be employed within a single enclave. Not only is
such an approach practical and low-overhead, but it prevents the leakage of keys in a single enclave. More
information on such an approach is provided in A Design and Verification Methodology for Secure Isolated
Regions, a paper from Microsoft Research.
VN Lease
In addition, the network can require that VNs obtain a lease that is periodically renewed. The renewal
process can require that the VN’s TEE be reset to a pristine state, eliminating any toehold that an attacker
might have been able to gain. VNs that fail to renew their leases are quarantined from the network,
preventing them from accessing data that is added to the blockchain after the quarantine takes effect.
Consensus Variations
Finally, it is possible to have VNs sample transactions received from other VNs and synchronously validate
them before commitment. This would enable the rapid detection of a malicious VN without major
performance tradeoffs. Similarly, a separate VN could asynchronously validate all transactions.
25. 22
Functional Prototype and Demos
To demonstrate viability and inform its v1.0 design, Microsoft created a functional prototype of the Coco
Framework and used it to create demos that showcase scalability and confidentiality.
Functional Prototype
The Coco Framework architecture is logically divided into several components: persistent distributed store
with a consensus algorithm, secure communication channels between application-to-node and node-to-
node, encryption schemes for confidentiality, and distributed governance. The functional prototype has
the following implementation characteristics:
• A persistent, distributed key value store based on a RAFT consensus algorithm.
• Intel SGX hardware for its TEE.
• Secure application-to-node and node-to-node communication via mutual TLS authentication. (This
was implemented using a modified version of mbed TLS, an open source TLS implementation.)
• A simplified network constitution that supports only member and node management.
• A version of an existing Ethereum protocol implementation for transactions and smart contracts,
with minor modifications for integration with Coco.
Microsoft expects to make many of the components within the Coco Framework pluggable to support
industry-specific requirements—including but not limited to consensus algorithms and communication
protocols.
Demos
Using the prototype, Microsoft deployed a multi-node Coco network to assess scalability and showcase
confidentiality.
Scalability Test
To assess scalability, Microsoft selected 2000 transactions from the public Ethereum network to feed
through the prototype. In general, transaction rates were roughly 100 times faster than for a non-Coco-
enabled protocol.
Specific results of the scalability test include the following:
• Throughput of around 1600 transactions per second. (Throughput is defined as the total number of
transactions processed and committed per unit of time. The speedometer in the demo displays total
number of transactions per second.)
• Latencies in the low hundreds of milliseconds, as measured with a 100-transaction batch size—
representing the average blockchain block size. (Latency is defined as the total time from when the
transaction is received to when it has been committed by all nodes in the network—as opposed to
local commit of the transaction on the leader. If desired, latency can be reduced by reducing batch
size—albeit at the cost of transaction throughput.)
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It should be noted that throughput numbers depend on the Coco Framework and its optimizations,
consensus and cryptographic primitives selected, and potentially other network governance policies.
Microsoft expects to further increase throughput through framework optimizations for v1.0, with the
caveat that some performance trade-offs may occur when additional security mechanisms are enabled.
Confidentiality
Microsoft worked with partner Mojix to port its supply chain DApp to a Coco-enabled Ethereum protocol.
In general, DApps can be "lift and shifted” with minimal changes to work on top of an Ethereum ledger
integrated with Coco; the only required changes are to support authentication to the Coco network and
to leverage Coco’s confidentiality features. As such, confidentiality can be implemented via access control
policies and surfaced through ledger-specific constructs, without requiring complex cryptographic
schemes.
Because Ethereum does not have a confidentiality model in Solidity (one Ethereum smart contract
language) and because Microsoft did not want to modify the EVM, the prototype used TEEs to implement
confidentiality through access control policies written within each smart contract. To do this, Microsoft
disabled access to transaction and block level information in the Coco Ethereum adapter. Mojix
developers were then able to enforce access control rules in the smart contracts themselves by verifying
the address of the caller. All smart contract members were made private and all read functions were
required to have a signature that was checked against a configured, authorized address list using
ecrecover().
For events, Microsoft added RPC methods that required a signature to check access before reading events.
Mojix developers were then able to implement smart contract methods, with the Coco Ethereum adapter
calling the smart contract function to check if the end user was authorized. If the check access method
was absent, the smart contract was considered public within the Coco network.
To many, the confidentiality demo may appear to be a standard enterprise application. The beauty is in
this fact; what appears to be a standard enterprise application backed by a centralized database is, in
reality, an Ethereum blockchain application backed by a distributed ledger across organizations.
Viewing the Demos
A video recording of the two demos can be found here.
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Conclusion
Blockchain is a transformational technology with the ability to drastically reduce the friction of doing
business, especially in regard to shared business processes across organizations. A growing number of
enterprises are investigating or experimenting with it as a secure and transparent way to digitally track
the ownership of assets across trust boundaries, opening-up new opportunities for cross-organizational
collaboration and imaginative new business models.
Microsoft is committed to bringing blockchain to the enterprise—and is working with customers, partners,
and the blockchain community to continue advancing its enterprise readiness. Our mission is to help
companies thrive in this new era of secure multi-party computation by delivering open, scalable platforms
and services that any company—from ledger startups to governments, healthcare organizations, and
global banks—can use to create new value.
The Coco Framework, our latest step in this journey, provides a foundation for blockchain in the enterprise
by delivering the key elements that businesses are demanding. When a blockchain ledger implementation
integrates with Coco, it approaches the performance and scalability of a traditional, centralized database.
Coco also enables arbitrary data confidentiality rules for the contents of the ledger, such as role-based
access control to transactional data. Finally, Coco delivers a comprehensive system for distributed
governance rather than requiring outside management mechanisms.
As noted throughout this document, Coco is not a standalone blockchain protocol; rather, it provides a
trusted foundation with which existing blockchain protocols such as Ethereum, Quorum, Corda, and
Hyperledger Sawtooth can be integrated to deliver complete, enterprise-ready ledger solutions. By
design, Coco is open and compatible with any blockchain protocol. It can even enable general-purpose,
secure, and accountable multi-party computation outside of blockchain solutions.
J. P. Morgan (Quorum), R3 (Corda), and Intel (Hyperledger Sawtooth) have agreed to integrate their
proprietary blockchain ledger platforms with Coco. Consensys has agreed to partner on the framework
and on Ethereum support. Microsoft plans to launch the framework on GitHub in 2018 as an open source
project—available on both Linux and Windows, in the cloud or on-premises. In the meantime, Microsoft
will continue to work with customers, partners, and the blockchain technical and business communities
to continue advancing production adoption.