Industrial Data Verification via Distributed Ledger Hashing
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Solution Overview
Problem
Industrial systems face vulnerabilities due to unauthorized manipulation of sensor data from assets like oil pipelines and gas turbines, leading to corrupted data and increased operating costs, as centralized architectures can be compromised by a single point of failure.
Innovation Solution
A verification platform that receives industrial asset data from sensors, stores it as invalid, records a hash value in a secure distributed ledger, and marks the data as valid upon verification of the hash value, using a compression data structure like a Patricia-Merkle trie to ensure data integrity.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a centralized architecture with a single master database is used to verify industrial data, then data verification can be performed efficiently, but the system becomes vulnerable to compromise from a single point of failure allowing data manipulation
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides the centralized verification system into multiple distributed verification nodes that each maintain copies of the verification data. Instead of relying on a single master database, the system segments the verification function across multiple independent nodes, so that compromise of one node does not affect the entire system's security or reliability.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces cryptographic hash functions and digital signatures as intermediary mechanisms between data sources and verification nodes. These cryptographic intermediaries provide a trusted layer that enables verification without requiring direct trust in any single node, thus preventing data manipulation while maintaining verification efficiency.
2Reliability
If all industrial asset data is stored and verified in real-time, then data integrity can be ensured, but system complexity and computational resources increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts only the essential verification information (cryptographic hashes and critical metadata) from the complete industrial asset data and stores these extracted elements in the distributed verification nodes. This allows verification of data integrity without storing or processing the entire dataset, thereby reducing system complexity while maintaining reliability.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements partial verification by checking only the cryptographic hashes and essential metadata rather than verifying every piece of industrial asset data in full. This partial action approach provides sufficient data integrity assurance while significantly reducing computational complexity and resource requirements.
Data Source
AI summary
A verification platform may include a data connection to receive a stream of industrial asset data, including a subset of the industrial asset data, from industrial asset sensors. The verification platform may store the subset of industrial asset data into a data store, the subset of industrial asset data being marked as invalid, and record a hash value associated with a compressed representation of the subset of industrial asset data combined with metadata in a secure, distributed ledger (e.g., associated with blockchain technology). The verification platform may then receive a transaction identifier from the secure, distributed ledger and mark the subset of industrial asset data in the data store as being valid after using the transaction identifier to verify that the recorded hash value matches a hash value of an independently created version of the compressed representation of the subset of industrial asset data combined with metadata.