Category Archive: ksi

padlock different angle 1472741

How to use the blockchain to secure medical records

Guardtime, a blockchain platform for ensuring the integrity of systems, is now working together with the Estonian eHealth Foundation to develop a blockchain network to secure one million patient medical records.

eHealth will use the Guardtime’s KSI (Keyless Signature Infrastructure) into its database to improve the security and the real-time availability of patient medical records.

Guardtime aims at protecting those records with an “independent forensic-quality audit trail”, so it will be impossible to edit the information.

During a recent interview conducted by Coindesk, a spokesperson for Guardtime said:

“In guarding sensitive records, the danger is that they could be altered, deleted, improperly changed or updated, affected by hackers, malware, system issues, etc. The blockchain in this case can prove the integrity of the record, and everything that has happened to it over time”

Why in Estonia?

Maybe you are asking yourselves why this kind of innovation is being conducted in Estonia.

Well, Estonia is already famous for its e-government system which use a chip-embedded ID card that allows citizens to access government services including filing taxes and voting online.

Guardtime Insights

In 2007 Guardtime invented a “Keyless Signature Infrastructure”, a blockchain platform created to ensure the integrity of systems, networks and data at industrial scale.

Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) is designed to provide scalable digital signature based authentication for electronic data, machines and humans. KSI uses only hash-function cryptography, allowing verification to rely only on the security of hash-functions and the availability of the blockchain.

According to the company itself, Guardtime’s method is similar to the one used by the blockchain startup Factom. In both cases, in fact, every time a file changes, a new signature is generated and stored in the blockchain.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio