IEEE 5G & Blockchain Summit

Blockchain and Distributed systems have always presented complex challenges, and technology trends are in many ways making the software designer's job more difficult. In particular, today's systems must successfully handle: - Privacy: Regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for Europe and the California Consumers Privacy Act (CCPA) require much stronger security for personal data, and that system owners must delete all personal data based on a user's request or completion of a transaction. - Access control complexity: Modern access control often uses rules that depend on data from sources outside the organization, requiring high performance networks with data integrity guarantees. - "Internet of Things" and ubiquitous sensor nodes: Data sources can include building sensors, smart watches, medical sensors, and many other sensor types. In short, systems must handle more data from disparate sources, and at the same time be responsive to new and emerging privacy and data retention requirements. Recent developments in distributed ledger technology (DLT) have been applied to some of these challenges, with only limited success. A key problem is the immutability property of blockchain (the most prominent form of DLT), which conflicts with the requirement to allow deletion of user data. There are many critical use cases in the health sector and the food supply sector. The Cities2030 project will look at the food supply chain with end to end tracking and tracing from the farm to the fork using Blockchain with compliance to GDPR.