Corda Blockchain Gets An Ing’s Notary Service Upliftment For Better Transactions

An announcement on a “Blockchain breakthrough” to help enhance ING, a financial services firm, made privacy and security. This feature development is for the transactions that are on the open-source blockchain platform Corda.

ING’s “zero-knowledge proof notary service” access the validity of a transaction but does not disclose any other data except for the legality of the said transaction.

“Like a notary whose job is to witness the signing of documents to validate them, the ‘zero-knowledge proof notary’ evaluates whether a blockchain transaction is valid or not. Still, without seeing its contents,” ING elaborated.

Corda’s current notary services have laid out two choices: A validating and a non-validating notary.

Corda is a recognized distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform, but ING said there is a trade-off between a particular security and privacy concern.

“In the case of the validating one, the notary sees the contents of a transaction before it determines if the information is correct, which means participants lose privacy,” program director of ING’s blockchain team Mariana Gomez de la Villa explained.

“A non-validating notary doesn’t see a transaction’s content, which creates a security risk where the notary could sign off the wrong transaction if a malicious participant builds an invalid transaction. However, it protects participants against double-spends, an attack where someone could spend the same asset twice, as does the validating notary.”

ING mentions it clearly in the white paper that turning a blind eye to the trade-off won’t help; instead, it should be addressed as the concerns affect the Corda participants themselves.

ING claims its notary tackles privacy and security issues equally.
The proof of concept is the fourth undertaken by ING’s DLT team, with the zero-knowledge range proof, allowing a blockchain network to validate that an unknown number is within known limits without disclosing it.

Using a mortgage application as an example, ING said that an applicant could prove their salary sat within a specific range without revealing the exact figure.

The second proof of concept witnessed an inclusion of zero-knowledge set memberships, which allowed validation of data such as locations and names and not just numerical data.

ING gave an example for a proper explanation of the zero-knowledge set memberships. It said that a bank could validate a new client from a country belonging to the European Union, without disclosing which country it is.