Reimagining Connected Mobility with Digital Trust

As in payments, cloud, and other emerging platform opportunities, Craxel’s ability to securely organize information at massive scale can enable an unprecedented level of digital trust.  To drive growth of the digital economy, three things are non-negotiable; information must be 1) safe, 2) accessible, and 3) trustworthy at incredible scale. Our breakthrough in high performance searchable encryption, combined with our unique ability to perform secure distributed ledger transactions at millions of transactions per second, delivers all 3 of these critical elements, and will provide a huge competitive advantage to companies seeking to provide the dominant “mobility” platform.  

Sensors and data tracking devices are now an expected and accepted part of our everyday lives. They monitor our habits, from working out to eating, to how much we sleep, sit, walk or drive.  Access to real-time data has transformed every day activities into sources of new business, guidelines for efficiencies, and insights that can improve public safety.  Not surprisingly, the automotive and transportation industry sits squarely in this data revolution, and has turned to telematics and data tools “to optimize their operations and boost their bottom line.” This requires managing information at incredible scale with unprecedented security and assurance.

In fact, there is a race between automotive industry leaders to transform themselves from companies that have historically been known as vehicle manufacturers, into  mobility companies that gather and analyze data to streamline operations, ensure vehicle health and safety, and even incentivize more sustainable driving practices.   Ford, for example, has created the Transportation Mobility Cloud (TMC), an open platform that manages information flow to and from Ford vehicles’ embedded modems to streamline fleet management and operational effectiveness. Not to be outdone, Toyota has turned to blockchain to share driving and autonomous vehicle testing data, manage ride and car share transactions and store vehicle usage information.  Daimler (Mercedes) even created a cryptocurrency called the MobiCoin to reward drivers whose data reveals environmentally-friendly driving habits. Jaguar is piloting a token that rewards users willing to share their data with the ability to purchase mobility services, such as public transport.  

All of these mobility initiatives must ensure data sovereignty, security, transparency, and efficiency. For example, how can vehicles connect to a larger ecosystem without an extraordinary level of digital trust?  Should consumers trust their information, and in some cases their safety, to the same IT technologies used today that have led to breach after breach?  Consider that a self-driving car can generate 1 gigabyte of data per second. Are existing systems scalable enough to handle the massive proliferation of sensor data without compromising security or availability? The data is so massive that it must be efficiently organized on-board for secure and instant access. Data collection of processed and aggregated data must scale while ensuring the trustworthiness and confidentiality of the data. Further, while individual companies can improve their own fleets and drivers, the mobility paradigms of the future will be most impactful if they can aggregate as much relevant information as possible. Yet as we have seen in several well publicized supply chain pilots, both customers and companies want, and in many cases need, to retain privacy and control over their own data.

Craxel’s Digital Trust Platform provides the scalable building blocks for managing the onslaught of connected devices with information security, data privacy, and information assurance.  In fact we have designed our Black Forest Digital Trust Platform with these exact attributes in mind:

• Security – High performance searchable encryption allows massive amounts of strongly encrypted information to be stored and quickly accessed without the encryption keys present.
• Privacy – Our platform provides cryptographic compartmentalization so that sensitive and non-sensitive data can easily be stored and efficiently accessed. Sharing of information is controlled at a granular level.
• Assurance -- Our distributed ledger can maintain chain of custody for millions to billions of objects, providing unprecedented levels of assurance at scale.
  

The information collected from all of these vehicles could be incredibly valuable, both for individual manufacturers and for broader improvements like road safety, managing emissions, and providing unique insights into smart cities.  But mobility companies cannot afford to launch initiatives without first ensuring security at scale. McKinsey recently emphasized the strategic importance of data in the automotive and related industries by highlighting critical trends around new sources of business:

• "By 2030, sharing economy business models, software applications, and data will provide another $1.5 trillion in revenue (30% more than today) for vehicle manufacturers."
• "10% percent of all new cars sold will be shared, 15% will be autonomous, and somewhere between 10-50% will be electric by 2030.”

The new mobility business models require transactional efficiency at low cost.  The idea of networking autonomous cars together to enhance smart initiatives is nothing less than ground breaking. The ability to measure real-time emissions, driving habits, and resources could dramatically impact our opportunity to create cleaner, safer cities and roads. We will see new business models continue to emerge, including data marketplaces and trading opportunities. But again, none of this will be possible without three key elements: 1) the secure exchange and storage of information; 2) the guarantee of data privacy, both for individuals and for companies, and; 3) a way to ensure the provenance and integrity of data sources.  These are the building blocks for digital trust, and the keys to growth of the digital economy.

Sources/Links of Interest:

Automotive World Interview with Ford's Lee Jelenic
Ford Media: Manage Your Fleet
Toyota Blockchain
Mercedes Benz Crypto Coin
Jaquar Transportation Tokens
IBM/Maersk Blockchain Supply Chain Struggles
McKinsey Mobility Insights