A Small Thesis on the Necessity of Ruby Protocol & Web3
It cannot be stressed enough that in the 21st century data explains our reality. If you face it, you can understand it, and then you can do something about it. If not, everything human cooperation strives for might be chipped away insidiously.
If this news isn’t an eye-opener for the privacy and data-abuse agnostic, then we don’t need to look any further.
What we know about the Shanghai Data Leak
A hacker or a group seized a Shanghai police database possessing a vast amount of personal data. This ocean of private data had been posted online, unsecured, for months, for sale. Security researchers estimate what happened in Shanghai was probably the most significant known breach of Chinese government computer systems.
The hacker(s) claim to have obtained nearly 24 terabytes of data from a Shanghai police database, claiming it contained information on one billion people and “several billion case records”.
The data purportedly includes information from the Shanghai National Police database, including names, addresses, national identification numbers, mobile phone numbers, and case details.
A sample of data listed names, birthdates, ages, and mobile numbers. One person was listed as having been born in “2020,” with their age listed as “1,” suggesting that information on minors was included in the data obtained in the breach.
Why is centralizing data so dangerous?
According to multiple security firms, such data leaks are relatively common. It is estimated that there are approximately 12 billion compromised accounts posted on the Dark Web right now, which is more than the total number of people worldwide.
When we are talking about a billion people’s information, we are not looking at static information because it can be translated into where you traveled, who you communicated with, or what you were doing, then your life gradually unfolds, naked and unprotected, to whoever has access to it. And once hackers release the data and put it online, it is impossible to remove it fully.
This is the plight we are bound to face when we decide to store the ever-increasing data in one single vault. We venture to say it is the number one reason why the data abuse issue is so prevalent in the modern world.
A SPOF or single point of failure is any non-redundant part of a system that, if dysfunctional, would cause the entire system to fail. To put a stamp on it, a single point of failure (SPOF) is essentially a flaw in the design of a system that poses a potential risk because it could lead to a situation in which just one malfunction or fault causes the whole system to stop working.
When an entity decides to centralize data, such systems are inherently born with the single point of failure issue. It can do tricks like creating backup vaults or decentralizing data under the technology umbrella, but ultimately, it only stalls the inevitable.
Under such systems, authorities are more likely to hoard the monopolistic power over other civil liberties. In the case of the Shanghai data leak, authorities are censoring searches from citizens, trying to find out more about what would be one of the biggest data hacks ever.
Why do Ruby Protocol and Web3 Work?
We need to make it clear that Dotcom and Web2 can be perfectly justified under specific historical circumstances and the products and services born under them should have their merits and places in the long history of human ingenuity. However, we study history not to predict the future but to unchain ourselves from the historical burden and give humans a new possibility for the future.
The conception of Web3 was born with the idea to place data control back into individuals’ hands. For this to happen, Web3 is based on transparent digital ledgers, known as blockchains. The network will verify everything before being accepted and theoretically before exchanges can happen without the need for a middleman. In the eyes of Web3 supporters, this will evolve into a disruptive way to communicate, exchange, store value, and even a better way to organize human societies.
The critics would oppose such presupposition, saying it promises too much and too good. But history is often made by amplifying human expectations. And those who wish to make history usually start by changing and redefining human imagination.
Ruby Protocol aims to take on this mission to make privacy accessible to everyone. It is the Decentralized Privacy-Centric Protocol for Web3
Ruby protocol is a private data management framework for Web 3.0. It proposes and implements a privacy middle-layer interacting with multi-chain.
It is a fine-grained private data access-control gateway across different entities and organizations both in the decentralized and traditional financial world. Built on functional encryption, the Ruby protocol will be the true embodiment of the decentralization spirit of the cryptocurrency movement.
All the encrypted data will be stored in a decentralized cloud such as IPFS. Decentralized functional encryption will be adopted to satisfy the users’ privacy needs. Moreover, our policy management layer will make sure the design of the underlying attribute and policy universe is well-tuned to the regulatory compliance requirement.
About Us
Ruby Protocol is a cross-chain, privacy-first infrastructure, powered by Polkadot. Our layer-1 protocol utilizes Functional Encryption (FE) cryptography, which allows users to adopt a modular approach to data privacy and ownership. This novel solution will allow users to encrypt sensitive information on-chain, which can only be decrypted by holders of an approved private key.
Ruby’s FE Substrate-pallet will serve as the building blocks for privacy-first smart contract DApps building on the native Ruby Chain, while also acting as a privacy layer for Parachains and Web3 DApps across the Polkadot ecosystem.
