Tech News - Cryptography

The work collaboration hub, Slack, yesterday, launched Slack Enterprise Key Management (EKM) for its enterprise customers. The feature is introduced to give customers control over their encryption keys used for encrypting and decrypting the files and messages they share on their Slack workspace. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1107646162079637506 Following are some of the advantages Slack EKM brings in: An extra layer of protection Slack EKM allows customers to use their own keys, which are stored in Amazon’s Key Management Service (AWS KMS). This will act as an extra layer of protection allowing privacy-conscious organizations such as banks share data, while also combating the risk. Better visibility into how the keys are being used It logs the usage of your keys to encrypt and decrypt messages and files in AWS KMS’s CloudWatch and CloudTrail. The detailed activity logs provide customers much more visibility into how the keys are being accessed. Administrators can control access very granularly What sets Slack EKM apart from general EKM services is that, in the case of any security threat, instead of revoking access to the entire product, it allows administrators to revoke access granularly. They can revoke access at the organization, workspace, channel, time-frame, and file levels. This type of revocation process ensures that the teams can continue to do their day-to-day work while administrators are taking care of the threat. On a phone interview, Slack Head of Enterprise Product, Ilan Frank told VentureBeat, “So today all data in Slack is encrypted at rest and in transit — but in rest, specifically. We, of course, have keys to those, and this now puts that control in the customer’s hands. It’s a feature that our large customers have been asking for for a very long time.” To know more about Slack EKM, check out Slack’s official website. Slack removed 28 accounts: A step against the spread of hate speech Slack confidentially files to go public Airtable, a Slack-like coding platform for non-techies, raises $100 million in funding

After the first preview of its Blockchain Cloud Service at OpenWorld last October, Oracle has confirmed the general release and availability of its Blockchain platform in an official press release this Monday. Before this release, Oracle’s pre-release version of  Blockchain Cloud Service was being used by different businesses across the globe such as Arab Jordan Investment Bank, Certified Origins, Solar Site Design, CargoSmart, etc. These organizations say have seen a major difference in their business after adopting Oracle’s Blockchain as a service (BaaS). For instance,  Andrea Biagianti, CIO of Certified Origins (Italy based olive oil producer) mentions that the company wanted to trace the products (Bellucci EVOO) that they sell in the market of United States across the entire supply chain. Oracle’s Blockchain service helped the company by making the implementation and collaboration of all the included parties quite simple. It also provided them with a competitive edge over the others in the market. “It adds a further level of transparency and information that is valuable for consumers looking for quality products and helps us to support the excellence of the small farms”, says Biagianti. This Blockchain service will be of great help to organizations in three major ways. Firstly, it provides them with a development platform to build their own Blockchain networks. Secondly, it allows integration with Oracle SaaS, existing third-party applications, Oracle PaaS and other Blockchain networks to drive more reliable transactions. Lastly, clients or customers can program and test smart contracts to automate processes over the Blockchain distributed electronic ledger. The new service is based on top of the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric, which is a collaboration tool that comes with in-built infrastructure dependencies, REST proxy, and a number of monitoring and operation tools. It helps in building Blockchain based automated ledger such as smart contract technology. A smart contract is an automation tool based on the Blockchain technology. It gets rid of the middleman in a business by enabling automatic exchange of money, property, etc, in a transparent and hassle-free manner. According to Amit Zavery, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Platform, “Blockchain promises to be one of the most transformative technologies of our generation”. This is quite true as Blockchain is helping transform businesses by making interactions more secure, efficient and cost-effective. It has also made the future Blockchain implementations easier. This means that as the Hyperledger specification evolves and makes new updates, there is no need for the developers to rewrite the company-specific Blockchain applications. Apart from that, new SaaS applications are being offered by Oracle for the Blockchain technology. These can be used in cases like track and trace, warranty and usage, cold chain, etc. Organizations wanting to avail Oracle’s Blockchain services can either pay per usage (without a contract) or via a monthly, yearly or a multi-year deal. There is also a 30-day free trial of the cloud service that the Customers can sign up for. Oracle Apex 18.1 is here! Oracle announces Oracle Soar, a tools package to ease application migration on cloud