Together IOTA and Dell Technologies Demonstrate Project Alvarium

Project Alvarium creates the first Data Confidence Fabric capable of measuring data trust.

(BERLIN, GERMANY -- February 9, 2021) IOTA Foundation, a non-profit focused on distributed ledger technology and the machine economy, and Dell Technologies introduce a world-first demonstration that measures the trustworthiness of data.

Modern industries often rely on automated decision-making systems for business-critical functions. At a time of vastly increasing data volumes, the trustworthiness of the data that drives these decisions is difficult to assess. Project Alvarium provides a measurable way of evaluating the confidence in data before it is used by an application.

In 2019, Dell Technologies introduced the first Data Confidence Fabric. The technology was subsequently re-engineered using the IOTA Streams framework, providing increased security and scalability, to guarantee the data trust that is imperative to organizations today.

The system logs different steps in the journey of each data point, as it travels from an edge or IoT device sensor to a router, to an edge server, and to the cloud. Each interaction is given a trust rating score, according to industry-specific requirements. Importantly, these scores are logged on the IOTA Tangle to ensure integrity and prevent tampering.

The upcoming demonstration paves the way for initial integration into hardware or software and is principally aligned with industries or organizations that require a high level of compliance or supervision. It is an industry proof-point that trust on the edge can be measured. Read more to learn how Dell Technologies and Intel plan to leverage Data Confidence Fabric in combination with Confidential Computing for privacy-preserving edge deployments. The presence of a Data Confidence Fabric allows for a host of new business opportunities and services. An obvious use case would be an industry that has a high degree of compliance or regulatory demands with fine-grained access and revocation controls for sanctioned use, without loss of attribution opportunities.

For real-world scenarios, we need to look no further than the global pandemic. It could massively reduce friction if there were a way to measure the trustworthiness of data involved in the vaccine rollout. Everything from the provenance of vaccines to how many people in which regions are receiving the vaccines, could be managed much more effectively if there were a trust certification measurement for all involved actors.

"The importance of data transparency is integral to how organizations in every industry move forward," said Steve Todd, Fellow at Dell Technologies. "Data confidence is needed to manage data at scale, creating systems of trust in this data so users at all levels understand the terms of use. Project Alvarium will create this transparency, and the more companies that integrate it into their processes and systems, the closer we'll come to a future without data ambiguity."

Dell and the IOTA Foundation have joined with Intel in a move to real-world pilots and are jointly reaching out to potential partners. “The DCF demonstration by Dell Technologies and IOTA is an important industry proof point in the potential for measuring trust at the Edge, added Paul O’Neill, Senior Director of Strategic Business Development in Intel’s Confidential Computing Group. Intel and Dell Technologies have already published a White Paper on the topic that can be accessed here.”

“We’re coming to a convergence in technologies and a growth in data utilization, but for that to succeed at scale, we need to be able to trust the data that we’re using,” said Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder of the IOTA Foundation.

Smart contracts often rely on services known as “oracles” to provide trustable data. Project Alvarium extends the functionality of a first-party oracle with the added functionality of a confidence score, to create an industrial oracle. Data feeds from these oracles may be used alone or in combination, to feed smart contract applications, driving the next generation of trustable decentralized applications. The oracle providers can be paid for the data feeds using the feeless IOTA protocol.

The IOTA Foundation, Dell, and Intel will demonstrate Project Alvarium, a simulated Data Confidence Fabric, in a public webinar, followed by a question and answer (Q&A) session on February, 24th at 11:00am est.

For more information on testing and technical details on Project Alvarium, please join us for the Q&A session. Send your questions to the session here!

See Dell's release on the progress of the project here at CIO.com.

About the IOTA Foundation

The IOTA Foundation is a global not-for-profit foundation incorporated and headquartered in Germany. The IOTA Foundation's mission is to support the research and development of new distributed ledger technologies (DLT), including the IOTA Tangle. The Foundation encourages the education and adoption of distributed ledger technologies through the creation of ecosystems and the standardization of these new protocols.

The IOTA Tangle moves beyond blockchain by providing the world's first scalable, feeless and fully decentralized distributed ledger technology. The Tangle uses its own unique technology to solve three fundamental problems with blockchain technology: high fees, scaling and centralization. It is an open-source protocol connecting the human economy with the machine economy by facilitating novel Machine-to-Machine (M2M) interactions, including secure data transfer, fee-less micropayments, and secure access control for devices.

Visit www.iota.org for more information. Follow us on our official channels!

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About Dell Technologies

Dell Technologies is a unique family of businesses that provides the essential infrastructure for organizations to build their digital future, transform IT and protect their most important asset, information. The company services customers of all sizes across 180 countries – ranging from 98% of the Fortune 500 to individual consumers – with the industry’s most comprehensive and innovative portfolio from the edge to the core to the cloud.