Talaria - A Secure, Decentralized, Modular Transaction Architecture with an Unforgeable, Indelible, Transparent Ledger

Galois and Dan Boneh of Stanford offer Talaria, a research project and prototype architecture of a secure, decentralized messaging and transaction platform. Talaria addresses four concerns for such platforms: resilience, scalability, security, and transparency.Talaria uses a decentralized, redundant, and distributed server-side architecture to provide resiliency. Talaria provides scalability by using distributed, scalably provisioned server components; small, highly secure yet distributed core of consensus servers in place of costly proof-of-work controls; ledger that grows linearly with time rather than transaction count; and separate message delivery component that limits storage requirements by continuously pruning expired messages. Talaria offers security by attestably securing clients, providing end-to-end, forward secrecy encryption of all messages, providing cryptographic authentication of all messages, and providing a ledger that is unforgeable and immutable. Talaria offers transparency via a fully publishable ledger that allows verification of any transaction while protecting privacy. Thus Talaria offers enterprises in general, and DoD in particular, a decentralized messaging and transaction backbone that is uniquely resilient, secure, and auditable. Talaria leverages Intel SGX for securing clients; Guardtimes KSI as a secure ledger; and Apache kafka for message queueing and delivery. Talaria employs several novel cryptographic solutions for securing messages throughout system components.