Model Everything but with Intellectual Property Protection - The Deltachain Approach
Thomas R. Weber, Sebastian Weber · 2024
Many organizations are involved in the development of complex systems, e.g., cyber-physical systems. Organizations work collaboratively to describe these systems, using models, which are developed using multiple languages and tools. The models may contain intellectual property that must be protected from other parties, including other contributors. To enable the ongoing exchange of models and to ensure intellectual property protection, our new idea is to use encrypted deltas, i.e., arbitrary changes made to a model. These encrypted deltas are stored on a chain, which we call Deltachain. Encryption enables free exchange of the Deltachain, e.g., on third-party commercial file storage servers. Collaborators involved in the development of the model can access the encrypted Deltachain, decrypt the parts to which they have access, and then work with those decrypted parts which are created by applying the deltas. Subsequently, the collaborators can encrypt their deltas to the model parts and append the encrypted deltas to the Deltachain. Our vision is the use of this Deltachain by collaborating organizations as a single source of truth.