Toward a new horizon in enterprise collaboration: 3 beta versions of baseline reference implementations released

In the evolving digital environment, the complexity of business interactions and transactions within and across enterprise ecosystems continues to increase. Traditional ERP systems are adept at vertically integrating data and automating business processes within a single entity, but challenges arise when applying these streamlined workflows to external partnerships and multi-party collaboration. These challenges are not limited to ERP systems. Traditional strategies for horizontally integrating digital business processes across multiple organizations suffer from issues such as manual data reconciliation, costly integration, high latency, and scalability constraints.

that much reference protocol Delivering new solutions to the age-old challenges of data consistency and reconciliation in multi-party business automation. Unlike traditional methods that often lead to data silos, this protocol ensures secure, private, and streamlined data synchronization between parties. Leverage zero-knowledge encryption to share data in a way that complies with stringent data protection standards like GDPR and CCPA, protecting your business from potential regulatory pitfalls. Based on the Zero Trust principle, security measures are further strengthened by ensuring that no party inherently needs to trust any other party. This advanced approach promotes interoperability between enterprise systems, creating secure, multi-party workflows that can transcend organizational boundaries. Later, by acting as middleware between various enterprise systems, Baseline Protocol ensures data consistency without exposing sensitive data or requiring intermediaries, thereby reducing coordination costs without compromising security in multi-party business interactions.

Evolving Enterprise Solutions with BRI-3: A Community-Driven Open Source Reference Implementation

Released in March 2020, the Baseline Protocol is collaborative and open source. community project Managed by Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and supported by oasis, designed to advance secure and private digital business coordination between multiple parties. As of now, technical specifications The Baseline Protocol is undergoing improvements and improvements with the goal of being recognized as an official standard by Oasis, a renowned standards development organization.

The development of Baseline Reference Implementation 3 (BRI-3) plays an important role in advancing the base protocol standard and was an initiative set by the Baseline Technology Steering Committee for the protocol’s 2022 roadmap. Reference implementations illustrate the practical application of a specification, serve as a guide for other implementations, and serve as an important blueprint to ensure consistency and compliance with the intended design. Moreover, a reference implementation lays the foundation for implementing a specific protocol. This not only provides a starting point for developers to build upon, but also allows them to avoid the time-consuming steps of building it themselves. BRI-3 was built with the dual purpose of providing unparalleled clarity and simplicity while clarifying the complex layers of the protocol. Therefore, this implementation will foster a deeper understanding of the protocol to encourage broader adoption by the open source community of developers and interested companies. BRI-3 also adopts a vendor-agnostic approach, ensuring adaptability to a variety of platforms and encouraging a development environment that is not limited to any specific technology.

Once completed, BRI-3 will deliver several other capabilities, including laying the foundation for a basic protocol software development kit (SDK). A comprehensive set of development tools contained in a single package, the SDK simplifies the process for developers to create native protocol applications. Additionally, a mature BRI-3 paves the way for demonstrating interoperability between different underlying protocol implementations, a key step toward standard approval. Interoperability, or the ability of different systems and technologies to work cohesively together, is important in enterprise systems. BRI-3 ensures that different systems can work together to share data and synchronize state in a frictionless, private, and trustless manner.

BRI-3, beta version released

Development of BRI-3, which began in August 2022, was supported by the Baseline Protocol 2022 grant program, raising $100,000 from the Ethereum Foundation and ConsenSys Mesh to strengthen Baseline Protocol’s open source community initiatives. Led by a team of six primary core developers, BRI-3 successfully progressed through the development phase, meeting four out of five milestones. Milestone 4 achieved, presentation The end of September 2023 not only marks significant progress in development, but also signals the arrival of BRI-3’s beta phase. In the remainder of this section, we will take a closer look at how the simple use cases selected for BRI-3 are implemented and examine them in the context of the underlying standard.

Use cases

BRI-3 Beta implements “baselining” of invoice data. This simple use case allows counterparties to digitally exchange invoice documents (state objects) represented as payloads and synchronize this data across systems of record while selectively protecting sensitive information. These invoice documents can be cryptographically verified to ensure they have the correct source, data integrity, and correctly applied business rule validation/transformation. The way this application was developed opens the door to future scenarios for this use case. After exchanging an invoice, a zero-knowledge proof can prove acceptance of that invoice to a third party, such as a regulator, without exposing personal information. Invoice information.

Improved features and technologies:

Stateful and Merkelization

BRI-3 Beta implements ‘Merkelization’ of data payloads, converting state objects into Merkle tree data objects, called ‘state trees’. Additionally, the evolution of these state objects over time is captured and ‘Merkelized’ to form a data object called a ‘history tree’. A specially designed data structure known as a ‘BPI account’ is used to store both the state tree and its history tree. These BPI accounts are intentionally associated with a specific workflow and are jointly owned by the BPI entities participating in that workflow. This design ensures accurate tracking, versioning, and status verification of critical data contained within workflows throughout the lifecycle of multi-party processes. Using these Merkle trees, verification can be performed in a privacy-preserving manner.

virtual state machine

BRI-3 Beta implements a Virtual State Machine (VSM) that can deterministically process all state change request transactions in a privacy-preserving and cryptographically verifiable manner. In the case of BPI, state change requests occur when a transaction is initiated to execute a work step. In BRI-3 Beta, VSM can identify, collect, and process eligible transactions. The VSM implemented in BRI-3 runs on a configurable cycle. When the VSM updates a submitted transaction to the “Processing” status, the execution of that transaction is verified. We ensure that all submitted transactions are genuine through requirements such as verifying the transaction’s digital signature against the sender’s public key. Once a transaction is approved, VSM begins executing the transaction and updates the workflow status upon completion.

Transaction execution and zero-knowledge processing

To execute a transaction, BRI-3 Beta’s VSM uses work step data associated with the transaction to obtain zero-knowledge artifacts that can be used to prove the correct application of business logic to the state objects in the payload. Much of the security of the underlying protocol implementation comes from this step. To complete a transaction, a zero-knowledge cryptographic correctness proof must be generated that encapsulates this computation. Cryptographic data objects created in this step, including Merkelized payload, witness, and transaction hash, are returned to the VSM as part of transaction processing. These artifacts are used to track and update the state of a task step’s state object and provide a tamper-resistant timestamp of the correct execution of the task step that can be accessed by third parties once the transaction is complete.

Milestone 5

BRI-3’s final milestones are on track for completion in the first half of 2024. Core developers are keeping many possibilities open. problem Briefly describes the features planned for this release. Features already added to the backlog include strengthening the robustness contracts required to keep proof of task execution on-chain, implementing mechanisms to link pre-compiled circuits to specific task steps and workflows, and paying down technical debt.

Stay tuned: visit us Website Follow our social channels for future news and demo announcements.

memo: This blog is for readers and developers to avatar Join the Baseline Core Devs Community to gain deeper insights and participate in ongoing innovation within the Baseline Protocol ecosystem.