Distributed State
Where data and databases were traditionally centralised, there has been an increasing demand for distributed data to provide resiliency – availability, tolerance, and eventual consistency – across nodes on the network covering multiple geographic regions.
Our distributed database is built on the same robust technology that underpins the Hyperledger fabric state database.
This distributed public state features granular security and full revision histories. Alterations can only be made by those with the relevant permissions and all modifications are logged. As a result, even expired certificates are never really deleted, and the digital certificates are protected against malicious and accidental changes.
When new nodes are added to the Tauliah network, this simply means adding new servers with localised data to the new site and connecting them to the rest of the distributed system, without interrupting the rest of the network. The complete history of issued certificates is then replicated, improving resiliency with every node.
The digital certificates issued are replicated across nodes so that any down-time or unforeseen destruction of the data at one site does not result in complete data loss. Recovery can be achieved as quickly as adding a new node to the network. All issued digital certificates are kept safe from destruction.
By distributing the certificates across the network in an efficient manner, and locating the data closer to where it is primarily issued, validation checks can be served from local data. This allows verification queries to be quickly performed, avoiding round-trips across the globe, even on large sets of certificates.
Finally, the digital certificate public state can be read directly using a simple REST API. The certificates are serialised to JSON and can be read and processed using industry standard JavaScript language and libraries. So, subscribers can easily build third-party tools to validate credentials from their own systems.