Abstract: The Gordian Envelope, developed by Blockchain Commons, is a sophisticated smart document architecture that secures private data and enhances its management using hashed data elision. This privacy-centric feature enables provable data redaction without compromising the data’s integrity or authenticity. This allows users to manage data exposure incrementally as trust develops over time. Its privacy-first features align closely with global data protection laws that advocate for data minimization and the protection of individual privacy.
The recursive structure of Gordian Envelope allows any Envelope to reference and encapsulate other Envelopes, thereby enabling complex data hierarchies. By design, this creates support for a variety of structured data formats. Deterministic CBOR (dCBOR) then ensures consistent data encoding across multiple languages and platforms, maintaining data uniformity in distributed systems and constrained computing environments. This consistency is essential to ensure reliable data verification and authentication and to support decentralized applications, addressing common challenges in data interchange and storage.
Gordian Envelope is built to support industries where data security and privacy are critical. In the healthcare & wellness industries, it is used to share sensitive patient data in compliance with HIPAA and to collect public health data while simultaneously protecting participants through herd privacy. At financial institutions, it enables secure transactions while supporting regulatory requirements such as dual control. In educational institutions, it maintains the integrity and verifiability of digital credentials even when a holder elides some of the data for privacy purposes. In the realm of digital media, Gordian Envelope safeguards journalistic integrity by verifying the source and authenticity of news content, thus combating misinformation and bolstering public trust. Additionally, digital wallet developers deploy Gordian Envelope to enhance the security and privacy of their apps, ensuring the robust protection of users’ digital identities and assets.
Blockchain Commons supports Gordian Envelope with all the specifications, reference libraries, documentation, and other tools necessary for developers to effectively integrate and deploy Gordian Envelope solutions. It also promotes a robust and collaborative developer community, built around monthly meetings, specialized round tables, live Signal chats, and GitHub Discussions that enhances the architecture’s adoption and demonstrates its practical deployment and relevance in today’s digital landscape.
Executive Summary
Gordian Envelope, a Blockchain Commons initiative, is an advanced smart document architecture designed to ensure secure and privacy-preserving data storage and transmission. This is achieved through structured data and the ability for any holder to flexibly redact data as needed, a capability that is essential for complying with global data protection regulations for data minimization while supporting individual privacy and human rights. Gordian Envelope is being advanced through collaborations with the IETF and W3C, aiming to establish it as a foundation for standardized secure digital architectures that can adapt to evolving cryptographic landscapes.
Gordian Envelope’s data redaction capability is built upon hashed data elision, which allows for provable redaction without compromising integrity or authenticity. Gordian Envelope’s core specification employs the well-established, quantum-resistant, and cryptographically secure SHA-256 algorithm to build structured Merkle trees. It then grants any Envelope holder fine-grained control to elide that data, allowing them to decide their level of data exposure. Signatures maintain their consistency and verifiability even after redaction, as they are computed across the structured trees of hashes, rather than the original data.
This design promotes a progressive trust architecture, which not only facilitates phased information sharing but also adapts to evolving trust levels, enabling data holders to dynamically control the visibility of their information based on interaction and perceived risk: a holder can choose to minimize initial data disclosure, then has structured options to expand transparency as trust or the relationship matures over time. By enabling the holder to progressively manage data revelation, Gordian Envelope not only enhances privacy and security but also bolsters user autonomy, thereby cultivating more organic and adaptable trust across interactions.
Gordian Envelope’s nested and recursive Merkle Tree design allows any Envelope to reference and encapsulate other Envelopes. This supports a wide range of data structures and scenarios, including relational hierarchical structures, simple linked lists, and node- or edge-labeled graphs. Data relationships can be simple or complex, as a designer requires. No schema is needed, allowing for enhanced adaptability and ease of use, but formal schemas can be introduced when necessary for specific data integrity needs or regulatory compliance.
Consistent data encoding is guaranteed using dCBOR (Deterministic CBOR), available in multi-platform code libraries written in security-conscious Rust, mobile-optimized Swift, server-centric Ruby, and web-optimized Typescript. This reliability is crucial in heterogeneous environments such as distributed systems and blockchain applications and even allows uniformity on constrained or low-powered hardware including embedded systems and the Internet of Things (IoT). It ensures that Envelope data is always organized the same and thus hashed the same. It’s what’s required to verify and authenticate data across different languages and platforms.
Gordian Envelope is a key component of Blockchain Commons’ broader Gordian Architecture. This larger architecture introduces a range of optional enhancements to Gordian Envelope that go behind the fundamental capabilities of structured organization, hashing, redaction, and verifiabilitity. This includes enhancements such as compression, encryption, decorrelation, and dynamic data.
Data compression optimizes storage and transmission without compromising integrity or verifiability, thanks again to the hashes in Envelope’s Merkle Tree, while selective encryption secures the partial or entire contents of an Envelope. This content can be locked with a multitude of “permit” types, including symmetric keys, public-private key pairs, and advanced cryptographic techniques such as secret sharing and emerging quantum-resistant algorithms. Other advanced cryptographic solutions such as quorum threshold schemes and multisig cryptography offer further expansion beyond basic signing and encryption.
Because Gordian Envelope is cryptographically agnostic, it’s adept at integrating both current and emerging encryption standards. Its structured and layered design for data security and verifiability is adaptable to diverse trust levels, security requirements, and specific scenarios. It can seamlessly adopt new cryptographic standards as they emerge.
Gordian Envelope can also employ multiple decorrelation approaches, including salting and emerging zero-knowledge proofs. This prevents unintended data correlation, thereby enhancing data confidentiality and privacy within the Envelope, while still allowing desired correlation when these techniques are not used. The ideals of decorrelation are further bolstered through support for proofs of inclusion, which enables herd privacy.
Dynamically changing data can be tracked through tools in the larger Gordian architecture. Proof-of-inclusion, differencing, and merging tools for Gordian Envelope facilitate the auditing and integration of data changes over time, optimizing storage and streamlining data integration.
Data can also include interactive functionality: an expression language with application-specific logic can operate within Envelopes. A Sealed Transaction Protocol employs these expressions to support encrypted and authenticated communications across potentially insecure channels such as QR codes and NFC, ensuring secure data exchanges even in vulnerable environments.
Blockchain Commons’ Gordian Envelope is actively deployed today by developers to create the next generation of secure, privacy-centric digital wallets. By integrating Gordian Envelope, developers significantly enhance the resilience and privacy of their wallets, better protecting users’ digital assets. Gordian Envelope was also designed to support self-sovereign identity management by allowing individuals and organizations to control their digital identities without reliance on a central authority, which gives wallet developers an easy entrance to this growing field. The practical deployment of Gordian Envelope in digital asset & identity wallets positions it as a leading choice in the competitive field of cryptographic security solutions.
But Gordian Envelope is not just about traditional digital assets. It supports numerous additional industries where security or privacy are important. In the healthcare & wellness industries, it is used to share sensitive patient data in compliance with HIPAA and to collect public health data while simultaneously protecting participants through herd privacy. At financial institutions, it enables secure transactions while supporting regulatory requirements such as dual control. In educational institutions, it maintains the integrity and verifiability of digital credentials even when a holder elides some of the data for privacy purposes. In the realm of digital media, Gordian Envelope safeguards journalistic integrity by verifying the source and authenticity of news content, thus combating misinformation and bolstering public trust. Gordian Envelope also supports use cases in supply chain transparency, data provenance for scientific research and AI models, and the integrity of software releases.
Blockchain Commons actively supports Gordian Envelope through the continuous improvement and open development of specification, libraries, and reference applications and through robust collaboration with the developer community and key standards organizations such as the IETF and W3C. By hosting monthly meetings and specialized round-table events, Blockchain Commons facilitates a proactive planning process for enhancements, ensuring the Gordian Envelope remains responsive to the evolving challenges within the industry. These collaborative efforts help to foster an ecosystem where security innovations can thrive, aligning with the latest in cryptographic practices and industry needs.
Gordian Envelope is a future-proof technology that readily adapts to evolving technological needs and supports a broad spectrum of applications, from securing data at rest to digital asset management and secure communications, making it an indispensable tool for developers seeking robust, flexible, and secure data architecture solutions.
For more details of Envelope see the Feature Listing and the Technical Overview.