Provenance Tracking Filesystem

Lockular's provenance tracking filesystem is the cornerstone component of the provenance suite, designed to ensure the security and traceability of files throughout their lifecycle.

Key Features of Lockular's Provenance Tracking Filesystem:

1. POSIX Compliance and Attachment Options:
   
   • The filesystem conforms to the POSIX standard, ensuring compatibility with standard interfaces and behaviours.
   • It can be attached using FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) or NFS (Network File System), providing flexibility in deployment and integration with various environments.


2. Shamir's Secret Sharing:
   • Filesystem metadata and blocks are broken into shares using Shamir's Secret Sharing, a cryptographic method that enhances security by distributing data across multiple locations.
   • The process of splitting data into shares and recombining them is governed by a strict protocol, ensuring secure data handling and storage.


3. Blockchain Integration:
   • While the intensive processing tasks are handled off-chain, each step through the protocol is recorded on a shared blockchain.
   • This blockchain integration ensures that every action taken on the filesystem is logged immutably, providing a reliable audit trail for the entire lifecycle of stored objects.


4. Cloud-Based Design Environment Compatibility:
   
   • The filesystem is designed to be seamlessly integrated into cloud-based design environments, making it ideal for tracking electronic design files from conception.
   • Whether attached via FUSE within a containerised environment like Kubernetes or through NFS supporting multiple users, the filesystem appears as a regular drive to the design sandbox, allowing for seamless integration with design tools.


5. Security and Performance Configurations:
   
   • The FUSE attachment allows for a tight coupling with design tools, offering enhanced security at the cost of higher memory usage.
   • The NFS option provides a more cost-effective solution by supporting many users per server instance while still maintaining a high level of provenance and security.


6. Scalable and Efficient Storage:
   The filesystem is capable of handling both small source code files (in KBs) and larger design outputs (in GBs), with storage mechanisms that scale efficiently based on the type of data being stored.


7. ACID Properties:
   Lockular's filesystem ensures atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID properties), crucial for maintaining data integrity and preventing corruption.


8. Built-in Redundancy and Security:
   
   • The use of Shamir's Secret Sharing inherently provides redundancy; only a threshold number of shares are needed to reconstruct the metadata or file blocks.
   • Shares can be automatically replicated to protect against DDoS attacks and other forms of data disruption.


9. Summary:
   Lockular's provenance tracking filesystem is a robust, secure, and flexible solution designed for environments where data security and traceability are paramount. By integrating advanced cryptographic techniques with blockchain technology, the filesystem provides an unprecedented level of security and provenance tracking, making it an essential component of supply chain provenance. This filesystem is particularly suited for industries like electronic design, where maintaining the integrity and traceability of design files is critical.


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Workflow Actor Management (WAM)

The Workflow Actor Management (WAM) component is a crucial part of Lockular Limited's provenance suite, designed to manage and oversee the cooperative relationships among organisations involved in complex workflows, such as design and manufacturing processes. Here are the key points about WAM:

Key Features of WAM:

1. Smart Contract Technology: WAM utilises smart contracts to establish strict protocols that govern how organisations interact, collaborate, and exchange information. This ensures a structured and compliant interaction framework.


2. Role and Permission Management: Within each organization, WAM tracks the structure and positions of teams and individual actors. It allows for the assignment of specific roles and permissions to teams and their members, ensuring that only authorized personnel access sensitive information.


3. Blockchain Integration: The structure of organisational teams and their interactions are continually recorded on a blockchain, providing a transparent and immutable history of individuals involved and their relationships within the inter-organisational team structure.


4. Provenance Tracking: WAM ensures that provenance records related to the structure of collaborative teams are consistently maintained, offering a complete historical view of all parties involved in a design or part of a design.


5. Domain Agnosticism: The component is adaptable to various domains, with each set of organisational rules, roles, and permissions introduced through domain-specific smart contracts. These contracts drive the user experience, allowing admins to set up relationships and collaborations effectively.


6. Enforcement and Tracking: In scenarios like chip design, where geographic divisions and export restrictions dictate specific sharing rules, WAM encodes and enforces these rules through smart contracts. Each enactment of these rules is tracked on the blockchain, ensuring compliance and security.


7. Integration with Other Components: WAM works in conjunction with other components of Lockular's suite, such as the Lockular Provenance Tracking filesystem within the IDE sandbox. This integration helps track the evolution of designs at a granular level, from initial design through to manufacturing and software development.


8. Security and Oversight: By maintaining a detailed structure of inter-organisational teams, WAM can help detect unusual patterns or relationships that may indicate security breaches, such as espionage, especially in large teams.


9. Summary: WAM provides a robust framework for managing the provenance of team structures involved in workflows, crucial for industries like chip design and manufacturing where precision, compliance, and security are paramount. By leveraging smart contracts and blockchain technology, WAM ensures that all interactions and roles within collaborative projects are governed by clear, enforceable rules and that a comprehensive, immutable record of these interactions is maintained. This not only enhances security and compliance but also supports effective management and oversight of complex organisational relationships

Theia.Cloud (Cloud Native)

SecureWorking is a highly scalable, cloud-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that is a product of collaboration between Lockular, EclipseSource, Ericsson, and STMicroelectronics. This open-source environment leverages Kubernetes to efficiently scale across thousands of user environments, making it a robust solution for various design needs.

Key Features of SecureWorking IDE:

1. Scalability and Collaboration:
   
   • Built to handle the demands of thousands of users simultaneously, SecureWorking utilises Kubernetes to manage and scale user environments effectively.
   • The collaborative development by major industry players underscores its reliability and industry-standard compliance.


2. Cloud-Based Design Sandboxes:
   
   • The IDE supports cloud-based instances of VSCode and Theia, providing designers with powerful tools within secure, closed environments.
   • Each sandbox is dynamically configured with the necessary toolchains specific to the project requirements, such as RISC-V chip design or steel alloy estimation.


3. Integration with Lockular's Filesystem:
   
   • SecureWorking can be configured to use the Lockular provenance tracking filesystem for enhanced security and data integrity.
   • The filesystem can be integrated via a FUSE adapter or NFS configuration, ensuring flexibility in deployment according to security needs and performance considerations.


4. Web3 Compatibility and Security:
   
   • The IDE supports Web3 technologies, allowing designers to authenticate using their Polkadot.js wallets.
   • This integration is crucial for the multi-signature protocols used in the filesystem's blockchain-based tracking, enhancing security and accountability in design processes.


5. Efficient Management of Design Resources:
   SecureWorking includes components that manage the instantiation and teardown of designer sandboxes, optimizing resource use and reducing costs by detecting and responding to inactivity.


6. Background Processing Capabilities:
   
   • The environment supports scheduling of intensive design processes to run in the background, freeing up the user interface and allowing designers to continue other tasks.
   • Designers are notified of the results offline once builds are completed, enhancing productivity and user experience.


7. Cost-Effective Processing:
   
   • In scenarios where design output generation is highly parallelisable, SecureWorking can dispatch jobs to large compute nodes, completing tasks quickly without additional cost, thanks to the cloud's dynamic resource allocation.


8. Summary:
   SecureWorking stands out as a highly secure, scalable, and efficient cloud-based IDE tailored for complex and sensitive design tasks. Its integration with Lockular's provenance tracking filesystem and support for Web3 authentication technologies make it a cutting-edge tool for industries requiring high levels of security and data integrity, such as chip design and materials engineering.
   
   The collaboration with leading technology firms ensures that SecureWorking is built on a foundation of industry expertise, offering users a reliable and powerful platform for their design needs. This IDE not only enhances security and provenance tracking but also offers significant improvements in throughput and operational efficiency, making it a valuable component of Lockular's broader technological ecosystem.

NFT Marketplace

The Lockular NFT Marketplace Platform is an innovative solution designed to track and manage both real-world objects and electronic design artifacts through the use of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). This platform is integral to Lockular's suite of provenance tools, providing a robust mechanism for the authentication, authorisation, and transaction of assets.

Key Features of the Lockular NFT Marketplace Platform:

1. Tracking Real-World and Electronic Artifacts:
   
   • For real-world objects, unique identifiers such as barcodes and indelible smart water dyes link physical items to their digital counterparts in the form of NFTs.
   • Electronic design artifacts, including software development kits (SDKs) and individual design components known as IPBlocks, are also tracked and managed through the platform.


2. Smart Contract Foundation:
   
   • The platform is underpinned by smart contracts that dictate the terms for buying, selling, and exchanging artifacts. This applies to a wide range of items from luxury handbags to electronic design outputs.
   • These contracts define how artifacts can be utilised and the conditions under which new artifacts can be minted.


3. Integration with SecureWorking IDE:
   
   • The NFT Marketplace can be seamlessly integrated with the SecureWorking IDE, allowing designers to upload, sell, or share their design outputs directly within the development environment.
   • This integration facilitates the easy transition from design creation to market transaction, enhancing the utility and accessibility of design outputs.


4. Web3 Technology and Wallet Integration:
   
   • All components of Lockular's provenance suite, including the NFT Marketplace, are based on Web3 technologies.
   • The Polkadot.js wallet is central to the platform, handling authentication and authorization. When users log into SecureWorking, the same wallet is used to interact with the NFT Marketplace, ensuring a unified and secure user experience.
   • The wallet's roles and responsibilities are crucial in governing interactions within the NFT Marketplace, ensuring that transactions adhere to predefined rules and permissions.


5. Provenance and Transparency:
   
   • The platform leverages provenance information from various components such as the Workflow Actor Management (WAM) and the provenance tracking filesystem to provide a comprehensive view of the lifecycle of each artifact.
   • This integration affords a 360-degree view of electronic designs and the designers or organisations involved, enhancing transparency and trust in the marketplace.


6. Summary:
   The Lockular NFT Marketplace Platform is a pivotal component of Lockular's broader technological ecosystem, designed to enhance the traceability, security, and transactional integrity of both physical and digital assets.
   
   By integrating advanced smart contract functionalities with the SecureWorking IDE and leveraging Web3 technologies, the platform not only simplifies the management of design artifacts but also ensures that all transactions are secure and compliant with established protocols.
   
   This platform is particularly valuable for industries where provenance, authenticity, and ownership are critical, providing a reliable and efficient marketplace for a wide range of assets.

Secure Artifact Store

Lockular's Secure Artifact Store is a specialised component designed to enhance the management and curation of artifacts across various NFT Marketplaces.

This component is an integral part of Lockular's provenance suite, although it is specifically tailored to work with digital artifacts within the NFT ecosystem.

Key Features of Lockular's Secure Artifact Store:

1. Curation and Management of Artifacts:
   
   • The Secure Artifact Store provides a centralised facility to curate and manage artifacts from multiple NFT Marketplaces.
   • Unlike the SecureWorking IDE, which primarily focuses on the upload and initial handling of design artifacts, the Secure Artifact Store allows for additional curation capabilities, such as tagging artifacts according to the curator's requirements.


2. Integration with Provenance Tracking Filesystem:
   
   • All artifacts managed within the Secure Artifact Store are stored on an instance of Lockular's provenance tracking filesystem.
   • This integration ensures that each artifact not only benefits from high-level provenance tracking through smart contracts but also from low-level tracking that records every interaction with the artifact within the filesystem.


3. Web3 App with Smart Contract Governance:
   
   • The Secure Artifact Store operates as a Web3 application, utilising smart contracts to govern the interactions and transactions within the store.
   • These smart contracts provide a structured and secure framework for artifact management, ensuring that all actions are traceable and compliant with established protocols.


4. Authentication via Polkadot.js Wallet:
   
   • Access and interactions within the Secure Artifact Store are authenticated through the Polkadot.js wallet, consistent with other components of Lockular's suite.
   • This ensures a seamless and secure user experience across the platform, leveraging blockchain technology for identity verification and transaction authorisation.


5. Technical Architecture:
   
   • At its core, the Secure Artifact Store is a thin layer that interfaces with the provenance tracking filesystem and the NFT Marketplaces.
   • This streamlined architecture allows for efficient management of artifacts while maintaining robust security and provenance tracking capabilities.


6. Summary:
   Lockular's Secure Artifact Store is a critical component for managing and curating digital artifacts across NFT Marketplaces within Lockular's supply chain provenance suite.
   
   By leveraging advanced Web3 technologies, smart contract governance, and seamless integration with the provenance tracking filesystem, the Secure Artifact Store provides a powerful tool for artifact curation and management.
   
   This component ensures that all artifacts are securely stored, appropriately tagged, and fully traceable, enhancing the overall integrity and functionality of the NFT ecosystem within Lockular's platform.