City PM’s Crypto Insider Interviews Aldo Lo Castro of AliasLab UK
AliasLab has been a leader in electronic identity IT for more than 30 years, and is now majority owned by TeamSystem Group, Italy’s leading ERP & management software and training services company employing more than 2,000 with €315m of revenue. AliasLab designs, implements and manages complete software and hardware integrations, primarily in the fields of strong authentication, electronic signatures and electronic identities. Having trained and lived in the UK for many years, Aldo Lo Castro, head of R&D, has led Alias Lab’s identity & signature IT work for over 10 years.
Aldo described to me how AliasLab “over the last years [has] specialised in three main areas: strong authentication, so ways to authenticate users securely; electronic signatures, so everything to do with going paperless and a high level of assurance making sure that who signs are actually who they say they are; and last but not least KYC remote identification because there is no point giving you the most secure signature in the world if I don’t know who you are!”
He adds: “Through these ‘lenses’ of technology is how we first approached the blockchain world and distributed ledger technology world, because obviously we were attracted to it, like most people, with the hype around Bitcoin and there’s no denying that but pretty much immediately we realised the synergies between the underlying technology of blockchain in general and our core business. So soon after that we started working on a solution that leverages blockchain for identity and electronic signatures – basically blockchain becomes a trusted third party in which to store the cryptographic proofs of transactions so with that system we can prove who has done what with an immutable audit trail. That has been our first approach into this world.”
As a technology company AliasLab sees the technological advantages of a platform that has the capability of storing small but very valuable amounts of data in an immutable way. Aldo affirmed “from the start, it has always been about blockchain implementations in the plural because for us it’s important to be agnostic from the underlying platforms whether it is Bitcoin, Ethereum, IOTA and as such interoperability is critical for us and in general one of the main issues facing the crypto world.”
Carrying on with the theme of interoperability, Aldo explained that in 2016 an new International Organization for Standardization technical committee was formed (ISO:TC307) whose scope is the Standardisation of Blockchain technologies and distributed ledger technologies. There are 10 ISO standards under development with 35 participating members and 13 observing members. We agreed that this would help drive the industry forward and certainly Aldo emphasised the importance for AliasLab to be part of that process from the beginning with its focus on security, identity and interoperability. “We think that it is going to be a very interesting area as our belief is that standards will help a lot to sort out the ‘wild west’ aspects of the crypto world today.”
He was keen to point out the benefits of the space, pointing to Bitcoin which, as it approaches its 10th birthday, is not only still here but also has never itself been hacked. The three areas of crypto loss are exchanges, phishing and threat of life.
This brought Aldo neatly onto discussing “AliasLab’s newest area of involvement in the crypto world is to focus on security for custodians of digital assets who distinguish themselves from exchanges as they are more for institutions, so when you have millions of cryptocurrencies to handle for banks, enterprises and governments. So again we are helping in writing a technical paper for the ISO committee to cover what is out there now, and point towards best practices as there is a lot involved: processes, hardware, software, methods of identifying – so there is big area here where we are delving in and creating a platform. In addition there is the grey area here, which is the insurance of these things, so finding some insurers to be part of this too.”
