Diode™ - Reclaim Your Digital Sovereignty

Reclaim Your Digital Sovereignty

What drives us, our mission, is to ensure people and organizations can enjoy all of the benefits of the Internet while maintaining their digital sovereignty.

At Diode, we believe the Internet is a wonderful tool that can enable free, civil, and thriving collaborations. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to leverage the Internet’s benefits without risking privacy and/or sustainability. Everything we do at Diode is to enable individuals and organizations with the means of private and secure collaboration.

Diode applications, such as Diode Drive and the Diode CLI, enable secure remote access to files, assets, data streams, and software with minimal setup and maintenance effort. The Diode Network makes this possible by enabling a world where it is sustainable to provide category leading software without exploiting user data.

Today, the team at Diode is busy developing next generation Diode applications, expanding the capabilities of the Diode Network, and growing our base of customers, partners, and developers.

Please get in touch if you’d like to explore a collaboration with Diode!

Team

Our team consists of experts from connected business, decentralized communications, and Internet of Things technologies. We're dedicated to a secure and sustainable Internet future - join us as we upgrade the Internet!

DOMINIC LETZ

Chief Technology Officer

GREG BELCHER

VP Business Development

HANS REMPEL

CEO

PETER LAI

Blockchain Software Engineer

YAHSIN HUANG

Social Media Manager

Our Story

Realization that PKI is Broken

While working at one of the world’s largest IoT organizations, one of our biggest customers’ devices all went offline around the world. We found that a certificate stored on the devices had expired, leading the devices to believe that they could not trust the servers, and so they stopped communicating. The solution? Trick the devices into believing the time was in the past, allowing a patch to be supplied OTA to update the certificates. From this, we realized that most of the world’s IoT devices had a vulnerability related to their inability to securely acquire time - if we could trick the devices for good purposes, how many more devices could be tricked for bad ones?

Solving the Problem of Time

A valid knowledge of time is assumed in the system of Public Key Infrastructure that secures today’s Internet. It is a chicken-and-egg problem - in order to securely get the current time (or, indeed, to communicate securely), a valid current time is required. We solved the Problem of Time by leveraging the Nakamoto Consensus, as used in certain blockchain technologies, to securely bootstrap time. This was a fundamental and exciting discovery! We named the algorithm that implemented the technology “BlockQuick™.”

Decentralizing the Blockchain

In the process of proving out implementations of Secure Time, we found that the methods weren’t practical - the bandwidth and memory requirements to securely communicate with a blockchain network were too great for edge systems (normal computers and devices). All consensus-based blockchain networks relied on designated full blockchain nodes to proxy communications on behalf of edge systems - the decentralized, trustless, world of blockchain networks all required centralized on/off ramps to be useful! This schizophrenia was not only a problem for our implementations of BlockQuick, it was severely limiting the scope of all consensus-based blockchain systems.

The Birth of the Diode Network

We knew if we could decentralize the on/off ramp technology, we would enable a whole new class of Web3 applications that would also be sustainable without exploiting user information - we went to work. By leveraging BlockQuick, Ethereum (selected after much consideration), and our deep experience in scalable edge systems and web services, we launched the Diode Network in 2019. The Diode Network is the world’s first and only public consensus-based blockchain that can communicate directly with every type of system on the planet.

Commercial Validation

As the Diode Network grew, we began to foster a set of applications that took advantage of the network’s bomb-proof security, ease of maintenance, and lower cost-of-operation. Distributed file sharing, Virtual Private Network (VPN) capabilities, and other remote productivity tools uniquely benefit from the Diode Networks’ serverless and trustless environment, particularly in on-premise applications that need remote accessibility. We launched an initial set of capabilities and also began developing partnerships with organizations who want out of the business of hosting edge-to-user communication servers.

The Future of the Internet

Today, the Diode Network is more secure than today’s Internet, and completely removes core problems/abuses caused by services centralization and social engineering exploits. It is a leading candidate to underpin the future of Web3 communications, and provides a practical path out of the increasingly snarled mess that is today’s Web2 Internet infrastructure.

The ramifications of these innovations are exciting and will change the face of the Internet! Join us to Upgrade the Internet!

Our Story

While working at one of the world’s largest IoT organizations, one of our biggest customers’ devices all went offline around the world. The IoT servers were functioning, the devices themselves were fine, but we found that a certificate stored on the devices had expired, leading the devices to believe that they could not trust the servers, and so they stopped communicating. The solution? Trick the devices into believing the time was in the past, allowing a patch to be supplied OTA to update the certificates. From this, we realized that most of the world’s IoT devices had a vulnerability related to their inability to securely acquire time - if we could trick the devices for good purposes, how many more devices could be tricked for bad ones?

A valid knowledge of time is assumed in the system of Public Key Infrastructure that secures today’s Internet. It was a chicken-and-egg problem - if you don’t know the time, you can’t securely communicate. But, if you can’t securely communicate, you can’t trust the time you’re given. We solved the Problem of Time by leveraging the Nakamoto Consensus, as used in certain blockchain technologies, to securely bootstrap time. This was a fundamental and exciting discovery! We named the algorithm that implemented the technology “BlockQuick™.”

The ramifications of these innovations are exciting! Now, every type of web application business model can now be sustainable without the sale or exploitation of user data. An even more far reaching economic implication is that the many of the roles played by centralized data centers and IT administrators can either commoditized or relegated to niche specializations. Another fundamental implication of the Diode Network is the practical decentralization of trust for Internet actors: it operates with a Distributed Public Key Infrastructure (dPKI) and Decentralized Domain Name System (dDNS / BNS). It is more secure than today’s Internet, and completely removes many of the problems/abuses caused by core services centralization. Because of these innovations enabled by BlockQuick, the Diode Network is a leading candidate to underpin Web3 communications. It provides a practical path out of the increasingly snarled mess that is today’s Web2 Internet infrastructure. Upgrade the Internet!