This week, Australian authorities recovered a tiny capsule, just 6mm x 8mm (0.24 x 0.31 inches) along a 900km section of Australia’s longest highway, the Great Northern Highway. The pea-sized capsule was a radiation gauge containing caesium-137, a radioactive material with a half-life of 30.05 years, that is used to measure the density and flow of materials in the mining, and oil and gas industries.

There are already so many words and concepts in information security: why do we need another one? And indeed ‘attestation’ is already used in several industry contexts with many subtly different meanings: what do we gain by overloading it?

Rusty Cumpston and Jon Geater saw an opportunity to solve a huge supply chain trust problem and were inspired to build RKVST (pronounced as “archivist”), a platform aiming to bring integrity, transparency, and trust to digital supply chains. RKVST enables all partners in the supply chain to collaborate and work with a single source of truth, which can be helpful for tracking nuclear waste, storing historical flight data to optimize aircraft flight plans, and much more.

PA Consulting recently joined forces with RKVST to host a Hackathon, looking to identify new and innovative propositions for digital supply chains. Could the teams of PA consultants and analysts identify opportunities to help their clients using RKVST technology? Short answer: YES! Many of today’s business challenges can be addressed with a reliable evidence ledger. If you want the long answer, read on.

Supply chain risk continues to make headlines, from Solarwinds and Kaseya to last week’s announcement of a patch for the OpenSSL vulnerability, and the latest cybersecurity review from the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre highlights the serious threats posed by supply chain attacks.

Last year the Log4J vulnerability perfectly illustrated how properly shared SBOMs would have helped users find and mitigate the “vulnerability of the decade”. And over the last few days we’ve been worried that we’re in the same place with OpenSSL 3.x. Why will this keep on happening? A lot has happened since The White House issued Executive Order 14028.

Speaking to people on our neighbouring booths at the UK nuclear decommissioning event, it was clear to see the entire industry is drowning in paperwork.