Immudb: Keep your Hands off my Database!

The immudb database has always been designed to be tamper-proof. Now with its new data connectors, it can keep data in other databases safe.

Immudb is an open-source, immutable database. That means it uses a variety of security techniques such as cryptographic proof and verification and zero trust to make its data and transactions tamperproof. That's great, if you're using immudb. But, say you're not. Well, immudb's parent company Codenotary has an answer for you. Database connectors that enable data stored in other data stores to be made tamper-proof.

Until now, there has been no easy way to guarantee the integrity of data kept in other databases for forensic, judicial, or auditing purposes. This could be a game-changer for companies and organizations that must ensure that the data in their databases is reliable.

The immudb connectors do this by providing cryptographic verification. This validates the integrity of the data at every transaction, ensuring it is tamper-proof. The connectors make it possible to extend data to and store it inside immudb, while still providing high performance and full query capabilities.

Dennis Zimmer, Codenotarys co-founder and CTO and the primary contributor to the immudb project, said: “Data stored in databases is vulnerable to tampering, but the immudb connectors change all of that so that it’s now possible to store data with trust – knowing its full history to guard against any intrusion.”

Technically immudb does this in part by using Merkle Hash Trees (MHTs). These are used to create digests that represent the state of the entire database at any specific time. Together with cryptographic proofs, you can prove: 1) a given element has been successfully inserted into the database and 2) a database is consistent between two points in time. Together, these provide robust guarantees about a database’s validity.

In addition, Immudb is built on a zero-trust model, with history preserved and unable to be changed. Data can only be added, but never modified. The database can be deployed in cluster configurations on-premises or in the cloud for demanding applications that require high scalability, up to billions of transactions per day, and high availability.

The support of both key-value and SQL makes it simple to use immudb in new and existing applications. Support for Amazon’s S3 storage cloud provides immudb with virtually unlimited data storage capacity. With immudb’s Time Travel feature, organizations can travel back and forth in time and see the change history of their data.

Immudb protects sensitive data for workloads that require the utmost data security. Codenotary uses immudb to underpin its software supply chain security product.

The new connectors come on the heels of the company’s January announcement of a connector to store events and data gathered by leading Security Operations Center (SOC) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools from Splunk, Elastic, plus IBM QRadar XDR and Microsoft Sentinel.

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