Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2020

To address climate change and regional data collection issues in West Africa, we have begun a project of building weather balloons that cost well below typical radiosonde costs in the United States. Launching a weather balloon would reward local residents digital currency for their efforts, if the balloon was proven to reach a certain height. While pursuing this goal, we encountered some challenges that come from operating a business remotely. One of our obstacles was the need to develop a 2-factor authentication to ensure the owner of the device was indeed the same person using the web application. This is usually straightforward, but our application and network servers are owned and operated by multiple separate companies. Here we explore an authentication solution using blockchain that allows projects like these to become platform agnostic and able to be implemented when different companies own different parts of the data pipeline infrastructure.