The Bank for International Settlements has developed Project Polaris, a new CBDC framework, to respond to cyberattacks in the crypto sector.
The central banks-owned Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has been a part of several CBDC projects in the past. This time, the financial institution has created a new CBDC framework as a response to rising cyberattack threats. The framework, titled Project Polaris, has been described in detail by BIS in a recent report.
BIS has outlined how attacks like smart contract hacks have caused significant losses to the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector. Such attacks have eroded a lot of value in DeFi, it said. Further, it mentioned how CBDC systems were also under threat of future cyberattacks.
The report said CBDC systems should be secure enough to maintain the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of transactions. CBDCs should be resilient enough to continue running even though their underlying financial institutions face major issues, it said.
Therefore, the new CBDC framework had seven steps for the control objectives, which were ‘Prepare, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover and Adapt.’ These seven steps led to 104 control objectives. Project Polaris also had requirements for creating new teams specifically catering to such security issues.
BIS officially mentioned in its report, “The framework is a baseline and is intended to be updated periodically, keeping pace with any developments related to CBDC systems and the cyber threat landscape, in partnership with the central bank community as well as the public sector and private entities that could participate in a CBDC ecosystem.”