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posted by janrinok on Wednesday July 01 2015, @04:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the hi-ho,-hi-ho dept.

The cryptography behind bitcoin solved a paradoxical problem: a currency with no regulator, that nonetheless can't be counterfeited. Now a similar mix of math and code promises to pull off another seemingly magical feat by allowing anyone to share their data with the cloud and nonetheless keep it entirely private.

On Tuesday, a pair of bitcoin entrepreneurs and the MIT Media Lab revealed a prototype for a system called Enigma, designed to achieve a decades-old goal in data security known as "homomorphic" encryption: A way to encrypt data such that it can be shared with a third party and used in computations without it ever being decrypted. That mathematical trick—which would allow untrusted computers to accurately run computations on sensitive data without putting the data at risk of hacker breaches or surveillance—has only become more urgent in an age when millions of users constantly share their secrets with cloud services ranging from Amazon and Dropbox to Google and Facebook. Now, with bitcoin's tricks in their arsenal, Enigma's creators say they can now pull off homomorphically encrypted computations more efficiently than ever.

http://www.wired.com/2015/06/mits-bitcoin-inspired-enigma-lets-computers-mine-encrypted-data/

[Paper]: http://enigma.media.mit.edu/enigma_full.pdf


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Wednesday July 01 2015, @04:57PM

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday July 01 2015, @04:57PM (#203828) Journal

    I've been aware of this area of research for some time, (although not MIT's project) and it has always had a different focus that either TFS or TFA seems to suggest.

    Safely Decoding the data has never been difficult in cloud computing. All that is important is client side encryption, and ONLY client side.
    There are only a few services willing to give you that, such as SpiderOak. Most cloud vendors want to hold your encryption keys for you, or allow no encryption at all.

    The focus of "homomorphic" encryption has always been on allowing use of data without revealing actual values.

    Example: doing a database hit to find all the credit cards that have been used to purchase Pot in Colorado which had billing addresses in Minnesota, where you don't want to reveal who's card, the actual card number, the vendor's name, address, or any other details. The data in the database must remain encrypted.

    I don't think this project gets anyone closer that goal.

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