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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
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Informative) by VortexCortex on Wednesday July 01 2015, @07:58PM
OTP value is 253
Oops, should be 240, I changed the example but forgot that part.
Also the division of labor is sometimes used in "homeomorphic encryption" in order to leverage this the buzzword by proving that multiple parties alone do not know what the data is. In my purist view true homeomorphic encryption needs no division of labor to ensure the data remains encrypted while the 2nd party / parties are processing it, as the example above demonstrates is possible. Discovering a uniform and efficient storage and encryption method for data fields that allows any operation is an ongoing puzzle. It seems TFA researchers haven't cracked the nut just yet, but have applied a hive organization in order to provide work checking and division of labor. In some (older, and experimental newer) distributed online game networks a similar approach is sometimes used with star network topology -- The client reporting significantly divergent values than the group's redundant processing is disconnected for cheating.
I wouldn't trust my data to such schemes yet, the field of homeomorphic encryption is still in its infancy, and the general wisdom to "Never be an early adopter" applies. For another example of a distributed division of labor attempting to provide forced ignorance, and failing, see The Onion Router.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @09:19PM
Bonus points for making your answer come out "42" !