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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: 2) by VortexCortex on Thursday July 02 2015, @01:13AM
Or, we could use homeopathic encryption!
Ah, yes. With homeophathic encryption you merely use that data itself as the key and XOR the plain text with the key. Thus the output is all zeros, and incredibly compressible. The only way to decrypt the data is via the key, which one simply XORs with a string of zeros to produce the original input.
Though the transmission of zeros seems weaker the more you send, it is actually a stronger encryption requiring an even stronger key to crack.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday July 02 2015, @04:32AM
But, you know, I am a bit uneasy with relying on the placebo effect for data security. Maybe we could come up with something like eTrust, or Windows share your wireless password with everyone including Michael David Crawford Galaxy. I dunno.