IBM releases toolkit aimed at keeping data encrypted even while in use
Eleven years ago,IBM made a breakthrough in the development of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), a technology that allows for computation and analysis of data while keeping it encrypted. FHE holds significant promise for a number of uses, IBM says — particularly any operations that involve highly sensitive data that must be protected.
However, FHE remains a complicated technology that’s hard to implement. IBM aims to change that with the release of new toolkits that should help developers start experimenting with FHE and eventually incorporate it into the products they build. The toolkit is available today in GitHub for MacOS and iOS, and it will soon be available for Linux and Android.
Today, files are often encrypted in transit and at rest but decrypted while in use, creating a security vulnerability. This often compels organizations to make trade-offs and go through long vetting processes in order to ensure they can keep their valuable data protected while still gaining some value out of it. FHE aims to resolve that issue.
“If we are able to perform computation with data encrypted, we can address this paradox of the need to know versus the need to share,” Flavio Bergamaschi, FHE pioneer and IBM Researcher, explained to reporters. “It’s almost the same as enabling the processing of that data without getting access to it. If we can achieve that, we are adding a level of security beyond what [exists] today.”
FHE is particularly well-suited for heavily-regulated industries like finance and healthcare, Bergamaschi said.
“Whenever you have ‘crown jewel’ data you want to protect, this is potentially the right type of encryption to work with,” he said.
Based on lattice cryptography, FHE is “to the best of our knowledge” quantum resistant, Bergamaschi.
While the technology holds great potential, it does require a significant shift in the security paradigm. Typically, inside the business logic of an application, data remains decrypted, Bergamaschi explained.
