Built In: Encryption’s ‘Holy Grail’

Excerpt from the article:

Fully homomorphic encryption combines addition capabilities with multiplication capabilities. But even just those two primitives together have big consequences.

“It’s the only type of encryption that gives you those two properties, which is why it’s often considered to be the Holy Grail of cryptography,” said Ellison Anne Williams, a former National Security Agency cryptographer who in 2016 founded Enveil, which focuses on bringing HE to the commercial sector.

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Despite the challenges, homomorphic encryption research is already finding its way to the commercial sector. At the aforementioned Enveil, Williams (right) has brought the expertise she refined at the NSA, where she researched encrypted search, mainly to finance. The company is also exploring healthcare and other industries with heavy privacy regulations. (Genomics analytics has attracted notable attention from homomorphic encryption researchers.)

At the center of Enveil’s services is the company’s API-based software, which, as Williams explains, sits atop an organization’s data at rest and data in transit and allows for some encrypted search and encrypted analytics — sometimes over encrypted data, sometimes over unencrypted data.

“We can take those searches or those analytics or those machine learning models, encrypt them, and then go run them anywhere our software is installed without ever decrypting them at any point during processing,” she said. “That’s powered by homomorphic encryption.”

Read the full article at Built In.