Homomorphic encryption technology originally developed at the National Security Agency is now ready for distributed enterprise use-cases. (Source: eWeek)
Excerpt:
The core innovation behind Enveil’s technology is its implementation of homomorphic encryption at scale. With homomorphic encryption, regular usage operations, including search, can be conducted on encrypted data without ever needing to decrypt the data. Williams noted that homomorphic encryption is a concept that has been around for 30 years, though historically it has been very computational intensive and slow, making it impractical for many use cases.
“So that’s the major breakthrough that we had—really taking the holy grail of encryption that for the last 30 years hasn’t been practical for any kind of commercial use and making it practical and commercializing it into a product,” she said.
Given her company’s origins at the NSA, Williams said the level of cryptography used in the Enveil platform is certified for nation-state protection and it is never decrypted at any point during the processing. Beyond protecting against nation-state level threats, Williams sees Enveil’s technology aiding financial services as well. For example, a bank can use Enveil to perform encrypted searches on sensitive data.
“If you have a trader, they’re researching a potential trade and they don’t want to tip their hand before they execute the trade. [ZeroReveal Cloud Fabric] enables them to do that,” she said.
The Enveil ZeroReveal Compute Fabric includes client and server applications. Williams explained that the client application encrypts the searches conducted by an organization.
“The server application’s job is to function as really a brain and understand how to take the encrypted searches that it received and have them processed, without ever decrypting anything,” she said.
Enveil’s platform enables organizations to use whatever key management system (KMS) is already in place for cryptographic key generation and management.
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