Enveil Founder Ellison Anne Williams On Cryptography's 'Holy Grail'

Excerpt: RegTech100 company Enveil is bringing a whole new level of cybersecurity to the financial services space.

Ellison Anne Williams, founder of Enveil, the cybersecurity startup, has described practical homomorphic encryption as the “holy grail of cryptography”.

She’s not wrong. People have been trying to solve it for four decades as it would provide people with the ability to enjoy continuous security, even whilst working on a file.

“If encryption is a vault protecting your sensitive data, traditional practice requires taking the data out of the vault every time it needs to be used or processed – when users perform a search or apply analytics,” Williams tells RegTech Analyst.

But taking the data out of the vault means it is being exposed to the risk of attacks and liability.

“Homomorphic encryption allows these critical actions to take place within the vault, eliminating the need for data exposure at any point,” she continues. “It allows organizations to securely search, cross-match and derive insights from third-party data sources without ever revealing the contents of the search or analytic or compromising the security or ownership of the underlying data.”

However, as important as being able to secure data while it’s being used or processed, making it a reality is far from easy. “The challenge all comes back to usability,” Williams explains. “No matter how great a technology is, if it can’t work within an existing workflow in a business-relevant timeframe, it is very unlikely to be used.”

Read the full article at FinTech Global.