The Last Watchdog: 'Homomorphic encryption' emerges as the Holy Grail of cloud computing

Excerpt:

In laymen’s terms, homomorphic encryption is a very advanced form of cryptography that allows you to perform operations on encrypted data as if it were plain text.

Homomorphic encryption, Williams asserts, is nothing short of a “Holy Grail.” The technology “enables people to be able to process data in its encrypted state out in the cloud, and so it changes the game.”

It took some of the smartest math minds on the planet several years to work it out, with the aid of advances in the computational capacities of computers. Waiting in the wings were company and government security experts who understood the cloud security gap; they’ve long anticipated what would be possible in a so-called “never decrypt’ business environment.

“Yeah absolutely, they are paying attention,” Williams told me. “One of the big reasons that some organizations have been hesitant to move out to the cloud is even though they can encrypt the data and put it out there, they can’t process it in its encrypted state, in any kind of effective way. So, essentially they can only use the cloud as a vault for encrypted data, instead of leveraging the full processing power of it. “

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