Intel, Microsoft Aim for Breakthrough in DARPA Encryption Project
Together, the vendor giants aim to make "in use" encryption -- also known as "fully homomorphic encryption" -- economical and practical.
The widespread encryption of data while stored on disk and communicated through the network — often called "at rest" and "in transit" — are critical security measures to protect business and personal data. Now Intel and Microsoft hope to create a practical and usable implementation of a third measure — "in use" encryption — that could allow encrypted data to be processed without decryption.
More formally known as fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), this area of cryptography research has already produced algorithms and systems that can manipulate encrypted data in very specific ways — for, say, averaging or searching. When the data in unencrypted, the result is the same as if the operation had been performed on the plaintext data. Yet FHE is costly, with processing requiring up to a million times more work to perform — a calculation that may take milliseconds to perform will instead take hours, days, or weeks, says Rosario Cammarota, principal engineer at Intel Labs.