/PRNewswire/ From the banking industry to national security and even cryptocurrencies, quantum computing and quantum security has found itself a major.
DARPA Seeks Chips that Can Crunch Data Without Decrypting It
Current methods of doing fully homomorphic encryption require too much computing power to be used widely.
The Defense Advanced Research Agency awarded four research teams multimillion-dollar contracts to figure out how to perform computations on encrypted data faster and with less power.
The four performers for DARPA’s Data Protection in Virtual Environments program aim to build silicon chips capable of supporting Fully Homomorphic Encryption, which enables users to compute and analyze data without exposing it to compromise by decrypting it. FHE still requires far too much compute overhead to be considered a practical option, so DPRIVE performers will create brand new chips specialized for FHE.
By
Kelsey Atherton on March 11, 2021 at 11:15 AM
Keeping data encrypted as it is processed could mitigate the harm from cyber intrusions, even by determined adversaries.
ALBUQUERQUE: This week, DARPA announced the award of several contracts that will let computers process encrypted data, instead of having to decrypt it prior to processing. That could drastically improve the security and functionality of cloud-based processing for the military, because data won’t have to switch constantly between being protected encrypted forms and vulnerable decrypted ones.
On March 8, DARPA announced the award of contracts to four research teams for the Under the Data Protection in Virtual Environments (DPRIVE) program. These teams will be led by Duality Technologies, Galois, SRI International, and Intel Federal, and will each be responsible for developing both the hardware and the software that allows for encrypted processing at speed.
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 m