An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
Let’s say you are a lender assessing the creditworthiness of a customer for a loan. Today, you typically send that customer’s private data (PII) over to a credit bureau, where they would run their own algorithms to provide a score, or detect a fraud attempt. That used to be an acceptable data exchange, but in today’s age of massive data sharing scandals, data breaches and resulting privacy regulations, all parties will need to comply to higher standards.
Duality offers a cloud-based homomorphic encryption solution that aims to solve just this problem. This encryption approach (pioneered by Duality co-founder Dr. Shafi Goldwasser at MIT) allows two parties to run proofs and routines on data to get back results, without either party seeing or accessing the data itself.
You can see how such a system might be useful for a pharma company to connect with clinical or medical records to run its simulations, without touching personal patient files. Or for critical government groups to plan new infrastructure projects based on both commercial and military security needs without leaking any IP or confidential data to unauthorized parties.
Homomorphic encryption, which has been called the ‘holy grail’ of security, is now an open source innovation project, with a community of initial contributors. Unfortunately (or fortunately for safety reasons), homomorphic also requires tons of computing power to effectively use for work, so this isn’t the kind of workload most enterprise IT shops would want to take on themselves.
“Companies that collect data don’t have the ability to extract value or meaning out of it,” said Duality CEO and co-founder Alon Kaufman. “If two or more companies want to work together on statistical analysis or machine learning models, they can do that in a high performance environment without decryption or sharing the data.”
Copyright ©2019 Intellyx LLC. Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.
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