Communications of the ACM
DARPA Will Spend $20 Million to Search For Crypto's Holy Grail
IBM researcher Craig Gentry
Credit: Forbes
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to spend $20 million over five years to find a way to both encrypt data and let it be used and manipulated. The Programming Computation on Encrypted Data (PROCEED) project would build upon the work of IBM researcher Craig Gentry, who has solved the theoretical problem of performing complex computations on encrypted data without decrypting it. Such full homomorphic encryption would enable someone to query a database without it ever knowing the content of the request.
Gentry's method takes immense computational power, so DARPA wants the participating contractors and academic research teams to reduce the computing time for full homomorphic encryption by a factor of 10 million compared to its current state, or alternatively reduce it to 100,000 times the computation required for unencrypted computing. Meanwhile, Gentry says he recently discovered a less efficient version that could offer more computational shortcuts.
Gentry recently received ACM's Grace Murray Hopper Award, which is awarded to the outstanding young computer professional of the year.
From Forbes
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