Communications of the ACM
Securing the Cloud
Homomorphic encryption could secure cloud computing by enabling users to send encrypted data to a cloud server, which would process the data without decryption and send back a version that was still encrypted.
Credit: Christine Daniloff/MIT
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have created an encryption algorithm that could improve security for cloud computing technology. The researchers say a new type of cryptography, homomorphic encryption, could secure cloud computing by enabling users to send encrypted data to a cloud server, which would then process the data without decryption and send back a version that was still encrypted.
Until now, a major flaw with homomorphic encryption is that if a user sends a search term to a server for a specific record, the server would have to send back information on every record in the database. The MIT team has solved this by creating a functional encryption scheme that combines several existing schemes, starting with homomorphic encryption and embedding the decryption algorithm in a garbled circuit that allows only the holder of a cryptographic key to encrypt data.
"Our result is in some sense the first result showing that you can do this very generally," says MIT professor Shafi Goldwasser, who together with professor Silvio Micali are the most recent recipients of ACM's A.M. Turing Award. The researchers recently presented their work at ACM's 45th Symposium on the Theory of Computing.
From MIT News
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2013 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found