There is a new industry association in town. It’s called The Fully Homomorphic Encryption Technical Consortium on Hardware, or FHETCH for the acronyms lovers out there. No matter what you think about another industry group or yet another encryption standard, this may be a good idea.
So far, FHETCH is not very big. It consists of two hardware accelerator companies, Niobium Microsystems in the US and Optalysys in the UK, and Chain Reaction, a blockchain technology company in Israel. But also in consideration for membership are cloud computing giants Google and Amazon, according to Niobium’s chief product officer, Jorge Myszne. There are also at least two dozen other companies in the space that could participate.
Cloud insecurity
The move to data storage and manipulation in “the cloud” was once thought to be a great way to protect data than keeping it on corporate or personal hardware. It was cheaper to maintain, created a billion-dollar industry, and it was arguably easier to keep secure. But those pesky cybercriminals found ways to hack, phish and infiltrate their way into the most (and least) secure cloud servers, wreaking havoc on customer personal data and corporate secrets… while also creating a billion-dollar industry to stop them.
Even when the data is fully encrypted on a server (data at rest), or encrypted while being shared (data in transit), it can’t be worked with while encrypted. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) fixes that problem. Homomorphic is Greek for “in the same form as”. FHE allows data to be manipulated inside the computational infrastructure without decryption, while also allowing it to be at rest and in transit.
Encrypted at all stages
Say a medical researcher wants to take a batch of medical data from the Mayo Clinic to do a study. Because federal medical data regulations forbid the sharing of patient data, that makes it very difficult to get that permission. But if the clinic is using FHE, it can transfer the data to the to the researcher, fully anonymized data in the encrypted form, without ever decrypting it, and analyze it for the study. There is no violation of the regulations.
That is one possible benefit. Another might be even better. FHE is resistant to quantum computer decryption, just like the recent post-quantum computer (PQC) encryption standards from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Myszne claims NIST will soon be working on FHE standards.
However, this is not a death knell for the PQC industry because FHE is painfully slow, Myszne said, hence the need for hardware acceleration. It solves some problems, but creates others, apparently. The full interview with Myszne follows.
Lou Covey is the Chief Editor for Cyber Protection Magazine. In 50 years as a journalist he covered American politics, education, religious history, women’s fashion, music, marketing technology, renewable energy, semiconductors, avionics. He is currently focused on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. He published a book on renewable energy policy in 2020 and is writing a second one on technology aptitude. He hosts the Crucial Tech podcast.