IBM Claims Breakthrough In Analysis of Encrypted Data

An anonymous reader writes "An IBM researcher has solved a thorny mathematical problem that has confounded scientists since the invention of public-key encryption several decades ago. The breakthrough, called 'privacy homomorphism,' or 'fully homomorphic encryption,' makes possible the deep and unlimited analysis of encrypted information — data that has been intentionally scrambled — without sacrificing confidentiality." Reader ElasticVapor writes that the solution IBM claims "might better enable a cloud computing vendor to perform computations on clients' data at their request, such as analyzing sales patterns, without exposing the original data. Other potential applications include enabling filters to identify spam, even in encrypted email, or protecting information contained in electronic medical records."

Comments

Look but don't see.

[Itninja]

First data is created and deemed private. It's then encrypted to prevent unauthorized people from seeing the private data. But other people want to analyze the data, without actually seeing it. Kind of like how it's good to know the income demographics of a city, but not to know the personal income of every person in said city. Never mind the fact that someone had to see the information at some point to render the statistics. Unless of course the results are never audited for accuracy. But's that's another story.

Anyway, so then we put our private data on someone else's server (we call it a 'cloud' - isn't that nice?) and they can't look at it because it's encrypted. But they will run analysis on the data, which requires a special tool to or something....look - all's I know is I get's me my KPI's for my board meetin'. Who really cares if some guys personal health records are sniffed by some computer...whoa! Jim has ass herpes?! I am so updating this on the Interwebz!