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MIT's Bitcoin-Inspired 'Enigma' Lets Computers Mine Encrypted Data

Posted by Soulskill on from the mine-your-own-business dept.

Guy Zyskind, Oz Nathan, and the MIT Media Lab have developed a system to encrypt data in a way that it can still be shared and used without being decrypted. "To keep track of who owns what data—and where any given data’s pieces have been distributed—Enigma stores that metadata in the bitcoin blockchain, the unforgeable record of messages copied to thousands of computers to prevent counterfeit and fraud in the bitcoin economy." Enigma needs a fairly large base of users to operate securely, so its creators have proposed requiring a fee for anyone who wants data processed in this way. That fee would then be split among the users doing the processing. Those with encrypted datasets on the Enigma network could also sell access to datamining operations without letting the miners see the unencrypted data.

8 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Cryptography is for cows. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    One less moo and you would have made first post.

  2. Hmm... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Kind of confusing summary? If I'm reading the article correctly...

    They found a way to distribute a computationally expensive technique known as homomorphic encryption using some of the technology we already use with bitcoins. The homomorphic encryption technique itself allows you to perform calculations on/with encrypted data without ever decrypting it.

    1. Re:Hmm... by Lennie · · Score: 2

      Homomorphic encryption isn't new at all.

      It's just that we used to think it's uselessly slow. I believe it was in the millions times slower than a normal application without this kind of encryption.

      But in more recent years people have been able to build practical systems with it by mixing different kinds and more specialized forms of encryption:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      There are companies that also build products: Cloud Encryption Gateways

      But I doubt that really solves the problem, if the application gets an update the proxy will probably start to leak data.

      --
      New things are always on the horizon
  3. That's not what the blockchain is for by michelcolman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The blockchain is already close to 40 GB in size, and now people want to store all sorts of other data (or metadata) in it. I can see this getting out of hand rather quickly.

    Miners won't be able to store the entire chain anymore, so only a few archival nodes will still have it. Just how secure and accessible will your metadata be then?

    1. Re:That's not what the blockchain is for by SLi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Then configure your miners to not accept these transactions.

      Essentially the blockchain is exactly this: A way to record information in an unforgeable way, for a fee to the miner. Bitcoin works, and the only way it can work, is by being a system that behaves in a desired way when each player maximizes their own benefit. (To a small extent this can be affected in a centralized fashion because the community can develop the reference implementation to a desired direction, but that may or may not turn to be anathema and may or may not be a powerful enough tool.)

      True, blockchain bloat causes problems, and it's a limited resource. The bitcoin solution is to sell the space to the highest bidder, because generally that maximizes the seller's benefit. In a sense, someone saying "that's not what the blockchain is for" is very similar to someone complaining that people are using lithium to make these stupid batteries, driving its price up, and "that's not what lithium is for".

      Whether Bitcoin can survive all the technical challenges in the long term is not at all obvious. For all we know, it might be that the entire model is game-theoretically self-destructive if analyzed thoroughly enough. In fact, it has provided quite a few surprises where the incentives have turned out to be something different than anticipated, causing weird scenarios where e.g. in some situations it's advantageous for a miner to not immediately report a found block. So far none of these have been such that they would cause a death spiral, but that's far from a given. (Arvind Narayanan's blog posts on the topic are quite insightful; you might want to start from https://freedom-to-tinker.com/...).

  4. What's the next project? by circletimessquare · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ultra?

    I'm joking of course but considering the historical significance of the name Enigma as a cypher that was spectacularly hacked to divulge crucial war secrets, it might not have been the best PR to call their project that name.

    Rename.

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  5. Is bitcoin sustainable? by doug141 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Bitcoin already uses 5000 times the energy visa does to record a financial single transaction. If parasites learn to use the bitcoin network for their own computations, that will get even worse.
    http://motherboard.vice.com/re...

  6. Re:data-mining encrypted data? by WOOFYGOOFY · · Score: 2

    Sorry, but this time you're just wrong without stipulation. The whole point of homomorphic encryption and computation is the computor never has the key and the data is never decrypted. It remains encrypted throughout the computation.

    They are doing this and then they're also doing a second thing, distributing the computation which is an ortho. concern to the homomorphic encryption and computation, in theory at least, if not in this implementation.

    Homomorphic encryption is counter-intutitve to most of us. I had never heard about it until a few months ago. At first glance, it seems like a thing that can't be true; like relativity.