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Microsoft To Provide New Encryption Algorithm For the Healthcare Sector
An anonymous reader writes: The healthcare sector gets a hand from Microsoft, who will release a new encryption algorithm which will allow developers to handle genomic data in encrypted format, without the need of decryption, and by doing so, minimizing security risks. The new algorithm is dubbed SEAL (Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library) and is based on homomorphic encryption, which allows mathematical operations to be run on encrypted data, yielding the same results as if it would run on the cleartext version. Microsoft will create a new tool and offer it as a free download. They've also published the theoretical research. For now, the algorithm can handle only genomic data.
It is based on homophobic encryption!
Super Easy Access Leak.
Your initial thoughts are wrong.
This is a type of encryption algorithm known as homomorphic encryption, which allows one to do operate on encrypted data without decrypting it.
This has no bearing on the strength of the encryption against an adversary.
>> encrytped
Someone, please buy the Dice interns a spellchecker for Christmas this year.
And what are we, as non-military individuals living elsewhere than France, supposed to do about it?
What types of mathematical operations are done on genomic data? I know nothing about it, but it doesn't seem like that's the kind of data you'd be performing mathematical operations on.
>> worst terrorist attack in French history
French history is LONG. Check out the Rhineland Massacres, the Albigensian Crusade, and maybe the Carolingian Succession for starters.
It's strong. Very strong.
Problem is, there's a tradeoff in time/speed and operations you can do. There are general algorithms that let you do a wide variety of operations, but they are very slow - on the order of a million times slower than unencrypted.
Faster algorithms usually restrict the operations you can do. on the data, and performance is almost equal that of unencrypted.
Note that you don't simply say "I want to add these two numbers" , encrypt them, then just do a simple add - no, the operation after encryption may be a multiplication, or other operation.
And this is actually very useful - because it lets you store critical data in the cloud, and perform manipulations of that data in the cloud, without the cloud provider having to have the encryption key. If the data is stolen, the hacker gets encrypted garbage.
So the current operation is database - you put up an encrypted data in the cloud, and the cloud provider runs an encrypted database service. You can perform limited queries, and the cloud provider will return you the encrypted rows as encrypted blobs to you. You use the key (kept onsite for security), and marvel that you just did a transaction in the cloud, the cloud provider executed the operation, and you got back the rows that you wanted, and at no time other than on your PC was it ever in plaintext.
You could be more fancy - say you want to add up a column - you tell the database server to add it up (encrypted), and the final result is sent back, as encrypted data. You use your key and get your answer.
That's the primary use case for this sort of encryption. Do it right and even in house database can be completely encrypted. So stuff like health information and banking records will never be in plain text until you need it so breaches won't be as harmful.
How do you figure?
If I add two values, and I know the domain of both values... then I... ooooohhhhh, ya never mind, I still have no idea what the two values were, even if I know what they add up too.
I'd still wonder whether this type of encryption which specifically allows for mathematical operations would be weaker than encryption algorythms that don't, but I clearly don't have the correct brain cell arrangements to do that analysis at this time. More learning required.
Very cool though.
Wave your arms in the air, scream and shout and run in circles?
What shall we do? Stop talking? Hello? The best thing is to go on with your life and tell the haters that you don't care. And by the way it is very interesting to do what MS claims to have done. If you want to do cloud computing you must be able to do similar things to data and code.
When in trouble,
Or in doubt,
Run in circles,
Scream and shout.
-- Heinlein
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Homomorphic encryption is a form of encryption that allows computations to be carried out on ciphertext, thus generating an encrypted result which, when decrypted, matches the result of operations performed on the plaintext.
So the results are "encrypted". Interesting idea.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
then I fail utterly to understand
Yes, yes you do.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I guess the point being, if you can operate on encrypted data in the completely same way as if you had the original, what is privacy is advanced through the encryption? It sounds like a second level redirect to encode the sequences to begin with. We know why its being promoted. Having 'no personally identifiable information' sent to and from groups would allow for privacy laws to be bypassed in the name of science. I don't specifically have an axe to grind in that matter, but can you really say the data isn't personal if in fact you can derive the exact same results from the samples?
Here's one possible application of said system (corrections welcome, I just thought it out while writing).
Joe the criminal is born sometime after mandatory child DNA screening (already in place in the US). His DNA was sequenced and encrypted for scientific study by ABC pharma-labs. ABC then stores a copy of the data for 'any use' because the encryptedDNA isn't 'private'. ABC pharma-labs also contracts their services to police departments who want to know if any of their criminal DNA samples 'ping' a known person.
Joe commits a crime and leaves DNA all over the place. The police give the sample to ABC pharma-labs. They run the sample and discover that the NNSGRC patient ref. #123456 was the perpetrator of the crime by running a battery of comparison tests (more likely running test results against a batch of prior run sequence hashes). This is probably super time consuming and expensive for now, but it'll only get cheaper. Finding the sample that is the closest match to the crime DNA, the police subpoena NNSGRC with a warrant to tie the ref. number with Joe-the-criminal's name. NNSGRC or whomever is in control of their secrecy -may- dispute the subpoena and in all likelyhood this will be settled with a supreme court ruling that will either say this scenario is either 100% legal, or pseudo-encrypted DNA is still private and as such there's literally no point to encrypt the information at all.
Assuming the court says its legal, you now have a national criminal database without passing a single new law. The end.
Bye!
Couldn't we lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something?
PS: Here's an interesting article on the topic a few years old:
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/0...
Bye!
Continuing the fine tradition of not RTFA around here, I didn't read the research paper but I did skim wikipedia's entry.
Nowhere do I see any mention of authenticity. This is as important as confidentiality and integrity. I'm not saying there isn't a solution (I'm not a cryptographer) but I wonder if anyone has any insight or links to a solution if it exists.
Here's the scenario. Homomorphic encryption lets us keep the data constantly encrypted, maintaining confidentiality. Ok, that's cool for data breaches, we stay much better protected from loss of confidentiality.
But what if a malicious actor purposely performs an operation on the data? Changing genomic data in this case might mess up diagnoses/research, etc. Future applications could be stuff like medical billing -- if its easy to tack on another bill, even if you don't know previous bills because its encrypted? Is there any mechanism that checks that the operation we perform on the encrypted data was authorized, i.e., that I am a manager allowed to do the operation and I specifically consent to performing the operation? Typical integrity checks wouldn't catch this; integrity is correctness of the data, which means it will only verify the computation was performed correctly and then move on. Authenticity is a different issue.
I would suspect Microsoft Research thought of this. My question is: is there a countermeasure that can be described as part of the algorithm? Or is the countermeasure "be careful with any software that uses this algorithm, make sure it checks authenticity before applying operations!". If the solution is for developers to be careful, I'm not convinced the algorithm made anything better. Many developers do not know cryptography and may assume safety, or may not have the time and resources due to a manager driving a hard deadline; in these cases, "we use MS's algorithm!" can get advertised without any increase in safety (and possibly even a decrease, as some might look to this as a crutch and reason why they can cut corners...).
How do you figure?
If I add two values, and I know the domain of both values...
You've got to realize that the operation that you're doing on the encrypted values is not the same as the corresponding operation on the unencrypted values.
For example, if E is the encryption function, then E(a + b) is not performed by calculating E(a) + E(b). Instead, there's a special "EAdd" binary function you need to call to perform addition on the encrypted values -- in other words: E(a + b) = EAdd(E(a), E(b)). The "EAdd" function may be significantly more complicated than simple addition is.
You fundamentally don't understand homomorphic encryption.
The results you get are encrypted results. You can't fish with them.
In your example, ABC runs the tests, and gets encrypted results. These are useful only to the person who has the key to understand Joe's DNA in the first place.
What this allows is the people who process data to not always have to be the same people who have the data. So if you build a server that does really hard math on DNA results, you can be given the encrypted data, perform your math on the encrypted data, and hand back the encrypted result. You never understand the data.
Your initial thoughts are wrong.
This is a type of encryption algorithm known as homomorphic encryption, which allows one to do operate on encrypted data without decrypting it.
This has no bearing on the strength of the encryption against an adversary.
Practical homomorphic encryption (like this MSFT product) is based on simplified encryption (to make it more practical, duh). AFAIKT in this case the MSFT product is based on a derivative YASHE (yet another somewhat homomorphic encryption) scheme. This is a bit more like steganography than pure encryption as it "hides" the encryption in a ring and requires lattice theory to generate a unique decryption (meaning you can only perform a few addition/multiplication operations before you have to re-decrypt, re-encrypt). Although theoretically, you can make this encryption "strong" by selecting different parameters (and introducing more overhead and lower error bounds), at some point there is a fundamental limit related to the entropy of the data set itself (which for medical-like data is pretty low entropy).
And then there is the (in)famous sum-product puzzle, which although is kind of an interesting puzzle in that in illustrates how seemingly impossible obfuscation can be removed by the most innocuous oracle queries.
What will break this type of encryption is not brute force, but say on medical data examining distributional anomalies to make a dictionary of sorts. Also since this appears to be some sort of "ECB-like" encryption (most data is encrypted the same way so you can operate on it), we all know how weak that can be in some situations...
This is why in most medical research, data must be de-identified, not merely encrypted. Not that fixes things by a long shot, but it's better than simply encrypting and hoping...
I don't think you need the quotes there.
Also, if Microsoft is really on the ball here, they have the ability to be first to market in a niche that could really use this. This is innovative and arguably somewhat charitable
The worst terrorist attack in French history happened a few days ago. Over a hundred are dead in Paris, and the war against ISIS is escalating.Why the fuck are you wasting time reading and posting completely irrelevant shit on Slashdot when supposedly you have better priorities? For the rest of us the world goes on.
"SEAL" is the name of a patented cipher from 1994.
Let me introduce you to my new encryption algorithm, Alien Encoding System (AES). Because that won't conflict at all with existing ciphers...
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
But, if it's millions of times slower, then you'd need a cloud provider with a million CPUs to do the same work you could do on your desktop with 1 CPU.
Encrypting data using a homomorphic encryption scheme allows for meaningful computation on the encrypted data producing the results of the computation in encrypted form, without the need for decrypting it or requiring access to the decryption key.
How long until someone comes up with a blockchain scheme that pays out for computational work done on encrypted data sets?
Or, more importantly, you can take your encrypted data and smash out the results on AWS infrastructure that you've rented and retrieve the results without ever having compromised the privacy of the individual to whom the data belongs.
But its the cloud!
And that's why no one is deploying general homomorphic encryption. There are a few approaches that run almost as fast as doing the unencrypted work, but only support a very limited set of operations and have space requirements that scale linearly (or worse) with the number of operations that you want to support. If it's targeted at a specific application then it's conceivable that they've managed to create something that's fast, but only useful for a very specific use case.
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This is defacto why encryption goes hand in hand with privacy. Isn't math beautiful.
Surely it has to be taken as a given that anything from Microsoft is fatally compromised with respect to privacy.
Only boring people are ever bored.
So that means it will start being adopted in about 20 to 30 years, at least 6 months after the government deadline to do so.
Normally I'm always a scientific progressive but something about this idea horrifies me. Doing analysis on data while it still remains encrypted? better hope that nothing goes wrong, better hope that there isn't some hidden unknown variable that develops. Kind of like a magic trick and magic tricks have a habit of going wrong..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..