Article by Katharina Koerner: “Privacy professionals are witnessing a revolution in privacy technology. The emergence and maturing of new privacy-enhancing technologies that allow for data use and collaboration without sharing plain text data or sending data to a central location are part of this revolution.
The United Nations, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the U.S. White House, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, the UK Royal Society, and Singapore’s media and privacy authorities all released reports, guidelines and regulatory sandboxes around the use of PETs in quick succession. We are in an era where there are high hopes for data insights to be leveraged for the public good while maintaining privacy principles and enhanced security.
A prominent example of a PET is fully homomorphic encryption, often mentioned in the same breath as differential privacy, federated learning, secure multiparty computation, private set intersection, synthetic data, zero knowledge proofs or trusted execution environments.
As FHE advances and becomes standardized, it has the potential to revolutionize the way we handle, protect and utilize personal data. Staying informed about the latest advancements in this field can help privacy pros prepare for the changes ahead in this rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Homomorphic encryption: A game changer?
FHE is a groundbreaking cryptographic technique that enables third parties to process information without revealing the data itself by running computations on encrypted data.
This technology can have far-reaching implications for secure data analytics. Requests to a databank can be answered without accessing its plain text data, as the analysis is conducted on data that remains encrypted. This adds a third layer of security for data when in use, along with protecting data at rest and in transit…(More)”.