Curated from Latest from TechRadar US in News,opinion — Here’s what matters right now:
Encryption has been on a long journey, transcending centuries, from leather scrolls to quantum-resistant algorithms. But if we look at security requirements for businesses 25 years ago, the world was very different then. I sold encryption software back in 2000 when no one apart from the Government knew they needed it. It was free for home or personal use, so trying to sell encryption in a world where users borrowed it free of charge was tough. One of the most notable examples at the time was OpenSSL, an open-source project that provided free encryption tools for securing internet communication. Another popular tool was PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), which had both free and commercial versions. The free version was widely used by privacy advocates, journalists, and tech-savvy users to encrypt emails and files. However, eventually, public-key cryptography and tools like PGP started to gain traction for secure email and online communication. It was a pivotal moment as encryption moved from being a nice-to-have to becoming essential for privacy and trust online. Unlocking Encrypted Data Without Compromising Security Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) has also been in the mix for about 15 years. But it has been labelled as too complicated, requiring too much processing, too much disk space, being too slow and more. But we’ve seen a breakthrough in FHE whereby customers are using it not just to encrypt data, but to query, decrypt and use it. They can also search data faster when it's encrypted than when it's not! Without going into lengthy explanations as to how the integers (the raw material that makes encryption possible) and cryptographic algorithms work, in simple terms, it’s only the user who has access to and can understand and read the data. Where anyone else is concerned, the data is just garbage. Why is this so important? If we look at how encryption tools work today, we create data, which we then encrypt. Every time we search, every time we move, we decrypt – because that’s the only way to make the data work for us. Once we have decrypted it, we must re-encrypt it to ensure it is safe. Therefore, we have multiple touch points where data, which we tell users is encrypted, isn’t encrypted. This might be okay for data-at-rest, but once you migrate data from A to B, in many cases, we send the encryption keys with it. This is the equivalent of sending the keys to the castle with the castle. Also, the moment the user wants to do anything with that data (which is arguably when it is most useful) then all that safeguarding is gone. Therefore, for us to be able to allow customers to use data whilst it still has a safety net around it and ensure data remains confidential is a huge leap forward. Most importantly, we don't have encryption keys travelling with the data; the keys are generated at the point of login. Is Bootstrapping FHE The Answer? Many in the industry advocate bootstrapping FHE as a workaround. This is a clever trick that allows encrypted dat
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Original reporting: Latest from TechRadar US in News,opinion