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Together, the vendor giants aim to make “in use” encryption — also known as “fully homomorphic encryption” — economical and practical.
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The widespread encryption of data while stored on disk and communicated through the network — often called “at rest” and “in transit” — are critical security measures to protect business and personal data. Now Intel and Microsoft hope to create a practical and usable implementation of a third measure — “in use” encryption — that could allow encrypted data to be processed without decryption.
More formally known as fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), this area of cryptography research has already produced algorithms and systems that can manipulate encrypted data in very specific ways — for, say, averaging or searching. When the data in unencrypted, the result is the same as if the operation had been performed on the plaintext data. Yet FHE is costly, with processing requiring up to a million times more work to perform — a calculation that may take milliseconds to perform will instead take hours, days, or weeks, says Rosario Cammarota, principal engineer at Intel Labs.
To make the economics more feasible, Intel and Microsoft have signed onto a multiyear initiative launched by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
“If we want to enable homomorphic encryption to process general-purpose workloads at scale — real and meaningful homomorphic encryption — then we need to go to custom hardware,” Cammarota says. “From the hardware standpoint, DARPA wants a reduction in the overhead that is more than five orders of magnitude.”
That means speeding up the processing by a factor of roughly 100,000. For such a feat, Intel will create an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) accelerator chip to speed up computations on encrypted data, while Microsoft will create cloud services around the custom hardware, Intel stated in a March 8 announcement.
The DARPA initiative, known as the Data Protection in Virtual Environments (DPRIVE) program, funds teams of companies and research organizations to rearchitect the software, hardware, and algorithms to create a platform that dramatically speeds up the computations and makes FHE a practical encryption solution, said Dr. Tom Rondeau, DARPA program manager, in a March 2 statement.
“DPRIVE is looking to solve a really hard technical challenge that will involve a deep understanding of mathematics, algorithms, software, hardware, and circuit design,” Rondeau said. “I expect that there are very few organizations that have the needed expertise in all of these areas, which are each critical to the program’s success. As a result, I anticipate very interesting teams will form to cover the breadth of the research.”
Limited implementations of homomorphic encryption exist, tailored for searching or for aggregating data. In September, researchers at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology announced they had finished a small pilot of a security-data sharing technology, known as the Secure Cyber Risk Aggregation and Measurement (SCRAM) system. The system allows companies to share security data without revealing the information being shared.
FHE allows companies to exchange encrypted data, or cryptograms, that can be used for specific tasks without exposing the actual data. Solving the speed problem would allow FHE to be used for computationally intensive applications, such as creating machine-learning models using encrypted data collected from a variety of sources.
In December, Intel talked about its research into homomorphic encryption and another technology — federated learning — that could be applied to the training of machine-learning models in the future.
FHE uses a specialized type of encryption, known as lattice cryptography, that encodes data using complex mathematical computations that are not able to be solved by current decryption techniques. However, the latest FHE algorithms use a data representation known as Large Arithmetic Word Size (LAWS), which uses data widths of thousands of bits to help mitigate some of the challenges of the algorithms. Because the word size is much longer than the 64-bit data pipelines in current processors, the standard computing system is not suited to processing fully homomorphic encryption.
Such considerations mean that a specially made processor is necessary to significantly lop a few zeroes from the computation time, says Cammarota.
“Homomorphic cyphertext — call them cryptograms — are big and ugly,” he says. “To speed up their execution, we approach the problem by looking at different layer of abstractions, providing a solution at a very high level of specialization and parallelism.”
The custom ASIC will be optimized for the calculations in much the same way that floating-point units (FPUs) extended the capabilities of early computers in the 1980s.
The Intel-Microsoft team is not the only one rushing to produce a hardware accelerator for privacy-preserving encryption. Newark, NJ-based Duality Technologies announced in February that it would lead a team to develop its own FHE accelerator, known as Trebuchet. Team members include the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, New York University, Carnegie Mellon University, SpiralGen, Drexel University, and TwoSix Labs.
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Making security engineering successful, Go’s supply chain, mitigating JSON interoperability flaws, automating the hunt for deserialization flaws, the importance of observability, and what to do about Exchange.
Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes!
Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw142
The post Security Engineering, Evil Packages, Exchange SSRF, & Observability – ASW #142 appeared first on Malware Devil.
There’s been a lot in the news recently about a new series of vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft Exchange and attacks against those vulnerabilities. According to security writer Brian Krebs, over 30,000 organizations in the United States — and possibly hundreds of thousands of organizations globally — have been compromised by attacks against these vulnerabilities.
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On the heels of the SolarWinds supply chain attacks, organizations are again scrambling to assess the impact of a recently disclosed attack attributed to the Chinese state-sponsored HAFNIUM APT group that targets vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange servers with two zero-day exploits. Perhaps it’s time we accept that there’s a war going on, and that this war is being fought on the backs of commercial companies who are targeted by sophisticated, military-grade offensive campaigns.
The post HAFNIUM and SolarWinds Attacks Highlight Lack of Accountability appeared first on Security Boulevard.
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On the heels of the SolarWinds supply chain attacks, organizations are again scrambling to assess the impact of a recently disclosed attack attributed to the Chinese state-sponsored HAFNIUM APT group that targets vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange servers with two zero-day exploits. Perhaps it’s time we accept that there’s a war going on, and that this war is being fought on the backs of commercial companies who are targeted by sophisticated, military-grade offensive campaigns.
The post HAFNIUM and SolarWinds Attacks Highlight Lack of Accountability appeared first on Security Boulevard.
The post HAFNIUM and SolarWinds Attacks Highlight Lack of Accountability appeared first on Malware Devil.
In most IT shops, privacy, data security and compliance often resided under the same umbrella of ownership. While all 50 States in the US have data breach notification laws, we are seeing a shift in focus on data privacy globally. Privacy and data security compliance are often used interchangeably but this misuse in terminology (and the associated requirements for all IT organizations) creates a lot of confusion in an already complicated industry. Cynthia will explore some of the key factors in 2021 as to and why we need to get it right.
This segment is sponsored by Capsule8.
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Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw142
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The Team Nautilus security researchers at Aqua Security have reported the discovery of cryptomining activity that involved 92 malicious Docker Hub registries and 92 Bitbucket repositories, all set up over the course of four days. The attacks were discovered using a dynamic threat analysis (DTA) tool developed by Aqua for identifying security issues in production..
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Our thanks to BSides Calgary and Conference Speakers for publishing their outstanding presentations; which originally appeared at the group’s BSides Calgary 2020 Conference, and on the Organization’s YouTube Channel. Enjoy!
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Implement Zero Trust Security for your organization’s IT assets and meet HIPAA security components. Try JumpCloud for Free.
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International Women’s Day is recognized as a time to highlight the work, struggles, and joys that women face worldwide. And while many places show their appreciation with gifts of flowers or treats to individual women, this year at Avast we’re honoring Avastian women by focusing on three charities that are doing amazing work for women.
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Are you evaluating a move to Microsoft GCC or GCC High as you prepare for CMMC?
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via the comic delivery system monikered Randall Munroe resident at XKCD!
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Fortinet is committed to promoting gender diversity inside the company and within the cybersecurity industry. Learn more.
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In 1801, the United States had a small Navy. Thomas Jefferson deployed almost half that Navy—three frigates and a schooner—to the Barbary C...
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