On November 14, Portland,
OR-based Galois
announced it has been awarded a 5-year, $15.2 million contract by Intelligence Advanced
Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to make secure computation
(SC) more accessible to data scientists and other programmers who are not
experts in cryptography. By doing so, the project seeks to expand the use of
privacy-preserving technology for government and commercial applications –
including personalized medicine analytics, patient medical records, public
accountability (e.g., FISA court watchdog), AI/machine learning, military data
sharing between nations, and cyber security.
While strides have
been made protecting data in transit and data at rest, it has proven far more
challenging to protect data in the last mile — while it is
being computed on. The Galois-led project for IARPA’s Homomorphic Encryption
Computing Techniques with Overhead Reduction (HECTOR) Program extends Galois’ work in secure
computation technologies, including homomorphic encryption, multi-party
computation, circuit garbling, and zero knowledge proofs, all of which allow
for computing on data while it remains cryptographically protected.
Verona will be focusing on extending the Julia programming language to
enable easy deployment of secure computation.
“These technologies can drive a sea change in how applications assure privacy of sensitive data,” said Dr. David Archer, principal researcher in privacy and cryptography at Galois. “Our objective is to develop a software development and runtime environment that brings secure computation to non-experts in cryptography. This environment will include tools for developing secure computation enriched programs, estimating the resource use of those programs, as well as deploying and executing them and proving their correct execution.”
The Galois-led Verona project includes key research contributions from New Jersey Institute of Technology, Two-Six Labs, KU Leuven, Julia Computing, and Columbia University.
Source: Galois
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