IBM's breakthrough encryption for the Web
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 01 October 2009, 23:02 IST   |    1 Comments
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IBM's breakthrough encryption for the Web
Bangalore: Just last year, Craig Gentry got a three month internship at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York. Little did he know then, that in the following days at IBM he would come up with an encryption that would allow people to share their data and keep it secret at the same time. According to Business Week, Craig was sitting in a Manhattan cafe thinking about cryptography, the science of codes and data protection, tussling with a question that had confounded the world's greatest mathematicians for three decades. Is it possible to run calculations on encrypted data without actually decrypting it? That's when Gentry got an idea. He thought of boxes enclosed within other boxes, which led to his breakthrough solution. Formerly, a Stanford University PhD candidate, Gentry was hardly an iconic math prodigy; he was nearly 35 years old at the time. The so-called fully homomorphic encryption, which is currently just a theory, would enable consumers to carry out many of their online activities, from e-commerce to banking, without disclosing the numbers or details of the private information involved. Gentry describes it as submitting to surgery without even having to take off your clothes, or identifying yourself to the doctor. This type of protection, if it works, could bring a crucial layer of safety and privacy to the online world, encouraging people to entrust more of their lives, from banking to health care, to the networks. However, such changes don't happen overnight. Gentry's breakthrough, unveiled by IBM in June, is still years from the marketplace. It involves lots of cloaking and uncloaking of data, which eats up too much computing power for now. However, IBM officials are describing the nascent technology in expansive terms. J.R. Rao, who leads the Secure Software & Services Group at IBM, says that this encryption could enable vast new areas of commerce and medicine to migrate safely to cloud computers. He compares Gentry's invention to the Wright brothers' first flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina - a demonstration of the possibility of something big, though not yet commercially viable. Gentry, who has since been hired by IBM (while still putting the finishing touches on his PhD thesis), took a circuitous route to the summit of research in applied mathematics. A math major in college, he went on to law school at Harvard University. Ten years ago he was working at a New York law firm and specializing in intellectual property. One day, after about a year and a half as a lawyer, he reworked his resume to emphasize his math skills and posted it. He had been itching to return to maths. This was at the height of the dot-com boom when the market for math was booming. Gentry landed a job at the Silicon Valley labs of NTT DoCoMo (DCM), the Japanese giant in mobile telephony. But it wasn't until he was in his 30s, in 2005, that Gentry enrolled in graduate studies at Stanford in computer science, and in the summer of 2008, he headed east for his three-month summer internship at IBM. By this time, most cryptographers viewed a fully homomorphic system as impossible. They had devised systems to carry out operations on encrypted data. But each one was partial. The challenge cryptographers face in devising such a scheme, is distortion. Carrying out calculations on encrypted data results in slight distortions. With lots of calculations, the distortion grows enough to render the data useless. Gentry's idea at the coffee shop was to give the encrypted data a double-wrapping of protection and to have most of the calculations, and distortion, affecting the outer layer. "Boxes inside of boxes" is his description of the approach.