Math boffins come up with a cryptography breakthrough

A COUPLE OF math boffins have come up with a new cryptographic technique which for some reason our spell chucker corrects as homophobic.

Homomorphic encryption will allow web services to work with sensitive data without ever being able to read it.

Craig Gentry of IBM published a cryptographic proof that it is possible to add and multiply encrypted data in a way that does not expose the unencrypted data.

This means that someone could send an encrypted database to a cloud computing provider without the supplier having to decrypt it. The results could then be sent back to the data's owner, who could decode it on their own system.

Now Nigel Smart, professor of cryptology at Bristol University in the UK, and fellow boffin Frederik Vercauteren, a researcher at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, have reworked the original proposal into a version that can be implemented and tested.

They claim to have made it all a lot simpler. Gentry's cunning plan encoded everything in matrices and vectors, but Smart and Vercauteren use integers and polynomials.

Smart claims that it makes the whole process a lot easier to understand and work with.

It is still limited by the fact that, as more operations are performed, successive encrypted answers degrade. It means that the current version isn't truly fully homomorphic. However IBM is convinced it will get the thing out of the closet someday. µ