IARPA director: New homomorphic crypto is ‘math magic’

The latest kind of advanced encryption could soon allow classified computing to be done on unclassified computer systems, a senior intelligence official said Thursday. “That’s really one of the next places [we’re] likely to look — Can we use homomorphic encryption to do secure multiparty computation?” Jason Matheny, director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, told the Billington Cybersecurity Summit. Matheny said that his agency had first started researching homomorphic encryption in 2011 to fix a gap in the way data was kept secure. The method allows analysis on encrypted data without the need for decryption. “We were good at protecting [data] at rest, we were good at protecting it in transit, but not while it was being processed,” Matheny said. The problem: In order to perform any computational function, even as simple as a search, the data had to be decrypted, then processed. And at that point an adversary who […]

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Intelligence community seeks answers in aftermath of Harold Martin case

The arrest and then recent indictment of Harold T. Martin III, a 20-year veteran of the intelligence community who is accused of carrying out the biggest theft of classified information in U.S. history, is causing leaders on Capitol Hill and in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to re-examine exactly how the government defends […]

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