IBM's Blindfolded Calculator

[anon]

A researcher's algorithm could teach computers a new privacy trick.

The computer science problems that earned Craig Gentry his job at IBM sound a bit like Zen koans. Could Google search the Web without knowing what it was looking for? Can an e-mail filter identify spam without reading it? Could an official count votes in an election without opening a ballot?

Those privacy puzzles, as Gentry has shown in an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, aren't as paradoxical as they seem. In a cryptographic epiphany last summer, the 35-year-old IBM ( IBM - news - people ) researcher cracked a problem that had remained unanswered despite 30 years of cryptographers' attention. His algorithm promises to unlock fertile new tangents in computer science and may eventually put IBM's stamp on a new blend of computation and privacy.

IBM's Blindfolded Calculator - Forbes.com

[slikrapid]

Imagine online accounting software that takes in encrypted data about your salary and expenditures, crunches the numbers and spits out an encrypted tax filing ready to be decrypted and sent to the IRS. The accounting software would never know the contents of what it had analyzed, and you might be less fretful about sending sensitive financial data to that online tax service.

basically the program does everything needed, you barely have to lift a finger - i generally like the automation - but a few simple questions: if it has to be sent to the IRS, then its quite obvious what the contents is - if the numbers have to be calculated then the input/output/relationship is known too - if you ID is known (in order not to have a mix up) then this would have to be quite a stupid program unable to connect these dots or send a report/summary to yours truly the big brother minions

But the trend in computing today is moving data and applications like tax accounting and e-mail filtering off the desktop to independently owned data centers--the so-called "cloud." That shift makes better use of scarce resources and also means that your files are always at your fingertips, no matter where you are or what device you're using.

the trend in today's world is going towards a police state
privacy protection doesn't mean giving it up to some privately owned data center
this also means that your files are always at someone else's fingertips too (no need to break into your computer, just into the cloud system)

up until the cloud computing your data was on your computer with your responsibility for protection - giving it up to 'the cloud' means that if their protection fails for one user (regardless of the reasons), it fails for every other cloud user too (its the same kind of protection for the whole cloud, unless you are maybe a VIP/premium user )

[noobglitch]

Wow my mind just got raped after reading that article. The first thing that got into my mind is frequency hopping. What if we use different computers to process each part of the data so even if one computer does get hacked, all it has is a piece of a data.

[slikrapid]

What if we use different computers to process each part of the data so even if one computer does get hacked, all it has is a piece of a data.

if your data is in the system those who know or are inside the system can access it (or simply make a copy and send it where they want) - if your data is to be processed without errors then every part has to link to the next/previous one --> data trail

the problem is never in the 'machine' - its in the people who use/abuse it