Securing the cloud

Grazed from MIT. Author: Larry Hardesty.

Homomorphic encryption is one of the most exciting new research topics in cryptography, which promises to make cloud computing perfectly secure. With it, a Web user would send encrypted data to a server in the cloud, which would process it without decrypting it and send back a still-encrypted result.

Sometimes, however, the server needs to know something about the data it’s handling. Otherwise, some computational tasks become prohibitively time consuming — if not outright impossible. Suppose, for instance, that the task you’ve outsourced to the cloud is to search a huge encrypted database for the handful of records that match an encrypted search term…

Homomorphic encryption ensures that the server has no idea what the search term is or which records match it. As a consequence, however, it has no choice but to send back information on every record in the database. The user’s computer can decrypt that information to see which records matched and which didn’t, but then it’s assuming much of the computational burden that it was trying to offload to the cloud in the first place…

Read more from the source @ http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/algorithm-solves-homomorphic-encryption-problem-0610.html