The Homomorphic Internet Revolution
The upcoming market of privacy centric internet services and applications.
Last week we had another shocking revelation that a security researcher found more than 419 million records in several databases that were part of a server that wasn't password protected, according to TechCrunch report. About 133 million records were from US Facebook users and 18 million records were from UK users, according to the report.
A Brief History of Internet Evolution
Problem #1 with Today’s Internet
What Is Homomorphic Encryption?
With organisations increasingly under pressure to be paper-free and unlock the value of data, security and confidentiality of sensitive information is an ever-increasing priority.
Data encryption is the security solution of choice. However, encryption is impractical for data analytics and data mining, which cannot be effective without decrypting the data first, re-introducing vulnerability. Data anonymisation may be used to provide security and confidentiality during data mining operations and performs well with tabular data. However, it is much less efficient with free text data, where processes like automatic identification of anonymised words, such as proper nouns, is not guaranteed to be effective in all cases.
Homomorphic encryption (HE) is, in a nutshell, a form of encryption that allows for various types of computation to be applied directly to cipher text without any decryption before, during or after the operation. The result of computation, once decryption has been applied, should be the same as if it was applied to unencrypted data. Hence, HE could allow organisations to be far open to sharing sensitive data with trusted third parties for collaboration and innovation purposes without compromising the integrity and security of the data.
An easy example of HE use case (see the diagram below) is where let say a data owner (DO) wants to send personal health records to a healthcare company that uses a public cloud provider e.g Amazon Web Services (AWS) for data processing purposes. Now let`s assume the DO does not trust Amazon Web Services with his/her data (because it`s owned by Amazon!). Using HE , the DO encrypts his/her data with a client side application and sends it to the server(s) running on AWS. The server performs the relevant computations on the data without ever decrypting it and sends the encrypted results to the DO. The DO is the only person that`s able to decrypt the results because the DO is the only person with the secret key needed to decrypt the results.
Top Open Source HE Projects
We predict the first wave of successful commercial implementations of HE will most likely be derived from one of the above projects or a mixture of both.
What is Homomorphic Internet?
Rather than giving you a standard/universal definition of “Homomorphic Internet” - we will instead say it will be a new internet infrastructure where data is always encrypted (at rest and at motion) and it will have the following characteristics:
How does the implementation of Homomorphic Internet will look like?
There is no right/wrong answers - however the R & D team at our parent company Zaiku Group thinks the implementation of Homomorphic Internet may look as follows:
The team at Zaiku Group also thinks that Homomorphic Internet will play an important role in the next-gen enterprise software systems architecture - so be ready for Homomorphic Enterprise Systems (see diagram below)!
Side note to Bay Area readers: Liam Shore (see his awesome picture below) - the co - founder of our parent company Zaiku Group is currently visiting the Bay area till next Wednesday 18 September. Liam is currently working on his PhD Thesis regarding `Trust for Consortium Formation & Service Composition upon Smart Contracts on the Blockchain`. We hope to use his research as the foundations for Kähler AI to target the $5 Trillion dollar OTC equity linked derivatives market (US/European) at some point in the future.
If you have time and would like to catch up with him please fill this form or reply to this email so he can follow up with you.