OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. announced development of the world's first homomorphic encryption technology that enables statistical calculations and biometric authentication to be performed on encrypted data - without having to decrypt it - at high speeds.

As cloud-based data has grown increasingly prevalent, data protection has become a critical issue, and homomorphic encryption, which allows mathematical processes to be performed on data in its encrypted state, has gained attention. Existing homomorphic encryption methods, however, use bit -by-bit encryption, which slows down processing times, making practical application of it problematic.

Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a special way of ordering bit strings of data and then batch-encrypting the data, so that inner product (the sum of the product of each bit) calculations of bit strings required for statistical calculations or other processing can be performed at a batch level, with the data in its encrypted state.

This technology makes it possible to use cloud-based data in more ways while safeguarding privacy. For example, when applied to biometric authentication, such as a fingerprint or vein data, this technology makes it possible to securely match encrypted data without having to decrypt it. Using confidential information such as medical or biological data for data analysis has, up until now, been problematic from a privacy standpoint. Fujitsu will be facilitating the combining of information utilized by multiple companies spread across a single cloud service together with this newly developed encryption technology.

Details of this technology are being presented at the The Second International Workshop on Modern Cryptography and Security Engineering (MoCrySEn 2013), opening September 2, 2013, at the University of Regensburg in Regensburg, Germany, and also at the The 8th International Workshop on Data Privacy Management (DPM2013), opening September 12, 2013, in London.