Do You Know Everything About Homomorphic Encryption?

Data privacy concerns only keep increasing as companies become more accustomed to using cloud computing services to integrate with third-party software and reveal valuable insights to users. Even some of the major regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulations in the UK, are struggling to prevent privacy violations by companies.

If a company is caught misusing user/consumer data, it could end up paying massive fines. But, this creates an enormous trade-off between the company’s utility and data privacy. On the other hand, the development of a major encryption technology helps sustain data privacy boundaries while allowing companies to extract useful insights from user information without invading it.

How does Homomorphic Encryption work?

Homomorphic encryption is one of the most popular types of encryption methods that have been present in the industry for quite some time. It allows companies/users to carry out computations on encrypted data without the need to decrypt it first using a cipher key/text.

Even the results of the computations performed on available data remain encrypted. The only entity that can decrypt the result of those computations is the private decryption key. Take a better look at how homomorphic encryption works below:

• At the start of the process, the data will be in its decrypted form, i.e., plain text. The owner data owner will require an expert party to perform a particular operation on the plain text without revealing any of the content that it contains. The operation could be an ML model or some function.
• The data owner will then encrypt the data and then send it over to the chosen party.
• When the party receives the encrypted data, it will perform the specified operations on it.
• Once the operation is complete, the party will send over the encrypted data back to its owner.
• Following that, the data owner will use the private decryption key, decrypt the results, and share the intended information of the mathematical operations with the party.

What are the Pros of Homomorphic Encryption?

Through the traditional methods of encryption, users had the option to store and process the data on cloud servers, even in their encrypted forms. But, the traditional encryption methods involve decrypting the data on the cloud servers if the users (i.e., businesses) wish to perform operations on it.

This could lead to massive security problems and data privacy issues. On the other hand, to dodge security issues, businesses would have to first download the required data, decrypt it, and then use it to perform computations. That would be too costly and time-consuming. Therefore, homomorphic encryption is the perfect solution for that matter.

Businesses can share private data with third parties to have computations performed for helpful results. There are low chances of revealing private data as it always moves in encrypted form. Some other pros include:

• Safe and Efficient Cloud Usage
• Secure Collaboration with Third-Parties
• Follows Regulatory Compliance

Conclusion

Data privacy remains a hot topic in the modern business world. Businesses have to work with huge volumes of data, and they have to collect it from the ongoing operations that most certainly involve customers.

That type of information contains personally identifiable information, or PII for short. Therefore, when businesses try and make something out of the said data, privacy issues arise. But the compliant nature of homomorphic encryption lets businesses make the most without invading privacy.