Companies such as Intel and Microsoft have been strong proponents of homomorphic encryption in recent years. When IBM introduced the world to its first heteromorphic encryption services in December of 2021, it caused quite a stir. But why IBM pushing Fully Encryption? This package offered businesses the opportunity to test out new technologies by providing them with prototyping facilities, as well as assistance and educational resources.
IBM’s Director of Strategy and Emerging Technologies, Eric Maass, recently gave an interview in which he discussed why the business is so enthusiastic about fully homomorphic encryption (FHE ). According to Maass, IBM has been working on FHE for more than a decade. IBM Research has made available open-source toolkits in an effort to quicken the pace of this development. The month of December marked the launch of IBM Security’s first commercial FHE services.
What is Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)?
To completely understand why IBM pushing Fully Encryption, let’s first see what exactly is Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). With the help of FHE, businesses are able to analyze and process sensitive data without compromising their privacy or their ability to comply with regulations. Either internal or external parties are able to perform data analysis and processing without the necessity of exposing the data (decrypted). As a result, using this method can assist businesses operating in regulated industries in overcoming the obstacles that stand in the way of adopting hybrid cloud computing.
IBM offers clients a security homomorphic encryption services package that includes education, expert support, and a testing environment. This package is designed to assist customers in rapidly spinning up new applications that make use of FHE. In addition, advancements in computing power technology have been produced as a result of IBM’s investment in research over the course of 11 years. These advancements are required to carry out FHE without negatively impacting performance.
How FHE protects financial workloads
At the moment, the act of sharing sensitive data is prohibited at a great number of financial institutions as a result of both internal policies and external laws and regulations. In spite of these limitations, institutions could benefit from outsourcing data in the form of increased value and the generation of insights that propel their enterprises forward. To further understand why IBM pushing Fully Encryption, let’s see the following examples that illustrate this point:
- Using client behavior to develop fraud detection algorithms.
- User preferences for the development of optimal applications and user experiences.
- With the assistance of consultants, business operation data can be used to automate procedures more effectively.
- Customer information is used to target marketing initiatives.
To mitigate the risks that come with data outsourcing, financial companies must implement security measures to safeguard their company’s intellectual property and critical workloads from internal and external attacks. Gartner expects that by 2025, 50% of major enterprises would default for privacy-enhanced computing for processed data in untrusted settings and multiparty analytics use cases.
FHE is a very effective way for supporting this strategy. The market for FHE is expanding, and this technology will also be ideal for the future outlook of computing systems. FHE utilizes lattice cryptography, which is deemed “quantum secure” since it is resistant to being cracked by future quantum-computing technologies.
The benefits of IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Virtual Servers
The benefits of IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Virtual Servers will help in understanding why IBM pushing Fully Encryption. These servers deliver business value to enterprises seeking secure collaboration across computing environments by addressing FHE’s existing problems. IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Virtual Servers can provide a secure computing setting that addresses the aforementioned issues in addition to FHE’s ability to be “malleable” cryptographically.
The capacity to change a ciphertext into another ciphertext that intercepts a comparable plaintext is referred to as malleability in this context. While malleability provides numerous benefits, it does present the possibility for external attackers to exploit some aspects of homomorphic encryption. Integrating homomorphic encryption apps with the protected environment and execution of IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Virtual Servers is one proactive technique for protecting this functionality.
Use case: Intelligent fraud protection
Context: Customers’ expectations regarding the financial services they receive have evolved, which has led to an expansion in the number of different channels through which customers can bank, make purchases, and save money.
Problem: This additional feature makes it easier for fraudulent actors to stay ahead of banking consumers and for careless actors to reveal sensitive data by providing them with more opportunities to do so.
Solution: Financial institutions need to integrate machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies into their present workflows in a secure manner. These features can track bank accounts, financial activities, and accounting invoices/purchase orders for the purpose of analyzing the data and identifying any possible fraudulent conduct. This is a major reason why IBM pushing Fully Encryption.
Solution with IBM FHE and IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Virtual Servers: IBM FHE and IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Virtual Servers collaborate to protect data with a barrier. The FHE Toolkit enables developers to perform and save their key operations on these virtual servers while performing computational or modular updates to their applications. This provides financial institutions with the ability to rapidly deploy solutions based on real-time machine learning and AI information, thereby protecting them from internal risks and external intrusions.
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