Encryption Pioneer Aims to End Our Data Dilemma With Cryptography’s Holy Grail
A company founded by one of cryptography’s heavyweights is making waves with a long-awaited approach to the data privacy problem
By Katharine Schwab
In 1984, Shafi Goldwasser, then a young professor at MIT, proposed a radical new idea in cryptography: that you could prove something was true without disclosing anything about it. The idea that would lay the framework for much of the cryptography we use today and eventually earn her the prestigious Nobel Prize of encryption, the Turing Award. More than 30 years later, she’s now a startup founder, with the aim of bringing a long-awaited approach to encryption out of the closet. “At some point it became clear that this theory, the mathematics, was efficient enough,” she says of the technique.
Part of the idea behind homomorphic encryption, as the approach is called, is to bring encryption to the places where it’s increasingly needed most. That’s a lot of places. In the last few years, data privacy has become a hot-button issue globally, with high profile scandals and data leaks surrounding prominent companies like Facebook and Equifax resulting in greater privacy awareness among both consumers and businesses. New privacy laws in the…
