Fully homomorphic encryption equating to cloud security: An approach

Abstract

As the data storage challenge continues to grow for insurers and everyone else, one of the obvious solutions is cloud technology. Storing data on remote servers rather than in-house is definitely a money-saver, but in insurance circles, the worry has been that having critical data reside outside the physical and virtual walls of the insurance enterprise is a risky situation. As the IT field is rapidly moving towards Cloud Computing, software industry’s focus is shifting from developing applications for PCs to Data Centers and Clouds that enable millions of users to make use of software simultaneously. “Attempting computation on sensitive data stored on shared servers leaves that data exposed in ways that traditional encryption techniques can't protect against,” the article notes. “The main problem is that to manipulate the data, it has to be decoded first”. Now a new method, called fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) that performs computation with the encrypted data and send to the client and offers a realistic hope that such calculations can be performed securely in the cloud.