An ongoing concern of cloud adopters and naysayers alike is the security of data entrusted to the cloud. Good news may be on the horizon, though, as a team led by Microsoft researcher Kristin Lauter has developed a way to allow users to share medical information via the cloud through a system based on homomorphic data encryption. The system would keep data encrypted, and users would require a decryption key to interpret the encrypted data. This would mean that even if a data breach did occur, the data would remain encrypted, making it useless to anyone without a key.
“This proof of concept shows that we could build a medical service that calculates predictions or warnings based on data from a medical monitor tracking something like heart rate or blood sugar,” said Lauter. “A person’s data would always remain encrypted, and that protects their privacy.”
While the system is still in the early stages of discovery, its capabilities may prove useful in medical records storage as well as some governmental functions. Lauter and her team hope others will experiment with their research to improve upon it. She said, “We’re hoping that people will do serious implementations of our design.”
Download the full whitepaper on Lauter’s study to learn more.
An ongoing concern of cloud adopters and naysayers alike is the security of data entrusted to the cloud. Good news may be on the horizon, though, as a team led by Microsoft researcher Kristin Lauter has developed a way to allow users to share medical information via the cloud through a system based on homomorphic data encryption. The system would keep data encrypted, and users would require a decryption key to interpret the encrypted data. This would mean that even if a data breach did occur, the data would remain encrypted, making it useless to anyone without a key.
“This proof of concept shows that we could build a medical service that calculates predictions or warnings based on data from a medical monitor tracking something like heart rate or blood sugar,” said Lauter. “A person’s data would always remain encrypted, and that protects their privacy.”
While the system is still in the early stages of discovery, its capabilities may prove useful in medical records storage as well as some governmental functions. Lauter and her team hope others will experiment with their research to improve upon it. She said, “We’re hoping that people will do serious implementations of our design.”
Download the full whitepaper on Lauter’s study to learn more.