NTT Research enters its 2.0 era: Creates ‘Scale Academy’ & quantum-safe security
NTT Research, Inc., a division of NTT, has detailed and described the launch of Scale Academy, a startup incubator designed to market products and services based upon technologies studied within the labs of NTT Research and NTT R&D.
The organisation also launched Scale Academy’s first product, SaltGrain, a zero-trust data security suite powered by attribute-based encryption (ABE) i.e. Access control based on user characteristics and policies.
ABA is a cryptographic scheme first proposed in a 2004 paper co-authored by Dr. Amit Sahai of UCLA and Dr. Brent Waters, who now serves as the director of NTT Research’s Cryptography & Information Security (CIS) Lab.
Leading Scale Academy is NTT Research SVP of product innovation, Bennett Indart.
For essential background here, let’s remember that NTT Research was founded as a corporate subsidiary with a mandate to engage in basic scientific research.
CEO Gomi San: Our 2.0 era
Now in its seventh year of operations, NTT Research points out that the newly established Scale Academy’s SaltGrain product name combines Salt – a term for enhanced hash security – with Grain, which alludes to ABE’s ability to provide access to data on a granular level.
“As NTT Research enters its ‘2.0’ phase, we are launching Scale Academy to iterate and grow the most promising new NTT technologies into market success,” said NTT Research president and CEO Kazu Gomi. “As the first case out of Scale Academy, we will push SaltGrain, which we believe the market is ready for. SaltGrain is a data security suite that breaks the prevailing all-or-nothing file-access paradigm, closes cybersecurity gaps and enhances privacy protection, which is much needed in the environment where AI agents are everywhere and playing a wide variety of roles.”
The Scale Academy at NTT Research will support breakthrough products that originate in its own four labs and in others throughout NTT.
“Business start-ups have their own rhythms and incentives that quarterly metrics miss,” Indart said. “Scale Academy accommodates those realities, with SaltGrain providing a timely entrance amidst AI risk acceleration, gaps in network and identity controls and the growing need to protect data wherever it moves.”
SaltGrain: Security for the AI era
SaltGrain taps ABE to bind access policy to the ciphertext itself and allow fine-tuned access control to data. SaltGrain’s ABE functionality is wrapped within a zero-trust framework, enabling use cases that involve document sharing while protecting sensitive parts within the documents.
This service supports image or video documents.
“The data protection provided by SaltGrain is much needed in the era of AI agents that need to access data or documents for learning; however, privacy and sensitive information must be properly protected. Also, thanks to a recent performance breakthrough by NTT Research scientists, the ABE core of this data security suite is prepared for post-quantum deployment,”notes the organisation, in a press statement.
SaltGrain targets enterprises and institutions managing high-value or regulated data, such as financial services, healthcare and global technology providers, where secure collaboration and data sharing are essential—but the cost of a data breach can run into millions of dollars.
Cross-organisational analytics
Unlike conventional security models that depend on perimeter defences or coarse access controls, SaltGrain’s application of ABE enables organisations to share and analyse data with greater confidence by controlling access to sensitive portions of the data. This potentially unlocks new use cases in areas like cross-organisational analytics, where AI agents can also be involved.
SaltGrain is the first in what NTT Research anticipates will become a portfolio of technology-driven products managed by Scale Academy, which provides stage gates and seed-round funding for this inaugural launch.
