Microsoft hails cloud security breakthrough with encrypted data

Cloud security

It also has ramifications for the security of data stored in the cloud, as it negates the need for decryption to take place, making it harder for malicious agents to get hold of usable data, according to the team.

The research paper sets out a number of hypothetical use cases for the protocol within the pharmaceutical, healthcare and machine learning industries. The researchers stressed that it will allow organisations to securely sample anonymised medical data before they buy it.

This type of data is typically expensive to procure, the paper said, so a pharma company needs to be assured the information is high quality and likely to prove useful.

“Current solutions used in practice require substantial and costly litigation to preserve the interests of each party, while still typically failing to preserve full privacy,” the paper said.

“In some scenarios anonymisation procedures end up causing the resolution of the data to decrease so much that a significant part of its value is lost in the process.”

In a blog post, outlining the economic benefits of the method, Microsoft said that using the cloud will enable data owners to retain full control over how much information is revealed during exchanges.

“It’s a research project for now. But the team aims to publicly release the library, or tools, needed to implement the secure data exchange in the near future,” the blog post stated.