Security News > 2021 > March > DARPA taps Intel to help build the holy grail of encryption
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has signed an agreement with Intel to add it to its Data Protection in Virtual Environments project, which aims to create a practically useful form of fully homomorphic encryption.
Fully homomorphic encryption has been described as the "Holy grail" of encryption because it allows encrypted data to be used without ever having to decrypt it.
"FHE adoption in the industry has been slow because processing data using fully homomorphic encryption methods on cryptograms is data intensive and incurs a huge 'performance tax' even for simple operations," Intel said in a press release.
Intel succinctly describes the biggest problem in data security as being caused by "Encryption techniques [that] require that data be decrypted for processing. It is during this decrypted state that data can become more vulnerable for misuse."
The goal of the Data Protection in Virtual Environments program is to develop an accelerator for fully homomorphic encryption that will make it more practical and scalable, which is where Intel comes in.
There's no word from Intel, DARPA or Microsoft on how long the Data Protection in Virtual Environments project will take, but it is described as a multiyear initiative starting with "Design, development and verification of foundational IP blocks that will be integrated into a system-on-chip and a full software stack," Intel said.