"Creating a New Cybersecurity Paradigm for a Cloud-Based World"
Scientists, mathematicians, and engineers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, are developing a new cybersecurity paradigm that reflects the reality of 21st-century computing and collaboration. Their work has applications in healthcare, military systems, space, the protection of critical infrastructure, and more. APL is developing Secure Computation on Compromised Infrastructure (SCOCI) solutions for several problem areas using a two-pronged approach that incorporates software- and hardware-focused methods. The researchers are working to bring Homomorphic Encryption (HE) from academic literature into practical applications in order to overcome a fundamental constraint of encryption. HE addresses the data protection vulnerability of privacy in use. In order for HE to be applied more widely, it must be usable by actual programmers, ideally without specialized knowledge of HE, which is uncommon. APL has made significant progress in developing pre-built program libraries for applying HE to certain use cases. In doing so, researchers have expanded the kind of operations that may be performed with HE beyond simple addition and multiplication to include complex trigonometric calculations. APL researchers have also paired HE with commodity hardware solutions for cybersecurity, drastically reducing the computational overhead that would otherwise prevent the technique's adoption. Using specially engineered commercial processors, they were able to hide any code being executed from almost anything and anyone who might want to inspect it. This article continues to discuss APL's work on SCOCI solutions.