Mathematical encryption-powered solutions and Quantum research.
A foundational technology for digital security and a central element of digital trust is cryptography. Despite its inconspicuous nature and the limited public understanding of its mechanisms, it serves as the technical bedrock upon which user confidence in digital devices, software applications, and communication channels is built across personal, commercial, legal, business, governmental, and other domains. Cryptography facilitates the confidentiality and integrity of data, whether in transit or at rest. Furthermore, digital signatures provide a means of authenticating information and ensuring non-repudiation for involved parties concerning their actions related to that information, such as its creation or dispatch.
A significant advancement in cryptographic methods is homomorphic encryption. It allows computations to be carried out on encrypted data, eliminating the need for prior decryption and protecting the secret key.
The maturation of this technology holds the potential to transform how confidential data, like financial, medical, and location records, is handled. Specifically, it could enable secure processing in vulnerable environments, like public cloud infrastructures, thereby reducing the risks of data localization issues and data breaches.
Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) remains a promising area of research, rather than a mature, disruptive technology.
Often called the "holy grail of cryptography," FHE is available today, but current algorithms have significant limitations and weaknesses in performance, correctness, and usability.
These limitations restrict FHE's potential applications to niche areas. However, significant research and standardization efforts are underway to advance FHE.
Quantum cryptography, or quantum key distribution (QKD), holds significant promise for enhanced security in communications.
However, it is not yet mature enough for sensitive applications. This technology leverages the laws of physics, rather than mathematical complexity, to ensure confidentiality through quantum communications.
While theoretically unbreakable, even against adversaries with unlimited processing power and mathematical capabilities, QKD faces practical challenges.
Its reliance on expensive, specialized equipment with extremely low error tolerance has led many cybersecurity agencies to advise against its use in sensitive contexts, advocating instead for the adoption of quantum-resistant cryptography (QRC), which can be implemented on existing computing infrastructure.
Cryptographic methods, also known as cryptosystems, offer a broad spectrum of capabilities, each with varying strengths and weaknesses. This allows users to tailor their choice to particular needs, contexts, resources, and constraints.
Grounded in mathematics, these methods encompass two main categories: symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, along with others such as zero-knowledge proofs, secure multi-party computation (SMPC), lattice-based cryptography, secret sharing, and obfuscation.
Symmetric and asymmetric cryptography both rely on a cryptographic key, a sequence of bits, as an input variable for a cryptographic algorithm to uniquely transform data. The dimensions and invulnerability of this key are critical, but not exclusive, determinants of the cryptographic process's security.