From: MIT Technology Review
A super-secure place for sensitive data to mingle could free companies to get the benefits of sharing it without risking leaks.
By Tom Simonite
As companies from the financial sector to the health industry amass ever larger, more detailed databases of information about people, it is clear that combining different data sets can offer powerful insights. But to protect users’ privacy, many of these data sets stay locked up inside corporate firewalls.
Chipmaker Intel thinks it has a way to let valuable data be combined and analyzed without endangering anyone’s privacy. Its researchers are testing a super-secure data locker where a company could combine its sensitive data with that from another party without either side risking that raw information being seen or stolen.
The technology could allow companies to do much more with their data, to their benefit and the benefit of their customers. Today, companies either keep their data closely held, or release it with certain details obscured or removed, which limits how useful it can be. Health-related data is particularly limited today, due to HIPAA regulations that govern the sharing of patient records. Two parties using the system need to agree on the analysis to be performed, feed in their data, and then get the results without either side seeing the other’s raw input. The original information is then wiped from the locker. “There are many companies and organizations that own data, and would like to share in a way that [ensures] it is not released or stolen,” says Sridhar Iyengar, a director of security research at Intel Labs. “This is a neutral environment where parties can place their data and derive an answer without revealing their data to one another.”
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