Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), today announced that its Cryptography Research Centre (CRC) has launched the UAE’s first secure cloud technologies programme which will boost advanced technologies that enhance data privacy and cloud encryption schemes.
TII said that its secure cloud technologies programme aims to advance Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), including fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), a form of encryption that permits users to perform computations on encrypted data without first decrypting it, and secure multi-party computation (MPC), creating methods for parties to jointly compute a function over their inputs while keeping those inputs private. This line of research will be coupled with the field of verifiable computation for Machine Learning, to cater for a proof of correctness for an Inference-as-a-Service use case when data privacy is not required.
The research team in-charge is also joining efforts with the hardware cryptography team to develop FHE hardware accelerators to offload certain computing tasks onto specialized hardware components within the system, enabling greater efficiency.
Speaking on the announcement, His Excellency Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary General of the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), said “Cloud computing has undergone significant growth in the last decade which has raised security and privacy challenges. Traditional approaches still require data to be decrypted for processing and a cloud-centralized key management system, thus exposing both the data and the secret key to cloud providers. This underscores the importance of launching this programme by our researchers at TII’s Cryptography Research Centre.”
Cryptography Research Centre, one of seven initial dedicated research centres at Technology Innovation Institute, employs and collaborates with scientists in multiple cryptography fields such as post-quantum cryptography, hardware-based cryptography, lightweight cryptography, cryptanalysis, cryptographic protocols, and cloud encryption schemes, amongst others. The Centre is also among the few internationally that brings together theoretical and applied cryptographers in a research-oriented setting. The cryptographers collaborate on breakthrough research projects that lead to innovative outcomes.
