Comment from Jack Crawford, founding general partner, Impact Venture Capital

The AI chip industry sector has attracted enormous amounts of capital for high performance computing with a heavy focus on cybersecurity. This recent Wall Street Journal article highlights almost $10bn of venture investments in the last year. If the cybersecurity space is of interest to you, then you need to be paying attention to a new technology out there: “fully homomorphic encryption”. Fully homomorphic encryption (or FHE) allows sensitive data to be processed and analysed, all while remaining fully encrypted. This ensures reliability and security while the data passes into the hands of second and third parties. FHE has countless real world applications. Check out the compelling overview on FHE included in the sites below: IBM video Cornami website Take this hypothetical, for example – imagine a medical researcher is trying to compute descriptive statistics on a population of lung cancer patients at a hospital. Unfortunately, the hospital is unable to share its private medical records with the researcher without violating HIPAA. With FHE, the hospital can encrypt its data using a fully-homomorphic scheme. This allows the data to remain protected and anonymous, but also computable. In this particular case, the hospital would encrypt its medical records and send them to the medical researcher’s cloud computing environment. Because the data is encrypted, it is protected and fully private in the cloud. Next, the researcher runs its analytical functions on the homomorphically-encrypted data in the cloud, manipulating the data while it remains encrypted. Last, the researcher downloads the encrypted output and decrypts the result to reveal the plaintext answer. Notice that the sensitive medical record data is encrypted end-to-end and is only decrypted when revealing the final answer behind organisational firewalls. By understanding the practical implications of FHE, it is easy to understand why investors are so excited about this new technology. Here at Impact Venture Capital, we are optimistic about FHE for several reasons. First, it is impossible to completely avoid third parties when communicating or storing sensitive data. FHE means users no longer need to trust third parties to keep their word on privacy because the data is always encrypted, secure, and private even in untrusted environments. Second, FHE eliminates the tradeoff between data usability and data privacy – there is no longer any need to mask or drop any features to preserve the privacy of data. All features may be used without compromising privacy. Finally, the number of billion dollar markets requiring an FHE solution is growing by the month –…

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