Data confidentiality is our mission
When we started working on Sharemind back in the day, we were convinced that it would have a significant impact on data privacy. Our goal was to protect data not only on the disk or on the network, but also during analysis.
Our first version of Sharemind was built on secure multi-party computation (MPC) and secret sharing. These are two cryptographic techniques that help us give proofs of privacy for Sharemind applications even when the Sharemind host has full access to the hardware or starts slicing it into atom-thin layers. The private data would not be accessible.
Sharemind became known as the MPC platform that people ran real-world statistics and data mining applications on. We learned from our customers what they wanted to do with Sharemind and continued innovating.
A brand new Sharemind
Today, I am very excited to tell you about Sharemind HI - a new product in the Sharemind family. It works as Sharemind has worked before. Confidential data never leaves the source. The host can not access confidential values, even during analysis. Sharemind still enforces limits on what can you learn from the private data.
There are three key differences. First, higher performance. Sharemind HI can work through tens of gigabytes of source data in minutes. Second, simpler deployment. Sharemind HI can be hosted by one organisation, but the host is still tied to the policies and restrictions set remotely by data owners or supervisory authorities.
The third difference is in the protection mechanism. Sharemind HI is built using the Software Guard Extensions (SGX) instruction set available on modern Intel® processors. To say it simply, the analysis of confidential data happens inside a Trusted Execution Environment within the processor. This is also where the name HI comes from - it stands for Hardware Isolation.
Sharemind HI combines the years of work we have done on cryptography, processes and algorithms. We want to help our partners build new data-driven services that were impossible before. We will be sharing more on how Sharemind HI works over the coming months.
New services from Mobile Location Data
There have always been analytical tasks where we've seen the need for Sharemind. Location Based Services(LBS) has been one of them for a long time. However, the amount of data that has to be processed in this domain has been challenging. Imagine our excitement when we could reach out to Positium LBS, our partner in mobile location data analytics, and tell them that we can now deliver the Sharemind privacy guarantee for their business.
The Positium Data Mediator takes mobile phone location data from multiple telecom operators and analyses it for multiple outputs. How do people move about? Where do they live? How do tourists move around in a new country? All this can be done without having to install apps on the user's phone and without jeopardising their privacy.
Your first chance to hear more about Sharemind HI will be next week, at the RSA Conference 2018 in San Fransisco, US. We will be unveiling the first Sharemind HI powered module of the Positium Data Mediator platform. Follow us on Twitter @sharemind to find out the exact demonstration times.
For more information on Sharemind HI and the kind of services it enables, contact us at sharemind@cyber.ee. We are looking forward to working with service providers interested in launching new privacy-preserving services!
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