Can you expand a bit more on the type of commercial agreements and confidentiality requirements of Boeing? In particular, what kind of data would the agreements pertain to, and who would the other parties be? Would the 'hoops' occur only for internal data transmission, or is it because they need to share it with 3rd-party organisations? I'm a researcher in the area, and I'm familiar with stuff like that from the healthcare domain, where you have e.g. lots of different hospitals that want to share certain data for research purposes, but I'm curious as to the use cases more commercial organisations might have.
It's neither. They make the assumption that their combined cloud partners aren't all in cahoots, and distribute their data such that the probability that a) one can intercept enough chunks and b) one can infer meaning from the chunks is very low.
The cynical part of me wants to say that it's very similar to a standard mapreduce, and the security properties came for free/very little.
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Can you expand a bit more on the type of commercial agreements and confidentiality requirements of Boeing? In particular, what kind of data would the agreements pertain to, and who would the other parties be? Would the 'hoops' occur only for internal data transmission, or is it because they need to share it with 3rd-party organisations? I'm a researcher in the area, and I'm familiar with stuff like that from the healthcare domain, where you have e.g. lots of different hospitals that want to share certain data for research purposes, but I'm curious as to the use cases more commercial organisations might have.
Yup - Ars can explain it better than me! http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/how-bo... Clearly, though, this would be a case where homomorphic encryption would not be required - because they've solved the problem without it.
Boeing's technique sounds more like steganography than cryptography.
It's neither. They make the assumption that their combined cloud partners aren't all in cahoots, and distribute their data such that the probability that a) one can intercept enough chunks and b) one can infer meaning from the chunks is very low.
The cynical part of me wants to say that it's very similar to a standard mapreduce, and the security properties came for free/very little.