Application of stealth computing in highly information-sensitive cloud environments
Swiss partners
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ZHAW: Josef Spillner (main applicant)
Partners in the MENA region
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University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates: Abu Talib Manar (main applicant), Qassim Nasir
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Penta, United Arab Emirates: Farhad Khalilnia
Presentation of the projet
This Leading House starting grant project was conducted in a trilateral setting, consisting of the University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland, and Penta, a leading private cloud company with offices in Dubai and Geneva as well as data centre locations around the world. The main objective was to advance and transfer the knowledge around computing on highly sensitive data, such as patient records or pension funds documents entrusted to cloud providers. This area is in high demand. To quote IBM, the work on fully-homomorphic encryption, one of the key instruments for stealth computing, «is ready for clients to begin adopting in a more widespread manner» according to an April 2021 statement. While a lot of the public attention around secure cloud computing is on either blockchains or on trusted execution environments such as Intel’s SGX, as researchers we saw early benefit on stealth computing - preparing data in a way that homomorphic encryption, order-preserving encryption, compression or other coding does not render any direct computation inapplicable, but rather still permits a certain amount of computation without having to decode the data again. Exploiting that can become a gamechanger for companies like Penta that address specifically the segment of customers who care about such possibilities to not compromise security in clouds.
The three project partners conducted all usual activities - basic research, paper writing, workshop organisation, and follow-up activity planning. Due to COVID-19, a lot of the planned exchanges did not materialise eventually, even though we stretched the project duration until June 2021 in hope of travel opportunities and further research-innovation impulse. Nevertheless, the active part of the project took place between September 2019 and October 2020, and this report covers primarily that timeframe.