The major revelation coming out of Snowden’s dissemination of NSA practices is that employed cryptography is secure. Even nation-state actors cannot break well-established encryption schemes (e.g., RSA, AES, etc.). As a result, encrypted data-in-transit (e.g., HTTPS) or encrypted data-at-rest (e.g., encrypted hard-disks) schemes provide sufficient cryptographic guarantees in the battle to protect users’ privacy. The unresolved problem is encrypting data-in-use: Currently, in order to process data, we need to decrypt, process, and re-encrypt. Consequently, nation-state and other actors target these processing end-points for collecting information. These end-points are regular computers plagued with vulnerabilities, as evident by the proliferation of disclosures of methods to extract information from them (e.g., buffer overflows, stack smashing, rootkits, return-oriented programming, Heartbleed, Spectre, Meltdown, etc.).
The problem is clear: As long as data gets decrypted, it can be leaked. In order to address this problem, MoMA focuses on revisiting traditional computer architectures (which were never designed with security in mind) and developing novel privacy-preserving architectures which process data while encrypted, using homomorphic encryption. The E3 framework, which stands for Encrypt-Everything-Everywhere, is a collection of tools (compilers, loaders, build tools) supporting both existing and the new microprocessor MoMA designed and fabricated at NYUAD in 2018.
For access to the E3 framework and related homomorphic encryption work, please visit MoMA’s github page.