Canada’s cyber intelligence agency says it’s working on what it calls the “Holy Grail” of data encryption to protect government information as the number of reports of privacy breaches, malware attempts and ransomware hits continues to grow. Encryption mainly works in transit — which protects data when it’s being sent — or “at rest”, which guards information when it’s being stored. But in order to be processed and understood, that information needs to be decrypted, potentially putting it at risk.”We want encryption when it’s being processed so you don’t have to decrypt it to do it, and that’s something called homomorphic encryption,” Scott Jones, head of the Communications Security Establishment’s (CSE) Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, told CBC News. That’s the Holy Grail of encryption that really gets us to a point where, ‘OK, now we will be secure even [while information is] being processed’ … That’s a relatively new phenomenon.
