The New Privacy: Emerging Standards for Cloud-Based Security

From consumer hard drives and enterprise servers, data is migrating to the cloud. Driven by lower costs of ownership, elastic on-demand services, improved interoperability and the insights produced through machine learning, cloud-based computing synthesises the best of previous mainframe and personal computing paradigms. However the cloud—and the valuable data it houses—is also vulnerable. Breaches, data leaks and linkage attacks are widespread, often bypassing existing security safeguards. In this contested environment, privacy attains a new primacy—a critical issue for customers and a currency of trust for business. New technologies are emerging to address privacy in the cloud. This whitepaper surveys four approaches: blockchains, differential privacy, multiparty computation (MPC) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). While blockchains and differential privacy are relatively mature and well understood, MPC and FHE have been, until recently, obscure topics of academic research.