We know that databases which are poorly secured can cause a lot of damage. They store very important information inside them and they should not be accessed by anyone else other than the owner. However, it is often reported that a private database is hacked and hackers find useful and damaging information inside them. Therefore, it is top privacy as well as security concern to have databases with poor security. Now, Google has come ahead to take steps on the leaks happening to databases.
For this reason, Google has decided to open source its ‘Private Join and Compute’ which is a cryptographic, secure multi-party computation tool, designed to help organizations work with confidential data sets together.
What this tool lets organizations do is trade data sets between each other and not reveal anything about individuals that are in the data sets itself. All the data which is traded stays encrypted but the results of calculations on the data will be revealed which means that no information is revealed.
There is a cryptographic protocol called Private Set-Intersection which is behind the working of this tool. The search giant already uses this approach in its Password Checkup Chrome Extension which also has a huge data set encrypted by default.
For example, there are data sets which might have information such as email address and phone numbers of its users. PSI hides these identifies with the help of encryption using private keys so it is not in readable form for the third party.
Google said in an announcement that “Using this cryptographic protocol, two parties can encrypt their identifiers and associated data, and then join them, They can then do certain types of calculations on the overlapping set of data to draw useful information from both datasets in aggregate. All inputs (identifiers and their associated data) remain fully encrypted and unreadable throughout the process.”