From the National Science Foundation:
In 2010, Craig Gentry, a graduate student supported by the National Science Foundation, thought of a new way to protect data. He called it fully homomorphic encryption: a way to process data without ever decrypting it.
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Fully homomorphic encryption isn’t the only forward-looking cryptographic protocol that researchers are exploring. Another promising approach is “honey encryption“–where wrong guesses of the key produce information that looks accurate but isn’t. A second approach is “functional encryption“–where restricted secret keys enable a key holder to learn about only a specific function of encrypted data and nothing else. In a third approach, called “quantum key encryption,” the quantum nature of atoms protects the data. All are active areas of study the National Science Foundation supports.
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