Director of Security Innovation Mariya Georgieva presents at ETSI Security Week

Mariya highlighted a number of initial applications in financial services, specifically around fraud detection and secure e-banking. However, Mariya noted that potential use cases exist across virtually every corner of financial services given the wide-ranging applicability of encryption in-use technologies. In today’s world, fraud detection is of especially high interest because the COVID-19 crisis has actually fueled a rise in fraud and financial crimes. Fraudsters often commit similar crimes at a number of different financial institutions, so secure and private data collaboration between financial institutions can help better identify and predict fraudulent activities.

As for the healthcare industry, fully homomorphic encryption is a natural fit given the abundance of sensitive personal health information. Mariya covered predictive healthcare applications like secure genotype imputation and secure association between genotypes and phenotypes while keeping data private and protected. (Inpher has won international competitions in this type of work.) Inpher also sees how fully homomorphic encryption would be helpful in creating a data-driven response to COVID-19. Inpher’s Senior Privacy Counsel and Head of Policy Sunny Kang recently advised the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee on how cryptographic privacy safeguards have the potential to address numerous data sharing and privacy issues presented by COVID-19. Secure and private data sharing is a huge need across the healthcare industry, and fully homomorphic encryption can be leveraged to address these privacy and security challenges.

Mariya —along with Inpher colleagues Nicolas Gama and Sergiu Carpov— helped build TFHE — the world’s fastest open-source fully homomorphic encryption library. Watch Mariya’s full talk here and don’t hesitate to reach out to discuss FHE use cases and applications!