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After spending time at a London fintech accelerator<\/a>\u00a0last year, enterprise database\u00a0startup ZeroDB scrapped its first business plan and mapped out a new one. By January this year it had a new name: NuCypher<\/a>. It was no longer going to try to persuade\u00a0enterprises to switch out their Oracle databases \u2014 but rather to sell them on a specialized encryption layer\u00a0to enhance their ability to perform big data analytics by tapping into the cloud. Its slogan: body armor for big data.<\/p>\n Today it\u2019s\u00a0launching an open source version of its general release\u00a0product here at TechCrunch Disrupt New York. At this point, the almost 1.5-year-old startup is also running a handful of pilots with major banks, says co-founder MacLane Wilkison.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a combination of cloud and big data,\u201d he says of the underlying drivers which the team reckons are creating\u00a0a need for the technology. \u201cNow all of a sudden you\u2019re working\u00a0in computing environments that are distributed across hundreds or thousands of machines, and that could be spanning both some on-prem, some private and even\u00a0public cloud. And that sort of scenario presents a lot of new and different security challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead of\u00a0building an open source end-to-end encrypted database, NuCypher is selling a proxy re-encryption platform for\u00a0corporates with large amounts of sensitive data stored in encrypted databases to let\u00a0them securely tap into the power of cloud computing. An idea that might need a bit of explaining to appreciate, but one that\u2019s grounded in a genuine\u00a0need \u2014 at least based on what NuCypher\u2019s early\u00a0banking partners are telling it.<\/p>\n On the competitors front Wilkison names the likes of HP-owned Voltage<\/a>\u00a0and Protegrity<\/a>\u00a0as the largest existing players in the space. Albeit, he says they\u2019re both doing tokenization of data, whereas\u00a0NuCypher reckons proxy re-encryption technology\u00a0offers greater security for certain types of data.<\/p>\n Unlike some other approaches to processing big data in the cloud, he\u00a0emphasizes\u00a0that NuCypher is not using tokenization to mask any data\u00a0\u2014 arguing this is necessary for the target customers because certain types of data when masked with tokens can be vulnerable to statistical attacks.<\/p>\n While proxy re-encryption is an existing area of cryptography, applying it to big data is what\u2019s novel here, according to\u00a0Wilkison, who says\u00a0the tech has mostly been used in academia thus far. \u201cWe\u2019re the only people that applied it to big data platforms like Hadoop and Spark,\u201d he says. \u201cAs far as I know we\u2019re the only one using proxy re-encryption in business.\u201d<\/p>\n So while the team\u2019s\u00a0early ideas focused mostly on\u00a0looking at data archiving and encryption to enable banks to make use of cloud storage, he says the business\u00a0was pulled onto its current\u00a0rails after\u00a0banks asked if they\u00a0could\u00a0apply the encryption tech the team had\u00a0been building for data archiving to big data cloud processing.<\/p>\n Safe to say, this mini pivot is a familiar story for enterprise startups \u2014 after all, who knows better the business\u00a0needs than the target customers?<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we originally started the company, my co-founder and I had built an open-source database and then an encrypted database that allows you to operate unencrypted data without sharing encryption keys with the database server\u2026 What the banks were particularly interested in was taking some of what we had built for that and applying it to more compute-heavy type of workloads,\u201d says Wilkison.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter a period of talking to customers\u2026 we took some of what we had built for that and made it into a more generalized encryption layer for different platforms \u2014 specifically for the big data space. So Hadoop, Kafka and Spark.\u201d<\/p>\n So what is proxy re-encryption \u2014 aka NuCypher\u2019s \u201csecret sauce,\u201d as Wilkison puts\u00a0it \u2014 and why is\u00a0the technique useful for banks?<\/p>\n \u201cProxy re-encryption is a set of encryption algorithms that allow you to transform encrypted data. Specifically\u2026 it allows you to re-encrypt data \u2014 so you have data that\u2019s encrypted under one set of keys, you can re-encrypt the data without de-encrypting it first, so that now it\u2019s encrypted under a second, different set of keys,\u201d\u00a0is how Wilkison\u00a0explains it.<\/p>\n He gives the example of a person who has some encrypted files stored in Dropbox. If they want to share the files with someone else that could be achieved\u00a0by downloading them, decrypting them with their key and then re-encrypting them with the public key of the person they\u00a0want to share with. But obviously \u2014 at scale \u2014 that\u2019s a pretty network-intensive and cumbersome process.<\/p>\n Even more naively, this person\u00a0could just share their\u00a0private encryption key with the person they\u00a0want to share the file with. But then they\u2019re\u00a0abandoning all control of their\u00a0security.<\/p>\n Clearly neither scenario is ideal for NuCypher\u2019s target customers \u2014 with their vast lakes of sensitive, highly regulated data. This is where NuCypher reckons proxy re-encryption can step in to offer an edge.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I can do with proxy re-encryption that\u2019s much more elegant and secure than either of those alternatives is I can basically delegate access to my encrypted data to someone else\u2019s public key,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n The platform creates a re-encryption token off of the public key of the entity with whom its customers wants to share data. That token can then be uploaded to the cloud where the third party\u00a0can access it \u2014 in turn enabling them to decrypt and access the data.<\/p>\n Wilkison says re-encrypted tokens can be created and used to\u00a0delegate access to \u201cas many people as I like.\u201d<\/p>\n Ensuring compliance with regulations around the processing of sensitive data \u2014 data such as a bank or healthcare company might hold \u2014 is one key selling point for the platform.<\/p>\n He\u00a0points to a regulation like HIPAA, which sets standards for protecting healthcare data, as one example where a lot of care is needed when handling data to\u00a0ensure compliance. He also flags up\u00a0the European Union\u2019s incoming GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), which ramps up penalties for violations of rules on processing citizens\u2019 personal data, as another instance of\u00a0data-centric laws\u00a0creating data processing pain-points that\u00a0NuCypher\u2019s platform is setting out to\u00a0fix.<\/p>\n Other target data-laden industries could\u00a0include telecoms and insurance, though the team has kicked-off\u00a0focusing on financial services, and the current pilot phase of the platform is with \u201cmajor banks.\u201d<\/p>\n Wilkison says\u00a0there are essentially three main use-cases for the platform:<\/p>\n Another benefit he\u00a0notes is\u00a0that NuCypher\u2019s proxy re-encryption technology enables it\u00a0to give\u00a0customers the ability to manage access controls without needing to provide full access to the data \u2014 which means\u00a0it can\u00a0remove any single point of failure (i.e. via an admin who has to have full access control to all of the data).<\/p>\n \u201cWith NuCypher a hacker would have to hack into each node individually in order to get all the data,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n Given the complexities of the technology, customer education is clearly one of the big challenges, with Wilkison saying this\u00a0boils down to\u00a0explaining how the approach differs from standard encryption.<\/p>\n And on that front, he says one selling point for the platform is that the\u00a0proxy re-encryption tech works with NIST standardized encryption algorithms. Which means NuCypher customers\u00a0don\u2019t have to abandon the tried and tested encryption algorithms they\u2019re comfortable using, such as AES-256, in order to make use of\u00a0the tech.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was one of the pieces that we added that took a pretty significant amount of research to develop for us \u2014 to get proxy re-encryption to work with things like\u00a0ECIES, which is a standard elliptic curve, NIST-certified,\u201d he notes.\u00a0\u201cSo we can go to a customer and say, everything that we\u2019re doing on a crypto level is very standardized, very well understood by industry. So they\u2019re not having to rely on newly rolled crypto.\u201d<\/p>\n NuCypher\u2019s platform exists as an SDK and an encryption library, so its business model is licensing the software \u2014 it\u2019s not hosting any data itself, confirms\u00a0Wilkison; customers can install the software\u00a0on premise, such as within an existing Hadoop deployment, or directly in the cloud on the infrastructure they\u2019re managing.<\/p>\n\n
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