The adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies, including fully homomorphic encryption, can help better secure data as it is collected, integrated and shared for detecting and responding to public health emergencies such as bird flu, said Kurt Rohloff, co-founder and CTO of Duality Technologies.
These technologies can help organizations – within the health sector and across other industries – collaborate while maintaining data privacy and security and ensuring regulatory compliance, he said.
“What we can do with these privacy-enhancing technologies is basically to collaborate on data,” he said. “For example, doctors’ offices can collaborate with public health government institutions to derive insights from data in ways that protect the privacy of the individuals and protect the security of the underlying medical files,” he said.
Privacy-enhancing technologies also facilitate cross-sector collaboration to enhance public health surveillance, he said in an interview with Information Security Media Group.
That includes collecting, integrating and sharing information from disparate organizations – such as poultry markets and transportation companies – to help spot trends in public health emergencies to improve detection and response, he said.
“If companies are more comfortable sharing their competitive data – if they were given very strong guarantees that their data wouldn’t leak to the public or leak to competitors … it basically makes public health even more effective in identifying potential outbreaks.”
In this audio interview with Information Security Media Group (see audio link below photo), Rohloff also discussed:
- Other promising privacy-enhancing technologies to improve public health surveillance and response;
- How to reduce bureaucratic barriers in data sharing;
- Bolstering cross-industry data collaboration.
Rohloff is also co-founder of the OpenFHE open-source homomorphic encryption software library and has led the defense industry consortium in developing this leading open-source library. He also has more than two continuous decades of experience leading DARPA-funded research and development projects for the U.S. Department of Defense. Prior to co-founding Duality Technologies, he was a tenured professor of cybersecurity and computer science and a senior scientist at Raytheon BBN Technologies.