Fully homomorphic encryption can safeguard highly sensitive health data related to rare diseases, underserved populations and clinical trials as it is shared with medical researchers, said Kurt Rohloff, co-founder and CTO of Duality Technologies. Projects to apply this technology are underway right now, he said.
Homomorphic encryption allows organizations to analyze encrypted data without first having to decrypt it. Duality recently signed a $6 million contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health for an initiative that aims to enhance the sharing of sensitive patient information while ensuring privacy, particularly for disadvantaged communities like tribal health centers, Rohloff said
“What we’re trying to do is to enable general techniques that allow collaboration on very sensitive data without necessarily exposing that data to leakage, to hackers and whatnot,” he said.
Using fully homomorphic encryption, data is protected at a Tribal Health Center and shared with the medical researchers who can run analytics without actually being exposed to the data itself.
“This allows the tribal health centers to protect their citizens, but also develop better health outcomes for these historically underserved populations and rare diseases that might be prevalent in these kinds of populations,” he said. “We’re trying to provide strong security guidance and security protections for this data and make it seamless for the cancer researchers also.”
The aim of the project – Duality dubbed it “Squeezes” – is to make the privacy-preserving framework repeatable to allow medical researchers to use these technologies and concepts to better protect sensitive health data in other projects beyond the work with single tribal health centers.
In the interview (see audio link above), Rohloff also discussed:
- More details about Duality’s work with ARPA-H;
- How privacy-preserving technologies such as FHE also can be applied in other regulated sectors such as financial services and education;
- Other emerging technologies, policies and practices that could better protect the privacy of sensitive health data in the future.
Rohloff has decades of experience leading technology research, design and development to support defense and national security applications. He 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. Rohloff also has over 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.