In July Bitcoin Magazine reported that researchers and entrepreneurs at the MIT Media Lab had started the development of a new encryption system, dubbed Enigma, based on the blockchain technology. Enigma will enable untrusted and anonymous participants to securely share sensitive information with a third party.
The name “Enigma” is part of the history of cryptography and code-breaking. It was the name of the electro-mechanical encryption system used by Germany before and during World War II, which was broken by a group of notable mathematicians and early computer scientists, including Alan Turing.
Enigma was created by Oz Nathan , a technology entrepreneur formerly associated with the Counter Terror Unit of the Israeli Defense Forces, and Guy Zyskind , a graduate student and research assistant at the MIT Media Lab whose research interests lie at the intersection of data, privacy and Bitcoin. Zyskind’s advisor, Prof. Alex “Sandy” Pentland , is associated with the Enigma team.
The new Enigma is powered by the blockchain. Enigma is a decentralized cloud platform with guaranteed privacy,” states the Enigma website. “Private data is stored, shared and analyzed without ever being fully revealed to any party. Secure multi-party computation, empowered by the blockchain, is the magical technology behind it.” In fact, protecting sensitive data is but a part of what Enigma will do. An important and innovative feature of the system is that it will permit analyzing the data stored by the system with external applications while keeping the data itself private and under full control of its owners.
Furthermore, data owners will be able to monetize their data. For example, participants could anonymously sell partial, controlled access to their medical data to pharmaceutical companies that need to run data analysis programs on a wide sample of patients’ data.
“[Enigma] is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, enabling different parties to jointly […]
