For decades, society has benefitted from modern cryptography to protect our sensitive data during transmission and at rest. It seems daily that we see news about data breaches, privacy lapses, and inadvertent disclosures of information. In a real sense data privacy has gone from boardroom discussion a decade ago, to dinner table discussion. For IBM Z clients today, data can already be encrypted at rest and in-flight with pervasive encryption. Clients can also protect data with Data Privacy Passports on IBM Z, a consolidated data-centric audit and protection technology (DCAP)* for eligible data ..read more

Often, when I begin explaining fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) to someone for the first time I start by saying that I’ve been working in the field for nearly a decade and yet, I still have to pause to spell it right. So, let’s call it FHE. Half-kidding aside, FHE really sounds like magic when you hear about it for the first time, but it’s actually based on very sound mathematics. The main difference is that FHE requires a shift in the programming paradigm that we are used to, which makes it a little more difficult to integrate into applications. That was until today thanks to a new too ..read more

While basic cryptographic technologies such as encryption and digital signatures are now integral to internet security, more advanced cryptographic techniques have also been slowly gaining traction. This trend has been spurred by increased focus on privacy issues as well as new innovations such as blockchain. These advanced cryptographic techniques include the ability to compute on data while preserving important privacy requirements, and the ability to prove correctness of such computations while still maintaining privacy. However, these new technologies are hard to deploy for multiple reason ..read more

Financial crimes continue to plague the global economy. As nefarious actors become smarter, the costs of money laundering and associated crimes has reached the trillions. At the same time, the disparities between those who can access financial services – and those who cannot – threatens to widen. To help solve these gaps, IBM Research is building new AI and data encryption tools to help keep data safe, cybercrime at bay, and make financial services more accessible. Fighting Financial Crime with Fusion AI The onus to spot financial crimes falls on banking and financial institutions, who can fac ..read more

The new IBM quantum computing-safe tape drive prototype is based on a state of the art IBM TS1160 tape drive. Ten months ago we assembled a team from IBM Research in Switzerland and IBM tape developers based in Tucson, Arizona, to try to build something which has never been built before to address a risk that may not materialize for another decade or more. As you can tell, we love a good challenge. The risk comes from quantum advantage, the point when a quantum computer can perform some particular computation significantly faster than a classical computer.  The challenge we fa ..read more

Inventors and co-authors Jialong Zhang and Marc Ph. Stoecklin. If we can protect videos, audio and photos with digital watermarking, why not AI models? This is the question my colleagues and I asked ourselves as we looked to develop a technique to assure developers that their hard work in building AI, such as deep learning models, can be protected. You may be thinking, “Protected from what?” Well, for example, what if your AI model is stolen or misused for nefarious purposes, such as offering a plagiarized service built on stolen model? This is an concern, particularly for AI leaders such as ..read more

“The prettiest thing I had ever seen” is not how IBM researcher Shai Halevi describes the beaches in Israel where he grew up. Or the sunset after a long day of hiking in Mitzpe Ramon desert. Rather, he saves these words to describe the first time he saw a cryptographic equation as an undergrad student. “It was elegant math with real world applications, but it was also hairy and disgusting – I was instantly attracted,” said Halevi. Growing up in an Israeli community known as a kibbutz, Halevi’s first job was in the banana fields of the kibbutz, but his life changed once he got his hands on a Co ..read more

Our mission at IBM is to help our clients change the way the world works. There’s no better example of that than IBM Research’s annual “5 in 5” technology predictions. Each year, we showcase some of the biggest breakthroughs coming out of IBM Research’s global labs – five technologies that we believe will fundamentally reshape business and society in the next five years. This innovation is informed by research taking place at IBM Labs, leading edge work taking place with our clients, and trends we see in the tech/business landscape. Later today, we’ll introduce the scientists behind this year ..read more

Quantum computing, future of AI and celebrity guest speakers make up the IBM Research lineup for Think 2018, IBM’s upcoming megaconference in Las Vegas. IBM Research will be the feature of over 45 sessions at Think 2018, taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada, March 19-22. IBM’s biggest industry and innovation event of the year will include a quantum computing track, showcasing the industry’s first use cases of quantum computing on the cloud across the world’s largest partner and public access network; demos from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, launched 6 months ago with a $240 million investment to pro ..read more

A new paper, from the IBM scientists behind many of the thousands of lines of code in Hyperledger Fabric, reveals the rationale and the thought process for the architecture, for the first time. It all started about two years ago with late night calls between Zurich and the US. IBM researchers were bouncing ideas off each other in search of ways to create a more resilient, extensible and scalable blockchain platform suitable for enterprises. What began with brainstorming in the wee hours of the night for the Zurich team, has evolved into a whole new architecture for permissioned blockchains tha ..read more