News blog

A video explanation of Sharemind at TEDxTartu

Dan Bogdanov gave a talk at the TEDxTartu conference in November 2011, explaining the principles between Sharemind. The talk was broadcast on the ETV2 channel. The programme also includes an interview with Dan on education and the success of Estonian e-services.

ETV2 has the video available here.

Meet us at EUROCRYPT 2011

Sharemind has a stand in the EUROCRYPT 2011 conference. If you are attending, feel free to come ask us about our recent successes in applications and collaboration opportunities. The stand should be manned at most hours.

Estonian company Cybernetica develops secure data computation technology for U.S. Government

Cybernetica press release

May 6th, 2011

Cybernetica, a research and development company based on Estonian capital, secured a  research contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is an R&D project management agency that was founded by the United States Department of Defense with the mission to maintain the technological superiority of the United States military. DARPA sponsors revolutionary high-payoff research, bridging the gap between fundamental discoveries and their military use.

Under this arrangement, Cybernetica further develops its secure data processing technology for the U.S. Government. In addition to Cybernetica, several participants from the international defense industry and global leading universities are involved in the project.

"Our system protects the confidentiality of the collected data from the processing institution. The solution has a wide range of implementation possibilities in the private sector - in auctioning systems, commodity exchanges, health services. It is useful whenever different parties have an interest in combining and aggregating shared sensitive data but wish to keep the individual records secret," commented Cybernetica's researcher Dan Bogdanov.

The system developed by Cybernetica allows organizations to create and analyze combined databases. Users can input their data and the system guarantees that no one other than the person providing the input has access to the data values. However, the data can be used for data analysis and aggregation tasks.

"This will open up a broad range of new opportunities and application possibilities. Due to confidentiality issues, different companies have not been able to process each others data, even if it served a common good. This kind of sharing requires a company to give data access to other companies and, hence, an easy opportunity to abuse the data and the results. Our technology provides an innovative solution for applications where sensitive data is involved," explained Bogdanov.

Cybernetica is the first Estonian company to secure a research contract with the agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. Cybernetica's management sees co-operation as the key to its success. "Advancing from basic research to applications demands a sustained effort and a conscious contribution of significant resources. In developing our technology we have been co-operating successfully with the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Tartu , the Center of Excellence in Computer Science and the Software Technology and Applications Competence Center," commented Peeter Laud, the research director of Cybernetica.  

Cybernetica is an R&D company based on Estonian capital. With more than a hundred employees, its primary mission is to develop knowledge-based and globally competitive IT products and services in the fields of information security, information and visual navigation systems and radio communication systems.

Additional information:

Dan Bogdanov
Cybernetica researcher
phone +372 52 75 525
e-mail dan@cyber.ee

New whitepaper on Sharemind performance

We have prepared a new whitepaper explaining how Sharemind applications are deployed. It lists the three main components of an application:

  1. The data entry application, developed using the Sharemind controller library.
  2. The secure computation algorithms, developed using the SecreC SDK.
  3. The reporting application, also developed with the Sharemind controller library.

Furthermore, we really wanted to get more details out about our recent benchmark tests. So we also added some information on that. The detailed results will be published in a research paper.

Get the paper here: The Deployment and Performance whitepaper

Sharemind 2.0 reaches a million operations per second

Dear Sharemind enthusiasts, 

We thought that we'll give you a feeling on how fast Sharemind private computations can be. To do that, we tested the new computation protocols on our new Sharemind experiment cluster. The cluster has plenty of CPU, RAM and fast communication and while the conditions are hard to find in the real world, the real world is catching up.

We benchmarked all the private operations and here are the results:

Sharemind 2.0 operation execution times

New features in Sharemind 2.0

Here is the list of new features in Sharemind 2.0. You can check some of them out in the latest SDK build.

General

  • A new build system based on autotools. Detects libraries installed in the system, allows the developer to specify locations of libraries and customize the resulting build. Deprecated Code::Blocks project files and the old make-based system as a result.
  • The network layer now supports secure channels between all parties. The RakNet 4.0 secure channels infrastructure is used. A keypair generator is provided for creating the necessary keys.
  • Refactored the whole project to remove singletons.
  • Refactored the logging and execution profiling system so it can be compiled out of release builds of Sharemind.
  • A new message processing interface allows applications using Sharemind libraries to better target the logging output.
  • The developer can specify timeouts more flexibly in the application now.
  • Stability improvements everywhere.
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