Privacy and Data Balkanization: Circumventing the Barriers

TL;DR

This paper explores cryptographic techniques to enable data sharing across organizations despite privacy laws, discusses potential quantum vulnerabilities, and suggests quantum technology developments to enhance security.

Contribution

It introduces methods using cryptographic protocols for private data transfer and analyzes how quantum technology can improve their long-term security.

Findings

Cryptographic protocols can facilitate beneficial data sharing.

Quantum technology can enhance the security of these protocols.

Potential vulnerabilities of current protocols to quantum attacks.

Abstract

The rapid growth in digital data forms the basis for a wide range of new services and research, e.g, large-scale medical studies. At the same time, increasingly restrictive privacy concerns and laws are leading to significant overhead in arranging for sharing or combining different data sets to obtain these benefits. For new applications, where the benefit of combined data is not yet clear, this overhead can inhibit organizations from even trying to determine whether they can mutually benefit from sharing their data. In this paper, we discuss techniques to overcome this difficulty by employing private information transfer to determine whether there is a benefit from sharing data, and whether there is room to negotiate acceptable prices. These techniques involve cryptographic protocols. While currently considered secure, these protocols are potentially vulnerable to the development of quantum technology, particularly for ensuring privacy over significant periods of time into the future. To mitigate this concern, we describe how developments in practical quantum technology can improve the security of these protocols.