Advancing the Capabilities and Deployment of Functional Encryption

In recent years, a new opportunity for protecting encrypted data has risen. Functional Encryption (FE) provides an entirely new vision of encrypting data. Instead of encrypting to individual users, in a functional encryption system, one can use FE to describe a policy of how to share data based on a user's credentials or attributes. While recent research has significantly advanced the capabilities and understanding of Functional Encryption, there are notable gaps to making Functional Encryption ready for practical deployment in protecting current data-at-rest encryption systems. Current issues include: resistance to tampering attacks, sharing across organizational domains, key revocation, efficiency for mobile and low power devices, and software assurance. Our proposal gives a new vision to solving these problems with a plan that combines cryptographic research and software development. Notably, our company, Zeutro, was co-founded Dr. Brent Waters one of the co-inventors of functional encryption and our research organization team includes the other inventor, Dr. Amit Sahai.