Скачать или смотреть Optalysys: THE NVIDIA OF SECURE COMPUTING.

At the recent #ITF2024, organised by imec in the centre of Antwerp, we heard from captains of industry in the semiconductor space. But I think it was significant that many of the rising stars that are scaling up now were keen to point out the important role that Silicon Photonics will play in AI.
Nick New, the CEO and founder of Leeds-based Optalysys, gave Optica a fascinating insight into how they use photonics to enable privacy-preserving data exchange at scale with encrypted computing. Here's what's happening.

The Reason for FHE – and a current problem

Encryption plays such a crucial role in preventing breaches that failing to use it is considered negligent. Modern software is incredibly complex and usually consists of multiple pieces that handle common tasks. Even if a company does everything right, a vulnerability can still lurk undetected in one of these smaller building blocks of software.

When is data vulnerable? Modern encryption is excellent when you want to protect information at rest in a database or when it travels through the internet, as storage and transmission systems are indifferent about the actual content of data. However, whenever a computer needs to process data, make changes or run calculations, the content DOES matter. Current methods of encryption, therefore, need to be reversed (“decrypted”) before the computer can work on the data.

This means that even the most secure computer systems always have a point where information is necessarily vulnerable. In light of these challenges, it has never been possible to keep information entirely safe from criminals. However, a major advance in cryptography looks set to change everything: encrypted computing.

This advance is a new method of encrypting data so that you cannot actually read it but can perform operations with it. Even if the company that owns the machine (or individual employees) wanted to snoop on your data, they’d be unable to do so because the raw data is never decrypted; it’s never vulnerable. Only the output of the calculation can be seen. This technology is known as Fully Homomorphic Encryption, or FHE.

BUT FHE computing has historically been approximately ONE MILLION times SLOWER than regular computing. So, established FHE cannot keep up. This is where Optalysys is set to revolutionise the FHE process using Silicon Photonics. They process information by manipulating light, with next-generation FHE cryptography.

Building on a decade’s experience, Optalysys recently attracted interest from investors, including Belgian imec.xpand. Watch the interview to discover more, and note that they are reaching out with the launch of a new Innovation Lab. Thanks also to Peter Vanbekbergen and Cyril Vančura of imec.xpand for alerting us to this rising star.