Advancing the Capabilities and Deployment of Functional Encryption Navy STTR FY2012.A Sol No.: Navy STTR FY2012.A Topic No.: N12A-T025 Topic Title: Advancing the Capabilities and Deployment of Functional Encryption Proposal No.: N12A-025-0028 Firm: Zeutro, LLC 4506 Roland Ave Baltimore, Maryland 21210 Contact: Matthew Green Phone: (917) 568-4473 Web Site: www.zeutro.com Abstract: 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. Benefits: Functional encryption simultaneously provides data security and flexible access controls at the cryptographic level. It simplifies public key management and removes the need for trusted distribution servers. Adding a function encryption layer to many existing data-at-rest systems would harden them against compromises, theft or loss. This technology has a potential commercial application in any system where access to sensitive data must be controlled. This includes military storage systems, cloud-based and third-party storage systems, electronic medical records, financial systems, email and more. Return