Philadelphia, PA, July 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In an era of artificial intelligence, a Meta AI Research mathematician delves into how AI impacts our society, and its potential to defeat even the newest encryption techniques for safeguarding data. "How can you expect your data to be kept secure and private in an AI-driven future?" said Dr. Kristin Lauter, West Coast Director of Research Science at Meta AI Research, who will be presenting a free and livestreamed public lecture as part of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Annual Meeting tomorrow, July 13. "AI may improve our lives, but without adequate safeguards, AI may also jeopardize the security of our private data," she added. Research in cryptography, the science of securing information, has to stay ahead of emerging threats and attacks in order to protect everyone's privacy. In her upcoming presentation entitled Artificial Intelligence & Cryptography: Privacy and Security in the AI era, Dr. Lauter will share how cryptosystems may be vulnerable, especially as the power of machine learning and AI models grows.

By Kristin Lauter Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the science of utilizing data to formulate mathematical models that predict outcomes with high assurance. Such predictions can be used to make decisions automatically or give recommendations with high confidence. Training mathematical models to make predictions based on data is called machine learning (ML) in the computer science community. Tremendous progress in ML over the last two decades has led to impressive advances in computer...

Exclusive Microsoft researchers, in partnership with academia, have published a paper detailing how they have dramatically increased the speed of homomorphic encryption systems. With a standard encryption system, data is scrambled and then decrypted when it needs to be processed, leaving it vulnerable to theft. Homomorphic encryption, first proposed in 1978 but only really refined in the last decade thanks to increasing computing power, allows software to analyze and modify encrypted data without decrypting it into plaintext first. The information stays encrypted while operations are performed on it. This has major advantages from a security standpoint.