Cyber protection company, Acronis, has joined the MPC Alliance, the global association of organisations with the mission of improving data security and privacy through the implementation of the secure cryptographic technology of multi-party computation (MPC).
MPC is a mathematical approach to digital security that reduces the dependency on trusted third parties and physically secured devices to maintain the privacy and security of our digital footprints, which have grown in size and value over the last few years and are vulnerable to misuse and theft.
As a subfield of cryptography, MPC allows multiple parties to compute an output using their private data without disclosing their data to each other or any third party, and it is capable of doing so while guaranteeing the correctness of the output even if some data become corrupt.
Acronis has adopted MPC technology as it develops innovative cyber protection solutions that address today’s safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity and security challenges, known as the Five Vectors of Cyber Protection. Acronis products and services are used by more than 5.5 million individuals, companies and organisations worldwide.
Amongst its applications, MPC is used to protect the private keys for generating a digital signature to approve transactions on public or permissioned blockchains, or to protect data stored in clouds. It is also used to generate digital signatures to authorise transactions, certify code, verify identity, facilitate blind surveys, preserve privacy in computations across multiple data sets across multiple blockchains, clouds and blind auctions, amongst others.
In addition to a range of MPC research initiatives, Acronis is working with Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to create encryption and secure data management technologies to enable a secure MPC platform for business-to-business and business-to-government transactions, ensuring encrypted data can be shared between multiple untrusted parties while keeping shared data secure and private.
Acronis Technology President and co-founder Stanislav Protassov said: “Multi-party computation is an area of great interest to Acronis into which we have devoted considerable research resources. Implementing and integrating MPC technology into our cyber protection solutions is analogous to implementing a trusted third party that receives the input and confidentially, computes the result, but doesn’t reveal any data about the inputs. For example, Acronis customers can do confidential benchmarking or business intelligence reporting without revealing any underlying data of a sensitive nature.”