NTT and Mitsubishi hook up on cloud encryption

NTT and Mitsubishi Electric have announced an advanced encryption technique that should address cloud computing security issues.

The cloud is growing in use, and rapidly, and as a result the firms said that many companies are transmitting increasingly sensitive data to external servers. This, they said, needs addressing.

The jointly developed technology hopes to increase security by applying fine grain encryption to both transmission and access, and the firms touted this as an alternative to symmetric public key encryption.

Rather than using keys, the system takes two measures and combines them to ensure that no user without the correct permission rights will be able to access restricted data.

It hopes to achieve this by adding a range of parameters to the cipher text and decryption key in the encryption-decryption logic. This, they said, could be used to apply 'conditions' to data, meaning that only users with the right combination at their end could get access.

"The encrypted document will only be able to be decrypted and accessed by an employee who has a decryption key associated with some attributes, when the decryption key's attributes satisfy the predicate pre-set in the encrypted document," the firms said.

The scheme will be shown off at August's Crypto 2010 conference. Following this the firms have promised that they will go back to the lab and study how to "efficiently implement and utilise this scheme for various applications".