Is the data privacy and security industry finally catching up with MPC technology?

Experts have long hailed MPC (Multi Party Computation) technology as the future of privacy and security in the digital space. However, with Coinbase’s recent acquisition of Unbound Security and similarly with PayPal acquiring Curv earlier this year, wider mainstream adoption is looking like a certainty. The world is finally catching up with a technology that’s long been ahead of the game.

Facebook recently sponsored the first event in the MPC Alliance’s year long series of conferences to show how the technology is being applied to solve real world privacy and security challenges.  In the keynote speech Salesforce CTO Dr Taher Elgamal made some compelling arguments as to why MPC will take a place at the forefront of privacy and security solutions, even going so far as the say outright that MPC is the future. Dr Elgamal’s words carry significant weight not least because he is known as the “Father of SSL” for his work in cryptography, ultimately playing a key role in bringing about SSL encryption on the internet.

“MPC is the best method to store private keys. That’s the best way to fix the most important security issue we have in our implementations today.” Dr Taher Elgamal

However, if you’re reading this, you’re still ahead of the game. MPC Alliance held their very first conference as part of a year long series of events aiming to introduce and showcase real world use cases of the technology on Oct 26th, 2021. The next event, taking a deeper dive into the Security applications of MPC will be held March 10th, 2022 as the momentum of MPC technology continues to build.

But what is MPC?

In short, MPC allows for multiple parties to contribute to a calculation or exchange without sacrificing the privacy of the data each party inputs. In fact, using MPC this data is never even exposed.

MPC is already being used in applications including everything from auctions, cryptocurrency security, forensic accountancy, and even satellite collision detection.  The real beauty of the mathematics and methods involved in MPC, is that the computation requires no trust in the sense that no “trusted third party” is required to handle the data. This has tremendous utility, as it essentially means the old trade-off between the privacy and utility of data is now fully mitigated. What’s more, as we see processing power explode over time, the advent of quantum computing will almost inevitably pose a threat to traditional encryption mechanisms. MPC neatly solves this problem by distributing the secret yet shared data during the calculation, protecting it from quantum threats.

The future of privacy and security

MPC solutions are commercially ready. As we’ve seen with Coinbase and PayPal, serious players are deploying MPC to meet their privacy and security needs. It feels like the industry has long been playing catch up but with the recent traction seen in 2021, MPC is set to become a ubiquitous tool in the world of data management in everything from personal crypto wallets to government bodies. Understanding the opportunities it affords will be essential to any industry where data needs to be carefully protected from external threats and internal bad actors alike. This covers almost all digital activity where the privacy of personal data has transitioned from a right, to a commodity, to a luxury to almost a myth in the space of 15 years. By this metric alone MPC is a serious step in the right direction.

To find out more visit www.mpcalliance.org or to watch the latest content from the MPC Data Privacy & Security conference visit here.

Photo by laura parenti from Pexels