Intel has partnered with Microsoft as part of a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program that aims to develop hardware and software to drastically improve the performance of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) computation. The multi-year effort could allow organizations with strict data confidentiality requirements to easily share sensitive data with partners and third-party services in public clouds without the risk of exposing it. FHE is a form of cryptography that allows mathematical operations to be performed directly on encrypted data (ciphertext) without the need to first decrypt. The result of the computation is also encrypted and can only be accessed by the owner of the data who has the private key.”]