Who said regulation stifled innovation? Sandrine Murcia co -founded Cosmian in 2018, a few months after the promulgation in the European Union of Personal Data Regulations, the GDPR. “This law was a boulevard to reconcile a massive use of sensitive, personal data, with a security imperative,” she slips, laughing eyes. His method: encryption. A discipline based on cryptography which makes it possible to make illegible data if one does not hold the key to decipher them.
The technique is not new. In wartime, the armies have always taken care to quantify their communications so that they do not fall into the hands of the enemy. But the current digital age has increased the needs and ways of doing things. Personal messaging like WhatsApp or Signal are partially or completely encrypted. Our web payment details are often protected through cryptography. Logic: dematerialization accentuates the risk of flights and data extortion. Also the abuses, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed it. It was he who precipitated the development… of the GDPR.
Secure the cloud
Sandrine Murcia is now thinking of bringing the use of encryption a notch further. “The new grail is the protection of the data in use.” Clearly, the Public Cloud – or Cloud IT -, where our history, our emails or our Chatgpt requests circulate by billions every minute. A sector dominated by Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Cosmian sells software solutions for companies to make the data they collect there, from start to finish. Without losing, however, in speed. To do this, this graduate of INSA Lyon and HEC, itself passed by Microsoft and Google, recently attached the services of David Pointcheval, a size of French cryptography, specialist in the cloud. Since its creation, Cosmian has raised more than 5 million euros and now has around twenty employees.
This safety overdose to pass on the servers has become crucial. Cloud Act or Fisa legislation in the United States today leaves the possibility of the American authorities to requisition any data passing through its “clouds”. An intrusive approach that tenses Europe. The EU has already adopted a protection framework for its data transfers to the United States. As for France, it has developed a qualification called SecnumCloud, in order to protect itself. “These are mainly legal provisions, points Sandrine Murcia. Technological solutions are preferable, such as encryption.”
Encryption enemies
Sovereignty is not the only purpose of this technology. Progress of cloud cryptography could also accelerate medical research. Sensitive data, such as those related to health, is not exchanged quickly for reasons of confidentiality. However, encryption methods make it possible to reconcile anonymity and scientific analysis, in particular for longitudinal studies.
With David Pointcheval, the boss of the Parisian start-up is working on other subjects, such as that of electronic voting, with the ambition to certify the act, while keeping the secret choice, as in the voting booth. One of the most interesting developments will surely be linked to quantum computer science. This technology is not yet mature, but it promises, in a few years, to surpass the calculation capacities of conventional computers. Enough to bring down all the security barriers present today on the web. Like many cryptography specialists, Cosmian militates for the democratization of “post-quantic” encryption. “Europe has not yet put itself in battle order,” regrets Sandrine Murcia. She urges the EU to invest now, to acquire her own standards. Under penalty of wakeing up too late. “Ultimately, American societies will impose theirs. This will be another digital battle for lost …”
The worst, to hear it, would be to question … the encryption in short. Several European states, including France, have long been favorable to the creation of stolen doors to get around it within encrypted messaging, in the name of the fight against child pornography, or more recently of drug trafficking. The debate is burning in France, on the occasion of the examination in the coming days in the National Assembly of a bill against this scourge. In addition to the dangerousness of the process for messaging safety in themselves, the installation of hidden doors is in any case “useless”, slices Sandrine Murcia. “Criminals will simply use other channels.” At the risk, this time for regulation, to really torpedo innovation.
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