Enigma

Enigma(enigma.media.mit.edu)

6 points by oneiric 10 years ago | 3 comments

Nzen 10 years ago |

In fairness, there's a white paper linked on the bottom. I scanned it. It sounds like an etherium competitor, specifically for computation. It describes a p2p system of compensated nodes, with an external blockchain to manage access\identity. Nodes run pieces of the data through simulated circuits, similar to a protocol described by Cohen in [2013 Crypto](http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-40084-1_1...). The authors claim they got the O(n^2) down to O(n), and parallelize the rest. Storage via a distributed hash table. Other fancy stuff to ensure correctness.

My concern for the site is toward the bottom. They advertise "Fair income distribution: Users get paid for their data". If this were google, that might work. As this is a private computation service, I don't know which way the typo should go.

bsilvereagle 10 years ago |

Click 'Learn More' ->

"Enigma is a decentralized cloud platform with guaranteed privacy. Personal data is stored, shared and analyzed without ever being fully revealed to any party. Secure multi-party computation, empowered by the blockchain, is the magical technology behind it."

If the author's find this, that's the vaguest, most poorly worded summary of a service I think I've ever read. I don't know a) how it's decentralized b) how my data is stored, shared & analyzed c) whether to trust the blockchain being called 'magical'.

dandelany 10 years ago | |

It makes sense as short buzzwordy marketing text. If you scroll down further there is a link to the whitepaper which describes it in great detail.

"A peer-to-peer network, enabling different parties to jointly store and run computations on data while keeping the data completely private. Enigma’s computational model is based on a highly optimized version of secure multi-party computation, guaranteed by a verifiable secret-sharing scheme. For storage, we use a modified distributed hashtable for holding secret-shared data. An external blockchain is utilized as the controller of the network, manages access control, identities and serves as a tamper-proof log of events. Security deposits and fees incentivize operation, correctness and fairness of the system. Similar to Bitcoin, Enigma removes the need for a trusted third party, enabling autonomous control of personal data."

http://enigma.media.mit.edu/enigma_full.pdf