At NTT Upgrade in San Francisco last month, NTT Research showcased its latest research, including projects that are now being commercialised. One of the technologies it has been developing for over a decade is Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE).
Enterprise Times editor Ian Murphy wanted to understand more about ABE’s journey and where it goes next. He talked with Takashi Goto, Senior Vice President, Strategy at NTT Research, Inc. and Fang Wu, Vice President, Business Development at NTT Research, Inc.
Both Goto and Wu began by discussing SpillProof, a document management solution. Goto commented, “Using ABE, so we can encrypt each paragraph with different access policy and based on the recipients attributes, so we can see that the user can see the different part of the document.”
Wu said, “One of our team has embedded the ABE technology into the Microsoft Office Suite. Based on the classification of the document you could put together a global policy that this particular individual is supposed to be able to see certain classification of the part of that document.”
The company is also developing an automated approach. With its new AI Inference chip for 4k video, that is already happening. The chip detects objects such as faces, number plates or any PII and then applies ABE. Only someone with the correct permissions can then view those objects when watching the video.
The conversation also touched on integrating ABE into Active Directory. This could allow the automation of ABE as content is retrieved based on user roles or attributes. There is also the potential for using this to control how an AI agent can access content to improve security.
To hear what else Goto and Wu talked about, listen to the podcast.
Where can I get it?
You can listen to the podcast by clicking on the player below. Alternatively, click on any of the podcast services below and go to the Enterprise Times podcast page.
