Galois wins DARPA funding for private data as a service

Galois, a technology research and development company, announced that its Jana project has been awarded a $6.3 million contract to research private data as a service for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Brandeis program.

Jana will deliver a privacy service that protects data while retaining its utility to analysts, the company said, and will demonstrate how an interoperable, open-source set of cryptographic, secure computation and privacy analytics building blocks can meet the Brandeis goals in a practical way that future systems can leverage.

The Brandeis program seeks to develop technologies with “revolutionary” impact that could help bridge privacy gaps that currently hamper collaboration and technology development, DARPA said in announcing the program earlier this year. It aims to restructure society’s relationship with data by providing data owners with mechanisms for protecting datasets before sharing them. Brandeis will allow systems to be built in which private data may be used only for its intended purpose and no other.

“Imagine if corporations had the confidence to share network and cyberattack data to prevent future attacks; if genotype/phenotype data could be leveraged for personalized medicine without putting patient privacy at risk; or if government agencies at every level had the confidence to fully share information to strengthen homeland security,” Dave Archer, research lead, Cryptography & Multiparty Computation at Galois, said in the company’s announcement.

“Jana embodies the vision of the Brandeis program, which is to unlock the full value of big data -- while maintaining the highest levels of privacy as data is shared and analyzed,” he said. “We believe the potential impact of Brandeis, of which Jana is a key component, is game changing.”