The New Jersey based, Duality Technologies and Intel have teamed up to provide Amazon Web Services with accelerated homomorphic encryption-based machine-learning applications (AWS).

This will bring privacy-enhancing features to the cloud, which will be available at scale on big data sets and will enable a wide range of machine learning (ML) tasks containing sensitive data.

Based on homomorphic encryption, Duality delivers privacy-enhanced collaborative data research and machine learning (HE). SecurePlus ML applications with greater privacy are now available on AWS for clients with third-generation Intel Xeon processors with accelerated HE.

These applications enable AWS clients to perform new machine learning workloads at scale in the cloud while safeguarding sensitive data and maintaining privacy. The HE acceleration layer HeXL, which employs Intel vector extensions to accelerate AI workloads and comes with hardware-enhanced security capabilities, is included in Intel’s latest Xeon scalable CPU.

This is the first time that such capabilities for massive data sets and multiple ML models are available at scale, which is considered a key step toward the adoption of privacy-enhancing technology.

Duality and Intel have partnered to deliver accelerated privacy-enhanced ML workloads on AWS, allowing businesses to perform data science and machine learning on sensitive data in the cloud while keeping the data secured at all times, even during analysis.

This functionality also ensures that companies processing sensitive data in the cloud comply with data privacy requirements because they are never directly exposed to the data.

Duality and Intel partnered earlier this year to provide optimized data science and AI technologies for privacy-enhanced data sharing. The partnership centered on using HE to speed up machine learning applications on the upcoming third-generation Xeon scalable processors.

“Duality and Intel are working together to allow organisations across the globe to benefit from secure, AI-powered data collaboration at scale, enabling a whole new world of big data insights and privacy-protected collaboration across industries,” said Alon Kaufman, CEO of Duality Technologies. “We are excited to bolster our relationship with Intel and allow AWS customers to use the cloud for ML workloads on sensitive data, removing a long-standing roadblock to utilising the cloud within regulated industries.”

Duality, a company founded by cryptographers and data scientists, developed the SecurePlus suite of secure data collaboration applications to meet the needs of organizations that want to collaborate on sensitive data while protecting their business interests and complying with data privacy regulations.

By encrypting data and AI models during computation, SecurePlus applications enable such collaboration on secured data and models. The collaborating parties can conduct computations in any environment – their own, their partners’, or a third-party cloud – without exposing sensitive data like personally identifiable information (PII).

The Intel HE toolkit, which was recently launched as an open-source project and is now available on the Intel Developer Zone, is the primary vehicle for bringing Intel HE technology innovation to users. The toolkit was created with ease of use in mind to make evaluating and deploying HE technology on Intel systems easier.

“At Intel, we believe that security and privacy are critical to today’s data-driven economy,” said Nir Peled, general manager of private AI and analytics at Intel. “Privacy-enhancing homomorphic encryption, now available at scale on AWS, will fundamentally change how data are shared and leveraged by organisations worldwide. We look forward to continuing working with Duality to make privacy, data confidentiality and data utility achievable goals for all enterprises.”