CIS Lab
Cryptography & Information Security Laboratories
The world’s leading cryptography lab
When NTT Research opened its Cryptography & Information Security Laboratories, it had one simple goal: to be elite. We hire experts—leaders in their fields—and provide them the resources needed to pursue their ideas. To establish our credibility, we rely on external measurements, hoping to prove ourselves in the top cryptography conferences with a substantial presence and often the highest number of submissions. While our scientists’ work is called basic research, the goal is to change not only the science of cryptography, but how we live and work. By letting research be the focus, rather than academia or product development, we have produced breakthroughs that literally transformed the science of cryptography.
Attribute-based encryption (ABE) was developed by the lab’s Director, Brent Waters. What began as a theoretical construct is now being applied practically. ABE is part of a suite of web-based, user-friendly tools offered by NTT that secures and protects the integrity of a user’s data, and can allow clients to safeguard everything from intellectual property to personal health information. Another concept being pursued by the CIS Lab is secure multiparty computation. It asks the question, is there a way to have people collaborate with data without revealing the actual data sets? This research has implications for fields like finance and medicine. We are also pursuing ideas in the field of obfuscation that were previously believed to be mathematically impossible, but may one day allow the use of a code without revealing the code itself.
“For the last couple of years, at the prestigious Crypto and Eurocrypt conferences, the CIS Lab has had more papers accepted than any other organization.”
Getting noticed isn’t always a good thing
