Cryptography is an obscure discipline. Unless you’re in big tech, a university or a research organization, you’re unlikely to meet its practitioners. Even then, you might have to search to find them. And then work hard to understand what they’re doing. But this field is critical to privacy and security in our digital age—and the quantum era to come. To update you, I’ve highlighted three cryptographic trends below. Privacy Enhanced: Cryptography’s Latest Frontiers (forbes.com)

As we now look to NTT Research’s Upgrade 2024, this two-day event is once again scheduled to analyse enterprise software and cloud technology innovations around privacy, precision medicine, optical devices and the digital workplace. The conference features a strong element of hands-on demonstration setups (some working products, some at the applied prototype stage and some even more embryonic) and it will be held at the NTT Experience Center (XC) and the Metreon, both in San Francisco from April 10-11, 2024. What to expect from NTT Research’s ‘Upgrade’ 2024  (computerweekly.com)

Over the past 20 years, innovation and new products seemed to come mainly from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and other venture capitalist investments. But that may be changing, as research labs, academics and research and development groups come up with new ways to develop “what’s coming next.” In this episode, Keith chats with Chris Shaw, CMO at NTT Research, about some of the big trends in how new products and technologies will be developed over the next 10 to 20 years. Today in Tech: Looking for gold: Where will the next OpenAI come from? | Ep. 129 on Apple Podcasts

Generative AI platforms have dominated news cycles for much of 2023 and that probably won’t abate in 2024. That isn’t surprising. The technology is spreading through every facet of life. Education, employment, infrastructure, law, government, consumer spending… all of it has some application for AI for claimed good and obvious bad. And all of the bad is making many experts leery of the “benefits: of AI. It was less than one month after OpenAI released ChatGPT for general use by OpenAI in 2022 that criminals figured out how to use it to create new strains of malware. During the past year, OpenAI suffered multiple cyberattacks that revealed sensitive data of users, employees, and researchers. Experts leery of “benefits” of AI – Cyber Protection Magazine (cyberprotection-magazine.com)

To sell us more goods and services, the algorithms of Google, Facebook and Amazon exhaustively parse our digital footprints. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with companies seeking to better understand their customers. However, over the past 20 years the practice of analyzing user data hasn’t advanced much beyond serving the business models of these tech giants. That could be about to change. Scientists at NTT Research are working on an advanced type of cryptography that enables businesses to perform aggregate data analysis on user data — without infringing upon individual privacy rights. DEEP TECH NEWS: Respecting individual rights by using ‘privacy preserving aggregate statistics’ | The Last Watchdog

With the ongoing evolution of artificial intelligence and quantum computing, 2024 is poised for significant advancements as organizations increasingly adopt and innovate using these cutting-edge technologies. This technological surge, however, is accompanied by a rise in sophisticated cyberthreats. A significant concern is malicious actors’ misuse of generative artificial intelligence — or gen AI. Businesses are now facing myriad complex challenges: an upsurge in ransomware attacks, increased state-sponsored cyber espionage, and the growing task of securing the ever-expanding internet of things (IoT). AI in 2024 Brings Pivotal Shifts in Cybersecurity Trends (technewsworld.com)

The future of data privacy is the end of compromise. With the world producing data at astounding rates, we need ways to put data to the best use while protecting against breaches and ensuring privacy, data protection and access control. These principles are foundational to attribute-based encryption (ABE)—a novel form of encryption that after years of study is now beginning to be commercially deployed. Compared to the prevailing coarse-grained access model of legacy encryption technologies, in which giving out a secret key essentially amounts to giving access to all the encrypted data, ABE is a more finely tuned approach that grants prescribed access of encrypted data to someone with a matching set of traits. Attribute-based encryption could spell the end of data compromise – Help Net Security