Cryptography advisory board receives a boost

Skyhigh Networks has announced an industry-first Cryptography Advisory Board to ensure advanced encryption algorithms applied to protect corporate data in cloud services meet the highest peer-reviewed standards. Composed of world-renowned cryptography researchers, the board will collaborate with Skyhigh Networks to leverage academic breakthroughs for more open, functional, and secure application of security principles required to enable the wider adoption of cloud services for mission-critical enterprise use.

Encrypting data with customer-owned keys in SaaS applications, without compromising application functionality such as search, sort, and format validation, is quickly becoming a must-have requirement as enterprises seek to address NSA concerns and comply with numerous regulatory requirements including PCI, HIPAA and the EU Data Protection Act.

The Skyhigh Cryptography Advisory Board consists of:
- Kenny Paterson, Professor of Information Security and EPSRC Leadership Fellow, Information Security Group, Royal Holloway, University of London
- Mihir Bellare, Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego
- Alexandra (Sasha) Boldyreva, Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology
- Ari Juels, Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, Cornell Tech
- Thomas Ristenpart, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison

The board offers unique insight into function-preserving cryptography research, enabling significant advances in efficiency, functionality, and security for data encrypted at rest in the cloud. Collaboration between Skyhigh and members of the board has already led to advancements in order-preserving, format-preserving, and searchable encryption to services such as Salesforce and ServiceNow.

Board members have been at the forefront of tackling fundamental challenges in cryptography pertinent to cloud security for more than 20 years. Collectively, this board has pioneered work on techniques such as order- and function-preserving encryption, provable security, third-party trust models, and tamper-resistant protocol-level encryption with direct applicability to securing the cloud.

The board will provide guidance on Skyhigh Networks’ use of open encryption schemes and will also advise Skyhigh Networks’ customers on data security strategies pertinent to cloud.