UPDATED 15:04 EDT / JULY 07 2021

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Intel leads $9.5M round for secure analytics startup Opaque Systems

Intel Corp. has led a $9.5 million seed round for Opaque Systems Inc., a startup founded by researchers from the University of California at Berkeley that’s using so-called hardware enclaves to help companies process their data more securely.

Opaque Systems disclosed the funding this morning. The startup said Intel, which led the round through its prolific Intel Capital venture capital arm, was joined by Race Capital, FactoryHQ and The House Fund, which specializes in backing companies established by UC Berkeley alumni.

Companies encrypt their business records to prevent them from being read by any hackers who may gain access to the corporate network. However, encrypted records must be decrypted before they can be used in an analytics project or to train a machine learning algorithm. That creates a cybersecurity weak point: If hackers manage to access records when it’s decrypted, they can easily read the contents.

Opaque Systems’ solution is to isolate data while it’s decrypted in a sandbox that blocks unauthorized access attempts. To do so, it uses so-called hardware enclaves, a cybersecurity technology that Intel and other chipmakers have added to their processors over the past decade.

Hardware enclave technology works by turning a portion of a server’s memory into an isolated data storage environment that in some cases can’t be accessed even by the server administrator. These isolated memory segments, or enclaves, provide a secure environment where data can be kept while it’s not encrypted. When it’s time to move the data outside the enclave, a company can apply encryption to make the information unreadable again. 

The leading public clouds all provide hardware enclave features. Opaque Systems has developed a software platform that enables companies to use those features to make data processing environments they run in the cloud more secure. According to the startup, its software makes companies’ data inaccessible even to the infrastructure-as-a-service provider on whose hardware they process it.

Opaque Systems’ platform is based on MC2, an open-source technology that the startup’s founders developed at UC Berkeley. The platform uses MC2 to let companies keep records in an isolated hardware enclave while analyzing them. Companies can also use the isolated records as part of a training dataset for machine learning algorithms. Developers build machine learning algorithms by having them process large volumes of training data, which enables the software to learn how to identify useful patterns.

But the most notable use case Opaque Systems promises to enable with its technology is secure shared analytics. There are scenarios, the startup argues, where multiple companies may wish to pool their data in one place to facilitate centralized analysis. Its platform uses hardware enclaves to facilitate such projects while preventing the participating companies from accessing one another’s data.

The healthcare sector is one area Opaque Systems sees the capability coming handy. Using its platform, a group of  hospitals could create a shared pool of medical data for research purposes and protect patient privacy by ensuring each hospital can only access its own slice of the data. 

Machine learning training is another use case Opaque Systems could target. In general, the more training data a machine learning algorithm processes during development, the more accurate it becomes. It therefore may sometimes be beneficial for companies that otherwise compete with each to pool their training data together in the interest of making their respective artificial intelligence products more accurate. Using Opaque Systems’ technology, competing firms could perform such data sharing without giving away any sensitive information to their rivals. 

“I have seen many situations where users cannot share or analyze data because of privacy concerns, yet they could greatly benefit from data sharing,” said Opaque Systems co-founder Ion Stoica. Stoica is a computer science professor at UC Berkeley who previously co-founded Databricks Inc., an analytics startup recently valued at $28 billion. “Opaque will accelerate the move of sensitive workloads to the cloud, and help achieve compliance to the new and stricter privacy regulations.”

It’s not surprising that the startup’s technology has caught the attention of Intel. Because Opaque Systems’ software makes it easier to use hardware enclaves, it could widen the adoption of the technology among enterprises. Increased adoption of the technology, in turn, would be beneficial for Intel’s chip business since it offers hardware enclave features as part of many of its server processors.

Another notable detail is that Intel competitors Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Arm Ltd. offer similar features in their products. As a result, building a close partnership with Opaque Systems could be beneficial for Intel in the long run from a competitive standpoint. 

Opaque Systems is one of several companies developing ways for companies to process their data more securely. IBM Corp. is also active in this area. Whereas Opaque Systems hopes to improve security by keeping data in an isolated enclave while it’s decrypted, IBM is taking a different approach: It’s developing technology that removes the need to decrypt data in the first place. IBM also supports hardware enclaves in its cloud platform. 

Photo: Unsplash

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