MIT Enigma: Lets you sell private data using blockchain

A new project led by MIT graduate students will bring greater flexibility to cloud data sharing - helping companies analyze customer data while keeping their private information secure and allowing loan applicants to submit automatic underwriting information without sharing their data. Consumers can even sell their data for research purposes without having to worry about it being leaked over the internet or falling into unknown hands.

The Enigma project was developed by MIT graduate student Guy Zyskind, with the help of blockchain entrepreneur Oz Nathan and MIT professor Alex Pentland. Users can sell encrypted data of large-scale calculations and statistics in the market without revealing the source address of the data. The team said the project will launch a beta test in the near future.

Its founders wrote in a white paper: "With guaranteed privacy, automatic controls, and increased security measures, consumers can sell their own data addresses. For example, a pharmaceutical company looking to find patients for a clinical trial can search a genetic database. The marketplace can eliminate friction for customer acquisition, reduce costs, and provide new revenue streams. Through a cryptographic technique called secure multi-party computation, data can be distributed across different servers so that no machine can extract basic information, but nodes can still work together to compute authorized functions on the data."

“The data is distributed to different servers, and they can transfer functions to other nodes without leaking information,” the team pointed out in the white paper. “In particular, no group can obtain the ability to access the entire data; that is, any group can only have a meaningless part.”

The blockchain can control data connections - a shared ledger, similar to what controls Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Users can effectively join a chain of cryptographically signed permission slips to give other users the right to store data.

Companies might also be able to use Enigma to store data and information about customer habits, using a permission system to let employees or partners analyze large volumes of records without the risk of a data breach.

Even banks can calculate loan underwriting rules based on automated scripts executed on encrypted data provided by users, so applicants never share their financial details.

“Users can take out loans, save cryptocurrencies, or purchase investment products, all of which are automatically controlled by the blockchain without any risk of exposing their financial status,” Enigma’s founder emphasized.