By Tom Simonite, Technology Review
Concerns over security and privacy have limited the adoption of cloud computing. It is now common for all kinds of data—from personal photos to business documents—to be stored on third-party servers. But despite increased use of outside commodity “cloud computing” equipment, confidence that a third-party service is using your data appropriately is still based more on old-fashioned trust than on technology. As digital break-ins at Twitter and LinkedIn in recent months show, even the biggest services aren’t immune to attack, and this is a big challenge to companies looking to outsource calculations related to sensitive data. Software called Pinocchio, created by researchers at IBM and Microsoft, shows one possible solution. It serves as a kind of lie detector that can be used to check whether a cloud service did the work it was supposed to, or whether it may have been compromised and forced to do something else. The software could also be used to improve privacy, by providing a dependable way for companies to process personal data remotely rather than bringing it all back to their servers.
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