Gaps In Encryption Create Exploitable Vulnerabilities

Data breaches are no occasional crisis – they are a persistent, costly epidemic wreaking global havoc on businesses.

While organizations leverage the latest technological advancements in perimeter defense, access management, and cloud and application security, one area that is overlooked is data encryption.

Where Do Gaps in Encryption Exist?

Enterprise data follows a lifecycle encompassing creation, collection, transfer, storage, processing, analysis, and archival. Traditional encryption methods typically include encryption at rest (when data is stored) and encryption in motion (when data is transferred between systems). However, these approaches need more protection because data must be decrypted for processing and analysis. Additionally, vulnerabilities arise during transitions between encryption in motion and processing or when shifting to encryption at rest.

These security gaps expose organizations to malicious parties – insiders and external hackers – who increasingly target such weak points to gain access to sensitive information. Attackers’ ability to identify and exploit these lifecycle vulnerabilities puts organizations at significant risk of data exfiltration resulting from a breach, underscoring the urgent need for comprehensive encryption solutions that protect data across every stage of its lifecycle.

The risks multiply in cloud-based and data-sharing environments where data is frequently in motion and accessed by multiple parties.

The Promise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption: Continuous Data Protection

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) solutions shield data from unauthorized access and render it useless to threat actors when other defenses fail and a breach is successful. FHE allows computations on encrypted data,, eliminating critical vulnerabilities created by conventional encryption and the need to decrypt data for processing and analysis.

FHE’s promise is transformative. It allows sensitive data to be processed without exposure in plaintext, enabling multiple parties to perform computations while ensuring data confidentiality and providing robust protection against software—and hardware-based attacks.

FHE enables operations on encrypted data without decryption, maintaining continuous protection throughout data workflows.

FHE is an indispensable tool for mitigating many cyber threats. Its application can reduce insider threats and man-in-the-middle attacks by ensuring that data remains encrypted during transmission and processing, reducing the risk of interception and tampering.

It safeguards third-party data sharing by eliminating plaintext exposure and defends against data exfiltration by ensuring that encrypted data is unreadable without proper decryption keys. The technology also strengthens cloud security by allowing secure data processing in untrusted environments.

Why FHE Hasn’t Achieved Mainstream Success

Despite its vast potential, FHE hasn’t achieved widespread adoption due to several inherent limitations hindering its practicality in real-world applications. The combination of high costs, resource demands, and incompatibility with existing software has further limited its adoption, especially in environments requiring real-time processing.

Traditional FHE solutions often cause data to balloon 100 to 1,000 times in size when encrypted, driving up storage costs and slowing data transfer. These scalability issues have made handling large datasets or complex computations difficult, particularly for big data analytics and machine learning. Performance bottlenecks can make operations on encrypted data thousands to millions of times slower than plaintext processing, requiring immense computational power.

Only when FHE is optimized can it empower organizations to maintain trust and integrity in an ever-evolving threat landscape.

Advances in cryptographic algorithms and computing power bridge the gap between security and usability in FHE, making it viable for real-world applications. Optimized Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions are emerging as practical, efficient tools for protecting sensitive data without compromising speed or scalability.

One of the most transformative developments in optimized FHE is the ability to inspect encrypted data at near-plaintext speeds.

Unlike traditional FHE, which could take hours, days, or weeks to process encrypted computations, cutting-edge solutions now operate within nanoseconds. This performance boost is critical in real-time processing scenarios like fraud detection, transaction monitoring, or high-frequency trading. Fast encryption and decryption enable organizations to maintain security without sacrificing efficiency, ensuring seamless operations across time-sensitive use cases.

An optimized FHE solution must align with stringent security standards, such as the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 certification, to ensure it meets the compliance and encryption benchmarks mandated by governments and regulatory bodies. This certification demonstrates the solution’s robustness and readiness for deployment in industries like finance, healthcare, and government, where data protection is paramount. FIPS compliance ensures secure encryption and fosters trust and confidence in the solution’s reliability.

Optimized FHE solutions eliminate one of the most significant pain points of earlier iterations—data expansion. In traditional FHE systems, encrypted data often ballooned up to 1,000 times its original size, which slowed down processing and created logistical challenges in storage and transmission.

Modern FHE, by contrast, ensures the size of encrypted data remains consistent with its plaintext equivalent, allowing for faster performance and reduced bandwidth and storage costs. This breakthrough is particularly beneficial for large-scale data-sharing applications requiring high computational efficiency.

When evaluating an FHE solution, it’s critical to ensure the offering incorporates key features and capabilities that enable organizations to fully unlock its potential.