A way to process encrypted data

IBM announced an interesting resolution to a problem created by encryption. The solution, which IBM dubbed "privacy homomorphism", allows deep inspection of encrypted content while maintaining the confidentiality of that content.

From a messaging perspective, this would be an important breakthrough, particularly in the context of archiving and security. For example, if encrypted messages are sent from desktop to desktop, archiving is a problem because the information in the message and any attachments cannot generally be indexed. While gateway-to-gateway encryption gets around this problem, there are some cases in which encryption should be maintained end-to-end. Similarly, deep inspection of encrypted content could take place for purposes of spam or malware scanning.

More information is available here.