IARPA Releases Research Report on Security and Privacy Assurance

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has publicly released the Security and Privacy Assurance Research (SPAR) Pilot Final Report.  IARPA invests in high-risk, high-payoff research programs to tackle some of the most difficult challenges of the agencies and disciplines in the Intelligence Community (IC). IARPA started the SPAR Program in 2011, building on the past IARPA Automatic Privacy Protection (APP) Program.

SPAR’s program goals were to develop 1) prototype implementations of efficient cryptographic protocols for querying a database that keep the query confidential, yet still allow the database owner to determine if the query is authorized and, if so, return only those records that match it; 2) prototype implementations of efficient cryptographic protocols for subscribing to topics in a stream of documents such that the subscription is kept confidential and only the matching documents are delivered; and 3) efficient homomorphic encryption techniques to implement queries on encrypted data.

The report describes the performance of SPAR technologies during a pilot demonstration in a U.S. government use case. The report was completed in November, 2015, and is being released to enhance public understanding of this research activity, consistent with the Principles of Intelligence Transparency for the IC. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in the report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of IARPA. 

Read the Security and Privacy Assurance Research (SPAR) Pilot Final Report.