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DARPA Awards Duality Technologies Multi-Million Dollar Contract to Accelerate Machine Learning on Encrypted Data

Hoboken, New Jersey – Duality Technologies, the leader in privacy preserving data collaboration, today announced that the company was selected for Phase II of the DARPA Data Protection in Virtual Environments (DPRIVE) program.  New capabilities for accelerated privacy-protected machine learning developing in the project will be integrated into Duality Technology’s secure data collaboration platform, offering customers the most comprehensive ability to apply data science and machine learning on sensitive data in an expedient and collaborative way that further breaks down data silos that exist within and between organizations.

“Duality emerged as an unequivocal global leader in making privacy technology real and practical, at orders of magnitude faster than anyone else,” said Prof. Kurt Rohloff, chief technology officer and co-founder of Duality. “We have assembled a renowned hardware and software acceleration team and we are continuing to achieve massive strides toward making what many people still believe is impossible – possible.”

With support from DARPA in the DPRIVE program, the Duality TREBUCHET team continues on its trajectory to leverage the Duality powered OpenFHE (openfhe.org) library for Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) computations that aim to significantly reduce the current computational burden and drastically speed up FHE calculations. This leading open source FHE software library revolutionizes computation on encrypted data – ensuring data security to address applications for the US Government, Department of Defense (DoD) and in commercial applications.

Duality was selected for Phase II of DPRIVE after success in a fiercely competitive Phase I round that included hardware accelerations teams from the biggest and most capable technology companies in this area. In Phase I, the Duality-led team designed a hardware accelerator for machine learning on data encrypted using FHE. The team’s successful design work in Phase I justified their selection for Phase II and the multi-million-dollar research and development contract to design and prototype encrypted computing acceleration hardware. A goal of the Duality-led TREBUCHET team is to make machine learning (ML) on FHE-protected ciphertext just as fast as ML on unencrypted data by designing a hardware accelerator integrated with advanced FHE software such as OpenFHE.

“This Phase II award further validates the ground-breaking work we are spearheading and I am immensely proud of our team, technology and the privacy-preserving revolution we are leading,” added Rohloff.

This research was, in part, funded by the U.S. Government. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Government.


Read more about Duality, DARPA, and the DPRIVE program in our DPRIVE one-pager.

Read more about the Duality TREBUCHET team’s work with FHE and hardware acceleration in our white paper, “Hardware Acceleration of Fully Homomorphic Encryption: Making Privacy Preserving Machine Learning Practical.”

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