In August 2023, the ISP Cybersecurity Lab joined IBM Client Engineering, IBM Consulting and IBM Research to participate in a technical discovery workshop based on the IBM Client Engineering Value Method. This is an Enterprise Design Thinking framework that encourages a blue-sky collaborative approach to help define a business opportunity, or to drive new insights into an existing idea. The methodology identifies and understands context, constraints and challenges, while defining the scope of a prototype solution that would be required to prove or disprove agreed hypotheses.
This gave the IBM team an opportunity to listen and learn about ISP’s goals and challenges, and for ISP and IBM to explore the application of FHE in their context and use case.
Defining the use case
The design thinking approach helped the IBM team in the early phase of the project. In a workshop, the IBM and ISP teams mapped a new user journey for the chosen use case scenario, considering ISP’s needs and requirements and using all the insights to better design the user experience, fundamental for the testing phase.
The chosen scenario was to enable a client to execute a cryptocurrency transaction with a third party. The bank would approve the transaction if the third party did not appear on its blacklist and sufficient funds existed in the client wallet. The innovation is that the details of the third party and other transaction details remained encrypted throughout the transaction. Using FHE, the encrypted third-party details were validated against the bank blacklist and approved or rejected without exposing any sensitive data to any of the parties involved, improving security and privacy for all participants.
