What is Nillion?
Nillion is a secure computation network that decentralizes trust for high value data in the same way that blockchains decentralized transactions.
Traditional challenges of handling high value data include:
- The need for secure storage: Traditionally, securing high value data requires encryption before storage. While this is effective for safeguarding the data at rest, it creates limitations when the data needs to be used or processed.
- The ability to compute on stored data without compromising security: Once data is encrypted and stored, the traditional process involves decrypting it to perform necessary computations, and then re-encrypting it. This decrypt-compute-reencrypt cycle not only creates potential security vulnerabilities, but also leads to inefficiencies in data handling.
- Achieving decentralization of data management: Traditionally when we think of “decentralization”, it’s in the context of how blockchains have revolutionized trust assumptions for financial transactions. Applying this concept to high-value data management involves distributing data across multiple nodes, which is crucial for ensuring transparency, resilience, and independence from centralized control. However, this decentralization can introduce complexities in maintaining secure storage and efficient computation. The distributed nature of data can lead to challenges in achieving consistent security standards and efficient processing across the network, complicating data management.
Nillion addresses these challenges by leveraging privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) including Multi-Party Computation (MPC). These PETs enable users to securely store high value data on Nillion’s peer-to-peer network of nodes, and allow for computations to be executed on the masked data itself. This eliminates the traditional need to decrypt data ahead of computation, enhancing the high value data’s security.
High value data stored in the Nillion Network can be computed on while staying hidden, unlocking new use cases and verticals; early Nillion builders from our community are building things like tooling for private predictive LLMs and secure storage and compute solutions for healthcare, passwords, and trading data.