Acronis expands the global reach of cyber protection, adds its expertise to the MPC Alliance

SHAFFHAUSEN, Switzerland, 10November 2020 - Acronis, a global leader in cyber protection, announced today that it has joined the MPC Alliance, a global association of organizations with the mission of improving data security and privacy through the implementation of the secure cryptographic technology of multi-party computation (MPC).

MPC is a mathematical approach to digital security that reduces the dependency on trusted third parties and physically secured devices to maintain the privacy and security of our digital footprints, which have grown in size and value over the last few years and which are vulnerable to misuse and theft.

MPC is a subfield of cryptography which allows multiple parties to compute an output using their private data without ever disclosing their data to each other or any third party, and it is capable of doing so while guaranteeing the correctness of the output even if some data become corrupt.

Acronis has adopted MPC technology as it develops innovative cyber protection solutions that address today's safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security challenges (known as the Five Vectors of Cyber Protection). Acronis products and services are trusted by more than 5.5 million individuals, companies, and organizations worldwide.

Examples of MPC in use today include its use to protect the private keys used for generating a digital signature to approve transactions on public or permissioned blockchains, or to protect data stored in clouds. It is also used to generate digital signatures to authorize transactions, certify code, verify identity, facilitate blind surveys, preserve privacy in computations across multiple data sets across multiple blockchains, clouds, blind auctions and more.

Amongst a range of MPC research initiatives, Acronis is working with Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to create innovative encryption and secure data management technologies to enable a secure MPC platform for business-to-business and business-to-government transactions, ensuring encrypted data can be shared between multiple untrusted parties while keeping shared data secure and private.

The Acronis Technology President and co-founder said: "Multi-party computation is an area of great interest to Acronis into which we have devoted considerable research resources. Implementing and integrating MPC technology into our cyber protection solutions is analogous to implementing of a trusted third party that receives the input and confidentially computes the result but doesn't reveal any data about the inputs. For example, Acronis customers can do confidential benchmarking or business intelligence reporting without revealing any underlying data of a sensitive nature."

Members of the alliance include: Acronis, Alibaba Group, AMIS, ARPA, Atomrigs Labs, Big Horn Web3 Solutions, Bolt Labs, Cosmian, Cryptoworth, Curv, Cybavo, Cybernetica, Digital Garage, Fragmentix, I4P, IJS Technologies, Inpher, ITRI, Juzix, MYKEY, Nth Party, NTT, Partisia, Penta Security, PlatON, PRIVEcomms, QEDIT, Qredo, Salesforce, Sepior, Spherity, Thresh0ld, TruthShare, TsingJiao Information Science, Unbound Tech, Xkey, Xtendr, and ZenGo. The MPC Alliance was envisioned and initiated by Sepior, Unbound, and ZenGo. Members of the alliance share a belief that many current and emerging online markets will benefit from MPC and working together as an alliance will help to accelerate awareness, mitigate barriers, and encourage adoption for greater privacy and security of online services. Companies developing or applying MPC to solve real world problems are invited to join, contribute, and participate in accelerating market awareness and adoption of MPC. Visit www.mpcalliance.org for more information. You can also follow MPC Alliance on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Telegram.