Hedera Head of Cryptography part of VISA and Google Research: Reducing HSM Reliance in Payments

Research paper has been published recently named "Reducing HSM Reliance in Payments through Proxy Re-Encryption" by co-authors from Visa, Google & Swirlds. Paper is focusing on credit and debit-card payments authentication methods with PINs, which are currently handled by Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) which incur heavy acquisition and operational expenses. Authors propose a solution of proxy re-encryption (PRE), a cryptographic primitive which can re-encrypt without exposing sensitive data.

What's really interesting is that Swirlds member Rohit Sinha is one of the co-authors of this paper, who is also head of cryptography at Hedera Hashgraph. Sinha has moved to Hedera directly from Visa, where he worked as a Staff Research Scientist for about 3 years. There is a reason to believe that the new proxy re-encryption solution could be built on a DLT network to provide highest level of security outside of HSMs.

There are other ties between Visa and Hedera found previously. Visa has filed a patent on digital fiat infrastructure and there is a mention of hashgraph in that paper as well.

More details can be found in the link to the paper.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentation/gaddam