NJIT Computer Science Professor's Startup Places in Top 2 of IT Security Competition

Written by: Brian Malina
Published: Sunday, April 21, 2019
Duality Technologies honored for creating secure platform to collaborate on sensitive data.

Duality Technologies, a startup company co-founded by a NJIT Ying Wu College of Computing (YWCC) professor, was the first runner up in the Innovation Sandbox Competition at the RSA Conference, the security industry’s leading meeting of the minds.

Associate Professor Kurt Rohloff’s startup applies an innovative cryptographic technology called “homomorphic encryption” to enable organizations to collaborate and compute on private encrypted data.

Duality Technologies’ CEO and co-founder Alon Kauffman called extracting actionable value out of data the “gold rush of our time.” He said artificial intelligence and machine learning are the best ways to extract value from data but those processes also could pose security and privacy concerns.

Duality Technologies alleviates those concerns using homomorphic encryption. Keeping the data encrypted while processing it provides an extra layer of protection for companies, allowing them to conceal confidential or proprietary information while enabling customers to perform data science, run analytics or crunch numbers on the data without accessing it in its raw, exposed form.

Duality placed second out of ten finalists who presented at the competition, cited for its SecurePlus platform for secure collaboration on sensitive data. SecurePlus is Duality’s primary product platform. It integrates Duality’s innovative private computation technologies that leverage homomorphic encryption. First place went to Axonius, a cybersecurity asset management platform that provides actionable visibility and policy enforcement for all assets and users.

Duality Technologies is backed by Team8, a startup foundry supported by industry leaders such as Microsoft, AT&T, Nokia and Walmart. Team8 has invested millions of dollars in seed funding in Duality Technologies, which is now moving towards its next round of funding.

Read more about Duality Technologies’ recent success here.

Watch Duality Technologies RSA presentation here.