In many activities involving big data, cloud computing offers a common distributed infrastructure for the storage of large amounts of data in a scalable, efficient, and low cost way. For sensitive data, there is the possibility to use encryption for the secure storage of data in the cloud. While we have become increasingly good at encrypting data at rest, in order to process the data on the cloud we first need to decrypt it, which in turn excludes the possibility for using the cloud’s resources to process sensitive data, unless it can be done in a secure way. Cloud users want to hide sensitive data, from cloud providers; similarly, companies using cloud services want to protect their intellectual property from cloud providers and users. Hence the need for strategies for processing data securely in the cloud becomes increasingly more important.
The objective of this project was to realise an end-to-end encrypted speech recognition system. Such a system would provide confidence to industries currently unwilling to use cloud services (e.g. government, education, medical, financial) to have trust that their data is always encrypted. If data is always encrypted on the cloud then even if the cloud service is breached, the attacker gets encrypted data (that has been backed up) that they still cannot access. Similarly cloud service providers have no knowledge of the personal information relating to the data stored on the cloud.