Secure Variant of the McEliece Cryptosystem

The McEliece public-key encryption scheme has become an interesting alternative to standard modern cryptosystems. Compared with other schemes it is not known to be broken by a quantum computer. It is also relatively efficent with a reasonable key size.

This work from the arxiv resource, shows the first construction of a McEliece based public-key cryptosystem secure against chosen ciphertext attacks

Researchers' scheme allows encrypted and shareable Google Docs

Yet more cloud based encryption research. Researchers at Trinity College, Dublin are reported by The Register to have developed software providing "'real-time' encryption of data before it is uploaded to the Google servers". The CipherDocs project also goes beyond simple document encryption. It preserves Google Docs ability to let users share their documents, thus allowing the secure sharing of encrypted Google docs transparently. It is also secure in the sense that Google would not have access to the encryption keys.

Startup Porticor launches with encryption technology for cloud computing

I've come across a number of technologies like this , proposing various ways to keep data securely encrypted in the cloud. The business need for it has got to be extremely high so it will be interesting to see how this area pans out.