Computer scientists from Brown University have developed a proof-of-concept proposal for a national gun registry to help track guns used in crimes.

According to its developers, the proposed national gun registry would use advanced encryption — wherein data is converted into code to conceal it, thereby preventing its unauthorized access — to secure data associated with legally owned guns such as the gun’s make, model and serial number as well as the registration number assigned to individual gun owners.

To allay the concerns surrounding a proposed gun registry — for instance privacy, government tracking and government seizure concerns, among others — the Brown University researchers propose an encrypted database that would be exclusively handled at the county level and would require a decryption key, something that would potentially resemble a thumb drive, for instance. As such, only a designated county official would have access to the decryption key for all of the legally owned gun data in that county.

In addition to the designated county officials, researchers suggest that gun sellers and law enforcement could access and search encrypted gun data with the proper authorizations. For instance, a law enforcement official might use the database to search for data about a gun found at a crime scene. The designated county official would use the decryption key to decrypt the data exclusive to his or her county, revealing only data about the records associated with the gun in question.

"All of the servers that are storing the data and all of the computers that are doing these operations, they're just processing encrypted data and they never actually see anything," explained Seny Kamara, a professor of computer science at Brown. "That provides really strong privacy throughout the process because none of the data can ever be seen without the decryption key."

The proposed encrypted registry will be detailed in May at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.