Things to Know about Databases that Leverage Partially Homomorphic Encryption
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Re: Things to Know about Databases that Leverage Partially Homomorphic Encryption
#2I'm up voting this based mostly on the author's reference to Meatloaf songs and PEBKAC in his headings.
Re: Things to Know about Databases that Leverage Partially Homomorphic Encryption
#3Article does not mention zerodb, FWIW:
Re: Things to Know about Databases that Leverage Partially Homomorphic Encryption
#4Hi,
We're the team working on Google's experimental encrypted BigQuery client, also mentioned in the article. It's open-sourced and available on github:
https://github.com/google/encrypted-bigquery-client
Happy to answer any questions or chat about cool uses of PHE!
Re: Things to Know about Databases that Leverage Partially Homomorphic Encryption
#5Quick summary of a great article:
Homomorphic encryption allows a provider to run computations over encrypted data. Thus we do not necessarily have to expose sensitive data to a provider in order to manipulate this data and derive insights from it.
The tradeoff comes in the form of increased time to compute and increased complexity in the storage, retrieval, and manipulation of the data - the provider has some general sense of what type of data is stored where, but cannot simply determine what to do by looking at the plaintext values.
A few companies/research groups are working on bridging the gap between the extremes (unencrypted/fully homomorphic encryption) in order to come up with a good compromise between security and cost.
> Both the CryptDB and Monomi publications cited approximately 20% performance impact and neither offers full, standard SQL functionality.
With increased regulatory standards on the near-horizon - healthcare/insurance in particular - research in this area holds a lot of potential, especially if they can get the overhead closer to 0% and figure out a way of safely tagging data for manipulation in a way that does not expose it to re-identification.
Re: Things to Know about Databases that Leverage Partially Homomorphic Encryption
#6I never understood why homomorphic encryption is too slow to be used reliably today. Does some part of the computation need more power than todays computers can offer?
Re: Things to Know about Databases that Leverage Partially Homomorphic Encryption
#7Quick summary of a great article: Homomorphic encryption allows a provider to run computations over encrypted data. Thus we do not necessarily have to expose sensitive data to a provider in order to manipulate this data and derive insights from it. The tradeoff comes in the form of increased time to compute and increased complexity in the storage, retrieval, and manipulation of the data - the provider has some genera…
Came here to post a summary but you did a better job than I could.
> A few companies/research groups are working on bridging
> the gap between the extremes (unencrypted/fully
> homomorphic encryption) in order to come up with a good
> compromise between security and cost.
Fully vs partially homomorphic encryption is a trade-off between supported operations and cost. Fully homomorphic systems allow arbitrary computations while partially homomorphic systems do not, hence the lack of support for standard SQL.
Re: Things to Know about Databases that Leverage Partially Homomorphic Encryption
#8Quick summary of a great article: Homomorphic encryption allows a provider to run computations over encrypted data. Thus we do not necessarily have to expose sensitive data to a provider in order to manipulate this data and derive insights from it. The tradeoff comes in the form of increased time to compute and increased complexity in the storage, retrieval, and manipulation of the data - the provider has some genera…
Came here to post a summary but you did a better job than I could. > A few companies/research groups are working on bridging > the gap between the extremes (unencrypted/fully > homomorphic encryption) in order to come up with a good > compromise between security and cost. I just wanted to add that plain text vs homomorphic encryption is indeed a security and cost trade-off. Fully vs partially homomorphic encryption i…
Ah thanks for the clarification. I know of IBM and Enigma's efforts in the realm of fully homomorphic encryption - do you know of any others?
Re: Things to Know about Databases that Leverage Partially Homomorphic Encryption
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Came here to post a summary but you did a better job than I could. > A few companies/research groups are working on bridging > the gap between the extremes (unencrypted/fully > homomorphic encryption) in order to come up with a good > compromise between security and cost. I just wanted to add that plain text vs homomorphic encryption is indeed a security and cost trade-off. Fully vs partially homomorphic encryption i…
Ah thanks for the clarification. I know of IBM and Enigma's efforts in the realm of fully homomorphic encryption - do you know of any others?
Nope, sorry, but I'd be interested as well.
Re: Things to Know about Databases that Leverage Partially Homomorphic Encryption
#10I've wondered about another system, and perhaps someone here can point me in the right direction. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) has total control of two operations. Partially homomorphic encryption (PHE) has one operation. We can do PHE pretty well, and we're currently very very bad at doing FHE in reasonable amounts of time.
In Craig Gentry's FHE schemes (and all current ones that I know of) are all based off of an idea of bootstrapping, where each operation performed introduces some additional noise and every so often one must work to limit the noise and re-extract the signal. But somehow, as more operations are performed, simply too much effort goes into understanding the signal and noise.
But let's say that I had a FHE scheme in which I could do a limited (and relatively small, on the order of 100) operations, but no more. I suspect this has a name, but I'm not familiar with it. If I had to name it something, I would give it the confusing name Limited FHE, or perhaps Finite FHE.
Then my question is: what sorts of things could we do with Limited FHE? Is this a question that people have thought about?