The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Non-technical comment to consider the conseqeunces of FHE. This is not to diminish the amazing work that has gone into FHE, and the theoretical use cases for FHE in a few fields I've worked in are significant. The challenge I found in working with people who want the data is that they really do just want the data.

Examples include government agencies who used made up in-house encryption schemes to get their data sharing plan past their legal privacy and security gates and then there was a secret key a small cadre had who could unscramble it after it was distributed in the sector, researchers rejecting synthesized data for uncontrolled test environments because "it was too hard," when really they just wanted the data sets outside the legal controls on it, rejecting differential privacy queries because they didn't want to come up with or specify their queries first based on metadata and again just wanted the data, rejecting identifying the individuals with access to millions of peoples health information data because as institutions they felt entitled to it, banks and payment firms rejecting zero knowledge proofs of user attributes because it violated KYC, and these are just a few.

There has been a concerted effort to squeeze the data toothpaste out of the tube when it comes to health information and other types, and so I am ambivalent about FHE use cases because its primary use case is side stepping rules that protect the privacy of data subjects.

The question I would have is, if data synthesis, legal risk-based de-identification, differential privacy, and cryptographic tokenization protocols were insufficient, what technical improvement in actual accountability does FHE offer to data subjects, and given the size of the data sets this facilitates, what are the consequences of its failure modes?

Given the entire history of cryptography is defined by one party convincing their targets that a given scheme provides them security, the way that FHE scales to giving data collectors impunity "because it's encrypted!" seems like it is vulnerable to every criticism leveled at blockchains, where just because it's encrypted doesn't mean it isn't laundering.

This feels more like a press release than an actually insightful article.

Would practical FHE be interesting? Sure. Is it happening? Doesn't seem like it is any time soon.

I don't think it was just a press release, the linked PDF had a nice overview of how we got here and some advances in the last decade. Decent little review type article with some hyperbole!

I think the title maybe a little too optimistic / vague by saying it's "near" without indicating what else is needed to get there / when it might happen ;).

I am still amazed by the amount of people that still mix security and encryption in-use with privacy. And truth is the whole privacy/security industry is doing nothing to change that.

Take this for example

"Valuable insights through AI (artificial intelligence), big data, and analytics can be extracted from data—even from multiple and different sources—all without exposing the data, secret decryption keys, or, if need be, the underlying evaluation code."

FHE gives you NO guarantee about the code that is running on the encrypted data. I can run a leaky AI model or a SELECT * on encrypted data and still get the output. What I can do (and that's assuming there is open-sourced, auditable code) is to make sure that anyone with hypervisor access on that machine cannot dump my data out during processing.

A very powerful concept for remote processing, supply chain security, and overall reducing trust; but completely unrelated to privacy.

"The question I would have is, if data synthesis, legal risk-based de-identification, differential privacy, and cryptographic tokenization protocols were insufficient, what technical improvement in actual accountability does FHE offer to data subjects, and given the size of the data sets this facilitates, what are the consequences of its failure modes?"

It doesn't. Because its not aiming at solving these problems. Encryption in-use is aiming to solve trusting hardware (and maybe code) you don't own. Privacy is a different (IMO more complex) problem.