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The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

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Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#11
post #8

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 nee…

> 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.

I might be misunderstanding but i think this is misleading. Any code can be run, but the person running the code cannot see the results (or any side effects), so they cannot leak data.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#13
post #7

This article skips over the elephant in the room, via a couple of casual references to “performance”. You did some experiments with HE in 2019 and it involves orders of magnitude slowdown — thousands of times slower than regular computation. I don’t see this speeding up either.

To make it fast I think we'll need custom silicon. I wonder how many stealth startups exist working on FHE chips?

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#14
post #11
post #8

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 nee…

> 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. I might be misunderstanding but i think this is misleading. Any code…

Depends on what do you mean by "person running the code"

If by person you mean the admin of the machine, then yes. If by person you mean the developer of the FHE-based application, then "maybe" If by person you mean the analyst who would in the end order an AI python model to be executed through the FHE-based software on a machine. Then no, that person will in the end get back human-readable results. Be that a model, or a table from an SQL DB running in FHE

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#15
post #8

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 nee…

I agree! That's why remote attestation or simply verifiability is such an important feature of these schemes. Semantic attestation ofc means having access to the source code and that IMO makes open source the natural choice. Audits might be an option where OSS is not desired for other reasons (likely business related). Not an expert on FHE, but confidential computing provides that attestation feature and it's just a matter of the software to make use of it.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#16
post #13
post #7

This article skips over the elephant in the room, via a couple of casual references to “performance”. You did some experiments with HE in 2019 and it involves orders of magnitude slowdown — thousands of times slower than regular computation. I don’t see this speeding up either.

To make it fast I think we'll need custom silicon. I wonder how many stealth startups exist working on FHE chips?

I wouldn't hold my breath on this. Reducing it by x40 AND making sure that hardware is not leaky.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#17

Healthcare is stuck in pre 2000 IT technologies because of privacy concerns. I hope that with FHE, Heathcare providers can move to cloud technologies without fear of losing privacy

They can today with other PETs like confidential computing. But change takes time and a lot of education when it's based on new types of technology.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#18
post #5

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 shar…

The whole cloud provider using FHE usecase always seemed a bit utopian to me. As you say, most of the time they dont want to provide user privacy, they want your data. Maybe i could imagine some sort of B2B case where there are strong requirements working out, but i struggle imagining it for consumer use cases. Not to mention, if you are outsourcing data computation, presumably its a lot of computation or you would d…

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Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#19
> Today, conventional wisdom suggests that an additional performance acceleration of at least another 1 million times would be required to make FHE operate at commercially viable speeds. At the moment, Cornami is the only commercial chip company to announce a forthcoming product that can meet and exceed that performance level.

Is there any comparison performance benchmark for these Cornami chips on real world algorithms? The data given by https://cornami.com/fully-homomorphic-encryption-fhe/ doesn't really help me.

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