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The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

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Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#41
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wait, how would hardware be possibly leaky? The encryption/decryption can leak data, sure, but that's unrelated to FHE. If your hardware can leak info about the plaintext on the side processing the encrypted data, then you could do the same in software anyway, and the FHE scheme itself is clearly broken...

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Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#42
post #22
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…

> A very powerful concept for remote processing, supply chain security, and overall reducing trust; but completely unrelated to privacy. It is still related to privacy, but the privacy "attacker" is the execution place, allowing for outsourcing of computations and storage without running into data leaks or violations of data protection laws. Maybe you use a different definition of privacy?

You are right. It is related to privacy, but its not the whole story. Thats what I am trying to say. Running FHE will not magically solve the "data leakage" problem of your AI models, and I believe that the people/companies who don't make that distinction are misleading.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#44

> 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 algorit…

If no one answers here, might try on the FHE.org discord, loads of researchers there who probably wrote a paper on exactly that.

thanks! will try there

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#45
I think the killer app for FHE is an Ethereum-esque Globally distributed VM (yes eye-roll I hate Crypto/Blockchain nonsense as well). To me that was always the big interesting concept behind Ethereum, running some sort of code with persistent state. Obviously no free lunches so we gotta pay for that somehow to incentivize people to pay for power on computing equipment they aren't personally utilizing. But somehow "crypto" got caught on the literally first example of a distributed systems correctness: debit/credit of synchronized accounts.

I feel FHE combined with slightly cheaper cost might enable things like community run server-less apps that have user state stored and processed by untrusted nodes with persistent state stored and accessible only by the data-owner. E.g. a simple excel-esque web app which only serves the UI while State and calculations are running on this hypothetical system at no cost to the apps creator with me paying only for exclusively my usage. They provide the code but no one but me can extract my data and the results of any computations, and for the privilege I pay the system.

I miss the days of upload and forget software that just relies on client resources and so require little upfront investment from developers, I feel FHE plus distributed computing could enable this.

I am aware "Web3" claims to want this future as a concept but the cost and utter lack of confidentiality (I can observe all data to and from a contract as well as the sender/receivers identity) makes it a super-niche borderline useless VM. For distributed governance sure, it's a public ballot box (the preface to the first distributed systems example, a single account with credits), but for any application/user data absolutely unacceptable.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#46
post #42
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A very powerful concept for remote processing, supply chain security, and overall reducing trust; but completely unrelated to privacy. It is still related to privacy, but the privacy "attacker" is the execution place, allowing for outsourcing of computations and storage without running into data leaks or violations of data protection laws. Maybe you use a different definition of privacy?

You are right. It is related to privacy, but its not the whole story. Thats what I am trying to say. Running FHE will not magically solve the "data leakage" problem of your AI models, and I believe that the people/companies who don't make that distinction are misleading.

This isn't an area I know much about so I'll stay out of the main conversation, but would like to point out that considering you wrote "completely unrelated to privacy" in your first comment, following it with "It is related to privacy, but its not the whole story. Thats what I am trying to say." makes me unsure what your point is or if you actually mean or understand it. Sorry for being blunt.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#47
post #31
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are the used operations that exotic that special hardware can achieve massive speedups?

Not at all, but imagine having to perform 10.000 multiplications on numbers of 10.000 digits just to encrypt "This is my password".

And that, differently, for each access (write and read) to each cell in the table.

Not what you would say feasible right now.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#48
> FHE (fully homomorphic encryption) provides quantum-secure computing on encrypted data

Today, if I understand it correctly, that means the encryption can't be broken on a computer with resources < whatever is required to calculate the square root of 16 ;)

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#49
This is a really misleading article. It skims over lots of practical issues with FHE, such as the cost of the extra work which will severely limit its applicability, and more critically, the necessity to use the same key(!!) to encrypt/decrypt every input and output. It also conflates FHE with quantum-resistant encryption, simply because most FHE algorithms currently use lattice-based math, and a 2006 paper observed that no quantum algorithms were known that could outperform traditional computing for lattice math. Not a very strong claim, imo.

It goes on to grossly overstate the extent to which current IT systems are at risk as well as the extent to which FHE would even address actual IT threats. Plus, anytime anyone claims something is “provably secure”, they are leaving out crucial parts of the system, like the interface with humans or key rotation.

And then there’s the part where the author is a VP of business development at a company that makes FHE hardware. Sigh.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#50

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

fhe doesn't solve this at all. if the problem takes little enough power do be run with the, you can run it without cloud compute or fhe easily.

Well, it's not about compute power and whether you can run things on-prem. It's about sharing, synchronizing, and collaborating on data. That's where PETs open up new opportunities.
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