51–60 of 132 posts
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 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 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'm open to correction, but it's my understanding that the strongest form of FHE allow users to submit an encrypted executable with embedded data as input, which is then processed by an untrusted server. I'd definitely call it an ultimate form of privacy. The computational cost is prohibitively expensive, and conditional branch is impossible in the standard implementation, so it's largely an academic exercise. But last time someone on HN told me currently the achievable performance on a modern computer is roughly equivalent to a 1970s mainframe, so I guess some niche applications are still possible.
Weaker forms of FHE don't have this level of privacy, and they do not claim so. Nevertheless, relevant development still represents progress on cryptography and privacy researches as a whole.
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…
In this case the real danger is that the availability of "privacy-preserving technologies" like FHE, MPC and Differential Privacy will actually do more to undermine human privacy than all the non-confidential tech that come before. This will mostly occur by allowing corporations to build sophisticated statistical/ML models using data that would previously never have been allowed out of its confidential silo.
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 "cr…
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…
That's the point though isn't it? Only the person who wants the results can get them or even see the inputs. That restricts the data available for shitty AI and precludes any Joe Schmo from scanning the whole database.
If your threat model is instead that you don't trust the FHE endpoint, then much how you want HTTPS termination to happen in a place you control you also in this case just encrypt the stuff you care about on your own devices.
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…
Suppose you have multiple organizations that want to run some computation on their joint data, without revealing their data to each other. Each organization has their own machine that runs the MPC protocol. They have full control over their machine, and can inspect that the code correctly executes the protocol. Only once all organizations agree, will the computation take place, and within the security model of the protocol, it is guaranteed that only the correct computation output is revealed to the designated parties.
A few years ago there were papers on evaluating simple logic circuits in an FHE context and it took 2h hours for what was basicially 5-6 NOR gates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> FHE gives you NO guarantee about the code that is running on the encrypted data. You mean in order to validate the data is authentic? Otherwise the code running on the data is irrelevant, as it can't access the data itself (and thus preserves the before-mentioned privacy).
The code decrypts the data at some point (for use, presentation, etc). If the code is crappy, insecure, etc. then the data will be exposed, and the data being encrypted wont help at all...