What is the actual value proposition of HE? The purpose of encryption is to hide information, if you are able to to do any meaningful comparison between two encrypted records, you have an information leak, and encryption has failed.
The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption
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Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption
#92What is the actual value proposition of HE? The purpose of encryption is to hide information, if you are able to to do any meaningful comparison between two encrypted records, you have an information leak, and encryption has failed.
The value proposition is that the hosting provider running your computation does not know what was computed.
Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption
#93Looks like some kind of ad that tries to discredit regular encryption by claiming that it's already compromised (it isn't), or that it will be very soon. But lo! Here is the knight in shining armour coming to the rescue (FHE)! Soon. Maybe.
Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption
#94What is the actual value proposition of HE? The purpose of encryption is to hide information, if you are able to to do any meaningful comparison between two encrypted records, you have an information leak, and encryption has failed.
Imagine running an inference on a model in the cloud.
Usually the cloud will have access to your model. That poses a problem if your model is highly sensitive. (Imagine the NSA wanting to run a model on North Korean servers. NK would immediately snatch up that model.)
With FHE, you can theoretically avoid that. Someone can upload an encrypted model to the cloud. The cloud can do some computation on it (inference) and deliver an encrypted result. Then you can decrypt the result in the comfort of your own government^Whome.
Obviously this is a bit of a stupid example, but just think of all the scenarios right now where you'd want to offload your computation on someone else, but you don't want to let them see the computation.
Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption
#95here is a good project with HE
Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption
#96What is the actual value proposition of HE? The purpose of encryption is to hide information, if you are able to to do any meaningful comparison between two encrypted records, you have an information leak, and encryption has failed.
There is no information leak, because the information is never decrypted. The encrypted operations are performed directly on the encrypted data and the still-encrypted result is returned to the client, to be decrypted at their convenience to view the result. That is the magic of FHE.
Two identical cleartext values would likely not encrypt to the same ciphertext value (for example, you could get around that easily on the client end by simply incrementing any duplicate value by 1 before sending and then decrementing it by 1 again on return, assuming that is done undoably given the other operations happening); any comparison operation would also likely be encrypted and thus unknown to the server; so the server couldn't just linearly compare any two encrypted values to make deductions.
Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption
#97> To achieve unrestricted homomorphic computation, or FHE, you must choose F to be a set of functions that is complete for all computation (e.g., Turing complete). The two functions required to achieve this goal are bit Addition (equivalent to Boolean XOR) and bit Multiplication (equivalent to Boolean AND), as the set {XOR, AND} is Turing complete.
This - "set {XOR, AND} is Turing complete" - is incorrect. You need to also have "true" constant.
Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption
#98This 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.
Our team has been working on making FHE practical. Performance has come a long way in the past few years so FHE can indeed be "practical" for certain applications.
If you'd like to check it out yourself, feel free to take a look at our team's FHE compiler and playground [0].
Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption
#99Looks like some kind of ad that tries to discredit regular encryption by claiming that it's already compromised (it isn't), or that it will be very soon. But lo! Here is the knight in shining armour coming to the rescue (FHE)! Soon. Maybe.
fhe solves a ton of issues in sass products that don’t look great under audit. things where we sign off on audit today with fancy contracts called “data privacy agreements.” i think it will take some time (20 years?) but i expect zero knowledge for most of your data to be table stakes for saas offerings
Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption
#100Great write up on the state of the field, but when I checked last, the current problem is performance. I didn't see much on that in the article. 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.
Performance is still problematic for many applications (particularly in ML).
Our team has been working on making FHE more accessible to engineers via a compiler; we've found usability to be a much bigger obstacle than performance.
You might be surprised to see how far performance has come! For (an admittedly small example of) matrix-vector multiplication, we can do key generation, encryption, computation, decryption, and compilation in less than 5 seconds on a MacBook [0].