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The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

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Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#101
post #77

> 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…

Keep in mind that this article was written by Cornami, so i would take any assertions about cornami solving all the problems with a huge heaping of salt.

What an amazing coincidence.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#102

> 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.

The subreddit /r/crypto is good quality as well (some researchers there).

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#103
post #93

Looks 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

Saas is all about collecting, controlling, and exploiting your data though. If they can still mine your data and leverage or sell the information they get out of it that's not really "zero knowledge". I don't expect companies will stop being interested in making money at all costs in 20 years, especially where the costs are mostly to you and your privacy.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are thinking of how ECB ends up with the identical blocks having identical encrypted form due to key and IV reuse. I don't think this is a requirement for all forms of FHE.

In particular, most FHE schemes inherently add randomness to encryptions as an artifact of using Ring Learning with Errors (RLWE) for hardness. This means that Enc(pk, m) != Enc(pk, m) if you run the algorithm twice; each key and message pair can produce many different ciphertexts.

It's always nice to see when some new field has managed not to experience every single classic blunder firsthand to learn not to do that. So there is something akin to a salt in the data that keeps identical records from being searchable, that's good to know.

Do you by chance have a simple way to explain how the search works then? Because superficially it seems like you might assume that you're looking for Enc(pk, m') == Enc(pk, m) and apparently that does not work.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#105
post #81
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t those sorts of differences suggest that perhaps enclave decryption would be as fast and support more functionality?

Probably but the main objective is to keep data safe in the cloud while keeping everything encrypted (traffic and data), all the time.

That's certainly fair. One of the oldest classic physical security failures I know of, which really stuck with me, is "who did background checks on the janitors?" It doesn't literally have to be janitors, but there are a lot of people in your space that we assume are not threats, even though there is a lot of overlap between "hacker" and "people who work for vendors".

I knew someone who was responsible for delivering backups from a secure data center to a lockbox every couple of days. Unfortunately the bank was only a few blocks from the data center so I'm not sure how much physical separation that really provided. Also this particular person would have been able to do absolutely nothing about being mugged for the disks if someone actually cared. But maybe I'm a little too paranoid.

I recall once having to drop the night's deposit off from the restaurant I worked at. They were down a manager due to illness, it was on the way home, I was a figurative if no longer a literal boyscout, so the math on "shenanigans if hinkley leaves with the money" versus "shenanigans if there is no night manager in the store" apparently leaned toward me. I'm glad they trusted me but I was a nervous wreck for four blocks until that bag went into the night deposit box.

Anything that can move "precious cargo" without a human failure mode is alright in my book.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Saas is all about collecting, controlling, and exploiting your data though. If they can still mine your data and leverage or sell the information they get out of it that's not really "zero knowledge". I don't expect companies will stop being interested in making money at all costs in 20 years, especially where the costs are mostly to you and your privacy.

Actually saas is about providing services for money.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In particular, most FHE schemes inherently add randomness to encryptions as an artifact of using Ring Learning with Errors (RLWE) for hardness. This means that Enc(pk, m) != Enc(pk, m) if you run the algorithm twice; each key and message pair can produce many different ciphertexts.

It's always nice to see when some new field has managed not to experience every single classic blunder firsthand to learn not to do that. So there is something akin to a salt in the data that keeps identical records from being searchable, that's good to know. Do you by chance have a simple way to explain how the search works then? Because superficially it seems like you might assume that you're looking for Enc(pk, m'…

By search, I assume you mean how would you do a database search with FHE referred to in the article. A simple example of private information retrieval is as follows:

Suppose Bob has an array of data he arranges into an mxn matrix, A. This data is not encrypted, but is encoded appropriately. Note that many FHE schemes allow you to compute ciphertext-plaintext operations.

Alice can send him 2 vectors x and y encrypted under her key, where x and y are all zero except for single 1. Bob homomorphically computes Ax = b. Since x is all zeros except for element i, the operation Ax effectively selects the ith column of A. Bob then computes dot(b, y). Since y is all zeros except for a 1 at element j, the dot product effectively selects the jth row of y. Bob sends the dot product back to Alice, which due to FHE is still encrypted under her key.

Alice decrypts the result and has looked up the j,ith element in A without Bob learning Alice's query or which data was involved in processing her search.

The default program on the Sunscreen[1] compiler playground shows this exact algorithm.

Disclaimer: I am an employee of Sunscreen.

[1]: https://playground.sunscreen.tech/

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saas is all about collecting, controlling, and exploiting your data though. If they can still mine your data and leverage or sell the information they get out of it that's not really "zero knowledge". I don't expect companies will stop being interested in making money at all costs in 20 years, especially where the costs are mostly to you and your privacy.

Actually saas is about providing services for money.

Money and control is what it's about. That usually means making someone dependent on you in order to access/use their own stuff, making it hard to migrate their data away from your service, and taking every advantage of the data being collecting.

I've never seen a saas product that isn't using and/or "sharing" their customer's data for their own benefit somehow. If they exist at all, they're the exception and not the rule.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saas is all about collecting, controlling, and exploiting your data though. If they can still mine your data and leverage or sell the information they get out of it that's not really "zero knowledge". I don't expect companies will stop being interested in making money at all costs in 20 years, especially where the costs are mostly to you and your privacy.

Actually saas is about providing services for money.

Typically that "service" involves doing something with the data server side (such as displaying it in a slick website).

FHE does have potential applicability here, but i think the potential is a bit overblown because there are a lot of devil in the details issues.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#110
post #93

Looks 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.

No, the point of FHE isn't that regular encryption is already compromised. It's that you can do processing on encrypted data while it's encrypted, without decrypting it. This opens up many more possibilities. For example, a cloud provider might store your data only in encrypted form and you can still do queries to pick out particular data or do some basic analysis, with the algorithm running on cloud computers, the result delivered to you in encrypted form, which you then decrypt with your private key.

The only problem is that there's a large performance penalty still, though there has been major progress in making it more efficient.

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