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The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

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Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#121

Post by yazzku »

bawolff wrote: post #77
m1ghtym0 wrote: post #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 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.

Does the ACM have submission standards anymore? They wrote the article and refer to themselves in third person.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#122

Post by everfree »

fudgefactorfive wrote: post #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 "cr…

I don't really follow how a customer would be able to pay for their usage of a VM globally distributed across untrusted nodes without "crypto/blockchain nonsense" involved. Where in the system would the credit card endpoint be located?

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#123

Post by ravi545 »

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Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#124

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

v4dok wrote: 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…

Fully homomorphic encryption is a toolset, it's not a specific configuration.

Your scenario has these parties, 1) a patient whose data we're discussing, 2) the hospital they shared it with, and 3) a pharma company looking to use the data. The hospital wants to promote this use without leaking any PII.

You're right that the hospital has no idea about the queries ("the code") but they control the server and which messages it will send in response.

As you point out, the hospital wouldn't run a FHE database capable of full-text extraction specifically because that would amount to simply sending all the data to the pharma company.

Instead they'd run a specialized FHE-DB server which would, for instance, return only row counts. The pharma company would run secret queries and if the hospital had one or more patients who matched the query the pharma company would know to the contact the hospital and then once paperwork is signed they could rerun the query with a signed token from the hospital and finally the query would return the actual PII.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#125

Post by olliej »

ricksunscreen wrote: post #114
m1ghtym0 wrote: post #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 algorit…

I don't know anything about Cornami's products or where they are in the manufacturing stage. However, I do work in FHE. To give you sense of performance, today you can multiply 2 encrypted 8192-bit values in BFV with typical (not optimal) scheme parameters in 17ms on a single core of an M1 Macbook Air. This is the most expensive operation by a wide margin. The ciphertexts for these parameters is about 0.5MB and the k…

I feel like the real problem is that much like QC people HE people selling it as "you can do some arbitrary computation [faster/completely securely]". Both QC and HE as currently theorized are extraordinarily limited in the kind of computations that can be performed. In the case of HE I cannot see how any of the schemes could be made to perform their quintessential example of an encrypted query applied to an encrypted database producing an encrypted result. Equivalently in QC land you have Grover's algorithm making DB queries magically faster.

Old man shakes fist at clouds.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#126

Post by angry_octet »

MauranKilom wrote: post #37
v4dok wrote: 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...

It's clear v4dok doesn't understand how FHE works, maybe due to confusion with enclaves like SGX. The hardware isn't able to leak the plaintext because it doesn't have the key; it executes on the ciphertext.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#127

Post by ricksunscreen »

brokenmachine wrote: post #119
ricksunscreen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about Cornami's products or where they are in the manufacturing stage. However, I do work in FHE. To give you sense of performance, today you can multiply 2 encrypted 8192-bit values in BFV with typical (not optimal) scheme parameters in 17ms on a single core of an M1 Macbook Air. This is the most expensive operation by a wide margin. The ciphertexts for these parameters is about 0.5MB and the k…

I understood about 20% of that but I really appreciate the comment. Are there any companies doing pioneering work on this now? What aspects of FHE does your employer do? How would you say the future is looking for FHE?

We're building an FHE compiler[1] and an accompanying zero-knowlege proof (ZKP) library for proving things about encrypted quantities. As with much of today's cutting-edge crypto, we're targeting Web3 applications, as this is an area where we see immediate use cases. However, our compiler and ZKP libraries are stand-alone so you can definitely use them in other applications.

My impression is that there are many parallels computing at large where custom hardware is becoming more and more prevalent. You can run arbitrary C programs with FHE by building a CPU out of binary gates and running on that, but it will run at 1Hz[2] emulated on 8GPUs. So, computing fibonacci(5) takes like 16 minutes. Conversely, you could create an arithmetic circuit that does it in like 16us. However, working with circuits is hard, let alone the additional requirements FHE imposes.

Today, our compiler lets you write Rust code that turns into an arithmetic circuit in the BFV scheme. It also manages parameter selection, which is another annoying part of FHE: choose parameters too small and decryption will fail due to excessive noise, but larger parameters slow down the computation and make ciphertexts larger.

Overall, the FHE has a ton of promise, but is currently in the chicken and egg phase whereby there isn't much commercially available because there isn't a market because there isn't anything available. We're trying to be an egg and grow along with a market. FHE is a big area and there's a ton to explore, like multi-key encryption[3]. FHE is currently nascent, but I believe its future is bright where it can be appropriately used.

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

[2]: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentat...

[3]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/180

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#128

Post by not2b »

yazzku wrote: post #120
not2b wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

The article does put quite a lot of emphasis on "soon broken" encryption algorithms, so can't blame kebman for that comment. It only mentions what you pointed out almost in passing. Also not an expert here, but if "Valuable insights through AI (artificial intelligence), big data, and analytics can be extracted from data", then you'd be a fool to believe this will protect your privacy, right? Or am I missing something…

If FHE could be made to work (and we are a long way off), the cloud provider would not be able to see your data even though you're doing processing on the data that remains on the cloud provider's CPUs, so in that sense it would protect you from Amazon/Google/Microsoft/plug in your cloud provider here.

Re: The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

#129

Post by yazzku »

not2b wrote: post #128
yazzku wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article does put quite a lot of emphasis on "soon broken" encryption algorithms, so can't blame kebman for that comment. It only mentions what you pointed out almost in passing. Also not an expert here, but if "Valuable insights through AI (artificial intelligence), big data, and analytics can be extracted from data", then you'd be a fool to believe this will protect your privacy, right? Or am I missing something…

If FHE could be made to work (and we are a long way off), the cloud provider would not be able to see your data even though you're doing processing on the data that remains on the cloud provider's CPUs, so in that sense it would protect you from Amazon/Google/Microsoft/plug in your cloud provider here.

Then how can they extract "insights" from the data if they can't see the data? At what point do the "insights" defeat the purpose of protecting your data from the cloud provider? Or are the claims in the article bogus?
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