Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer

jeremykun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 168 posts

Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer

#91

Post by 3np »

vintermann wrote: post #89
fatneckbeard wrote: post #82

sounds like you could have anonymous currency. heres our FHE bank. we both have accounts. the entire ledger is encrypted. i give you 5 dollars, i have no idea what your starting and ending balance, but i am still able to initiate a transaction that will deduct 5 from mine, and add 5 to yours, and verify i actually have 5 to send, and the entire thing will be done without exchange of information about balances with an…

Sure. And then, after you've transferred 5 dollars to me, I say "What 5 dollars? What are you talking about?" and refuse to hand over the thing that you thought you bought. Add perfect anonymity to the mix and I get to do it over and over again, too.

You could still design the scheme such that the sender can produce a cryptographic proof. Equally applicable for tax auditing etc.

Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer

#92

Post by macrolime »

vintermann wrote: post #89
fatneckbeard wrote: post #82

sounds like you could have anonymous currency. heres our FHE bank. we both have accounts. the entire ledger is encrypted. i give you 5 dollars, i have no idea what your starting and ending balance, but i am still able to initiate a transaction that will deduct 5 from mine, and add 5 to yours, and verify i actually have 5 to send, and the entire thing will be done without exchange of information about balances with an…

Sure. And then, after you've transferred 5 dollars to me, I say "What 5 dollars? What are you talking about?" and refuse to hand over the thing that you thought you bought. Add perfect anonymity to the mix and I get to do it over and over again, too.

You could set it up so whoever initiates a transfer could get a kind of receipt that proves they initiated a transfer of X dollars to whomever.

So if Alice transfers 5 dollars to Bob and Bob says "What 5 dollars? What are you talking about?", then Alice could say, well here's my receipt, that's signed by my private key and the private key of the FHE bank, that shows that I sent the money to Bob and the FHE bank executed the transfer.

Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer

#93

Post by londons_explore »

gigatexal wrote: post #88

This is all interesting and I’m thinking now with all the talk of privacy and data sovereignty etc why this is coming out or Google now and not Apple? Anyone know if Apple is thinking along these lines? Would be nice if we could get performant computation on things without having to decrypt our own data. Then again my understanding and real world applications of homomorphic encryption is pedestrian at best. What I do…

The news stories you read about Google and Apple re: privacy are heavily influenced by corporate PR departments sending 'tips' to the media to try to make themselves look good or a competitor look bad.

The actual privacy efforts of both companies don't (in my experience) closely align with what the news says about them.

Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer

#94

Post by PeterisP »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #84
fatneckbeard wrote: post #82

sounds like you could have anonymous currency. heres our FHE bank. we both have accounts. the entire ledger is encrypted. i give you 5 dollars, i have no idea what your starting and ending balance, but i am still able to initiate a transaction that will deduct 5 from mine, and add 5 to yours, and verify i actually have 5 to send, and the entire thing will be done without exchange of information about balances with an…

>> since the bank itself could never prove its reserve level of deposit met the percentage set by government There’s no minimum reserve set by the fed anymore: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm

It's not really about the reserve requirements, but about basic accounting requirements, which all banks do have. At its fundamentals, bank balances are not some storage of "your money", they are recording of how much the bank legally owes you (or vice versa). And of course the bank has to know exactly what liabilities they have according to their contracts, so they need to see the balances. They also need to be able to add arbitrary quantities of new money to the FHE scheme when cash is paid in and remove it when it is paid out.

Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer

#95

Post by mik1998 »

fatneckbeard wrote: post #82

sounds like you could have anonymous currency. heres our FHE bank. we both have accounts. the entire ledger is encrypted. i give you 5 dollars, i have no idea what your starting and ending balance, but i am still able to initiate a transaction that will deduct 5 from mine, and add 5 to yours, and verify i actually have 5 to send, and the entire thing will be done without exchange of information about balances with an…

GNU Taler does something similar, except without homomorphic encryption. It only anonymizes the payer however.

Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer

#97

Post by yarg »

hectormalot wrote: post #79
yarg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FHE @ plain text speed? Absolute bullshit. > You choose the encryption standard in use for the database, from AES, DES, 3DES, Blowfish, Twofish, Skipjack, and more. That seems very wrong ((as far as I know) those standards are not in any way designed in such a way as to permit operations on their cyphertexts). > Vaultree has achieved major breakthroughs in several encryption technologies, allowing organisations to pr…

How I read it is that you specify which ways you will use a column and then VT will create the various encrypted columns to support this. Deterministic shared key for matches only. Ordered encryption for ranges and FHE for various calculations. The latter probably being quite slow. I don’t think they are rolling their own crypto, just combining a lot of existing algorithms in various ways. I could see a use cases in…

They're claiming to have made breakthroughs in several encryption technologies, not that they've figured out a clever way to glue some things together.

I could be wrong, but it smells like snake oil to me.

Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer

#98

Post by MoOmer »

golol wrote: post #87

When I first learned about homomorphic encryption it gave me the idea of "cryptographic AI", as some sort of sci-fi writing prompt. Suppose compute is readily available to interstellar civilizations but actually designing a (super)intelligent AI is difficult. Then it could be economically feasible for cryptographic AI to exist. These are descriptions of AIs that run under homomorphic encryption, where the private key…

Put a few thousand more words to pad, and I’d read that book!

Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer

#99

Post by golol »

MoOmer wrote: post #98
golol wrote: post #87

When I first learned about homomorphic encryption it gave me the idea of "cryptographic AI", as some sort of sci-fi writing prompt. Suppose compute is readily available to interstellar civilizations but actually designing a (super)intelligent AI is difficult. Then it could be economically feasible for cryptographic AI to exist. These are descriptions of AIs that run under homomorphic encryption, where the private key…

Put a few thousand more words to pad, and I’d read that book!

Yea collecting sci fi ideas is fun but writing a book is wayyy too hard sadly ...

Re: Google’s fully homomorphic encryption compiler – a primer

#100

Post by noman-land »

I left this comment on the blog but I'll repeat it here as well.

Really interesting! Thanks for the writeup. I'd be particularly keen to see the example applications broken up into the two halves you'd expect in an actual client/server application.

The adder example, while illustrative, receives cleartext inputs and returns cleartext outputs. In a real application the adding code would presumably sit on a server and there would be client code which just encrypts user inputs and decrypts backend outputs.

It would be very interesting to see how one might set this all up with a keypair. Could the same adding code be used for multiple different users and keys, for example?

Post reply on HN