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Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption

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Re: Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption

#81

Post by ameliaquining »

Plont wrote: post #13
unsungNovelty wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's google. They are good at engineering. Not at creating trust. After the bizillionth time they have broken trust, there is no need for benefit of the doubt.

Yeah. Google is an ad business. Their entire motive for getting invested in AI is ad revenue. We're supposed to believe they just... won't turn on the money fountain? After going into the red for their data center investments? Hell nah. I'd expect this to be something like the Google Ad ID: technically separated from what Google considers personal information, but trivially easy to tie back to an individual person an…

This blog post is about an open source project that you can look at for yourself and decide whether it's suitable for your use case.

Re: Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption

#82

Post by sean_pedersen »

bmenrigh wrote: post #31

Has FHE really progressed so far that it's now so efficient that doing computation on an encrypted prompt is feasible? I thought even basic operations like FHE addition were still thousands of times more complex. The only mention in the article I see is: > But while homomorphic encryption has a nontrivial cost overhead, it shifts the capability/privacy trade-off to a question of cost. And the cost of homomorphic encr…

There are LLM models which compute only using addition no?

Re: Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption

#83

Post by Veserv »

filup wrote: post #15

Proper encryption means the ciphertext is indistinguishable from noise. So...in order to be able to process on it, you have to make it not indistinguishable from noise. So I take offense to the term FHE. It's a oxymoron. The whole thing immidiatly stands out as a sham to build trust where it's gone.

You are objectively wrong. The math is straightforward to show that you can operate on a ciphertext securely in some cryptosystems.

Consider two integers M1 and M2.

Consider RSA with private key (E), public key (D), and public modulus (N).

Encrypt(M, E, N) = mod(pow(M, E), N).

Decrypt(C, D, N) = mod(pow(C, D), N).

mod(Encrypt(M1, E, N) * Encrypt(M2, E, N), N) = mod(Encrypt(M1 * M2, E, N), N).

So, for all RSA encryption, multiplying the ciphertexts results in a ciphertext that is the multiple of the plaintexts. However, unless you can break RSA, you can not determine what numbers you multiplied or what the final multiplied number is.

This is not a fully homomorphic system as it only allows multiplication, but it is a existence proof that you can do operations on ciphertext that apply to the plaintext without being able to recover the plaintext unless you can break the encryption directly.

Re: Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption

#84

Post by aeturnum »

Cider9986 wrote: post #22

This is the same Google that doesn't have e2ee on their password manager by default. Like WTF, it's a password manager.

I think that, if you are under the impression that having an administrative back door is an unpopular feature, then you should speak to more of your non-technical friends about their experience of technology. I think you'll find that the people who could most benefit from a password manager often don't have good credential management and would be worse off if they lost all their passwords when they forgot or lost their master password.

Re: Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption

#86

Post by froh »

meindnoch wrote: post #80

Great, private AI, at the cost of >1000x the resource usage. Because apparently AI companies weren't already using quite enough energy to cook the planet. The most private AI is the one running on my own hardware, not in some giant data center.

where does this factor "1000x" come from? I have doubts.

Re: Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption

#87

Post by Cider9986 »

aeturnum wrote: post #84
Cider9986 wrote: post #22

This is the same Google that doesn't have e2ee on their password manager by default. Like WTF, it's a password manager.

I think that, if you are under the impression that having an administrative back door is an unpopular feature, then you should speak to more of your non-technical friends about their experience of technology. I think you'll find that the people who could most benefit from a password manager often don't have good credential management and would be worse off if they lost all their passwords when they forgot or lost the…

You can have recovery in Bitwarden with the email feature.

Re: Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption

#88

Post by raggi »

froh wrote: post #86
meindnoch wrote: post #80

Great, private AI, at the cost of >1000x the resource usage. Because apparently AI companies weren't already using quite enough energy to cook the planet. The most private AI is the one running on my own hardware, not in some giant data center.

where does this factor "1000x" come from? I have doubts.

https://www.jeremykun.com/2024/05/04/fhe-overview/#the-highe...

> Fourth, there is a bandwidth concern. FHE encryption schemes generally increase the size of the data being encrypted, and the user must send the server a special set of encryption keys to enable the computation, which are relatively large as well. The special keys need only be generated and sent once and can be used for all future computations, but they can easily be gigabytes in size. In one example FHE scheme with lightweight keys, a ciphertext encrypting a single integer is on the order of 25 KB, and the special keys are about 0.5 GB. In others, 16,000 or more integers are packed into a single ciphertext of similar size, but the keys can be 10s of GiBs.

Re: Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption

#89

Post by Cider9986 »

ameliaquining wrote: post #77
rpedroso wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many customers are using Google Password Manager? How much revenue does it generate? What would it cost to add E2EE? How would it affect the UX? How much revenue would it generate? What projects would have to be de-prioritized to fund this work? I agree, a password manager without E2EE is unusable in my eyes. However, I can also understand the institutional reasons this might be the case. I don't think it reflect…

Google Password Manager does in fact have E2EE. It's quite straightforward to enable. Your interlocutor is complaining that it's not the default, which I'm quite sure is a deliberate decision made on the grounds that the typical user, the one for whom the default matters because they won't tweak their settings, needs workable account recovery more than they need defense against the specific kinds of security threats…

LastPass, designed for regular users and one of the most popular password managers, had a breach of user vaults. If they hadn't implemented E2EE then it would have been more devastating than it was (crypto wallets were found from vaults with weak master passwords).

Re: Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption

#90

Post by Eueudhsbsj32 »

meindnoch wrote: post #80

Great, private AI, at the cost of >1000x the resource usage. Because apparently AI companies weren't already using quite enough energy to cook the planet. The most private AI is the one running on my own hardware, not in some giant data center.

Aren't there already much more efficient ways to make inference private?

Using regular encryption and secure enclaves, there are already providers that are roughly 2x the cost of normal providers. For example, https://tinfoil.sh/

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