A very casual (layman's?) introduction intro to Homomorphic Encryption - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13450015
Homomorphic encryption
11–20 of 86 posts
Re: Homomorphic encryption
#12Seriously one of the most important area of mathematics for democracies in an online world. Homomorphic encryption promises a hidden and verifiable online voting system that does not rely on trusting third party.
How does computation on encrypted data relate to voting systems?
It’s possible that OP meant multiparty computation.
Re: Homomorphic encryption
#13I've run into a few people working on this over the last five years or so, but they've been a bit cagey about discussing their use cases and customers. Any public applications outside of blockchain?
Cloud Computing. Use the compute from a big company, without that company possibly knowing what they are computing on.
Machine Learning. Apply neural networks to encrypted data and avoid privacy issues.
Re: Homomorphic encryption
#14Seriously one of the most important area of mathematics for democracies in an online world. Homomorphic encryption promises a hidden and verifiable online voting system that does not rely on trusting third party.
Any political voting system will need a trusted third party to run the voter registration/identity system, so I doubt the lack of practical homomorphic encryption is blocking this. There are other voter-verifiable systems that don't rely on HE for trustworthy counting:
https://www.chaum.com/publications/AccessibleVoterVerifiabil...
The major problem with online voting is that people can be coerced into voting against their wishes outside the watchful eye of election authorities. This may be worth the increase in voting ease, but it's where the real debate is.
Re: Homomorphic encryption
#15The technology for all this progress was a huge discovery in 2009. But what if it is a dead end, that nothing originating from that discovery will ever be practical? Like wouldn't it be preposterous if someone said, "Here Craig Gentry, take $1 billion to run enough computers for the current FHE schemes. What is the snazziest demo you can run?"
Some of the newer schemes are much faster. The recent progress feels like deep learning in 2010, right before everyone realized it worked
> The recent progress feels like deep learning in 2010, right before everyone realized it worked
Does it work, though?
Re: Homomorphic encryption
#16The technology for all this progress was a huge discovery in 2009. But what if it is a dead end, that nothing originating from that discovery will ever be practical? Like wouldn't it be preposterous if someone said, "Here Craig Gentry, take $1 billion to run enough computers for the current FHE schemes. What is the snazziest demo you can run?"
That’s life
It will join the graveyard of technologies was that rhetorical?
Re: Homomorphic encryption
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of the newer schemes are much faster. The recent progress feels like deep learning in 2010, right before everyone realized it worked
> The recent progress feels like deep learning in 2010, right before everyone realized it worked Does it work, though?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/crypton... (2016)
> We demonstrate CryptoNets on the MNIST optical character recognition tasks. CryptoNets achieve 99% accuracy and can make more than 51000 predictions per hour on a single PC. Therefore, they allow high throughput, accurate, and private predictions.
Re: Homomorphic encryption
#18To address the inevitable “what is this useful for” questions, my go-to example is cryptographic voting mechanisms. The idea is that you segment a large integer into a couple of different bins by its bitwise representation. So you have a 60-bit integer and you segment it into four 15-bit bins. You use one of those to randomize what the encrypted versions are going to be, and you use the other three for different vote…
I'd think there's a simpler way to accomplish what you said above (though in both cases, any voting mechanism that lets the voter verify their vote after the fact also runs into the problem of people complaining about encouraging vote buying).
i.e.
imagine every polling place would output to you (after you voted) a random number in the 128 bit space.
the votes are recorded with this random number. we can verify after polls closed that the voting machine has an appropriate number of votes (i.e. not more or less than people who came through the booths)
all these vote data is aggregated into public record. you can look up after the fact your random number and see that it matched who you voted for. No encryption needed (beyond the technology that goes into making a secure rng)
Re: Homomorphic encryption
#19Seriously one of the most important area of mathematics for democracies in an online world. Homomorphic encryption promises a hidden and verifiable online voting system that does not rely on trusting third party.
Any political voting system will need a trusted third party to run the voter registration/identity system, so I doubt the lack of practical homomorphic encryption is blocking this. There are other voter-verifiable systems that don't rely on HE for trustworthy counting: https://www.chaum.com/publications/AccessibleVoterVerifiabil... The major problem with online voting is that people can be coerced into voting against…
I don't think that is a major problem, unless I am misunderstanding. Oregon for instance is all vote by mail, outside the watchful eye of any government authority.
Re: Homomorphic encryption
#20There is a decent size effort to build a system that runs (a restricted, but hopefully useful subset of) Julia programs fully homomorphically (as well as supporting various sort of secure multiparty computation protocols). At JuliaCon two years ago, the Galois folks talked about their initial prototype of this work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KLlMg6jKQg (fun to watch even if you don't care about julia to see FHE "in action"). This effort was recently funded with the goal of extending the prototype into a full robust system, so I'm hoping for some good news here over the next couple of years.