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Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet

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Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet

#151

Post by paulrudy »

dachrillz wrote: post #19
paulrudy wrote: post #9

> FHE enables computation on encrypted data This is fascinating. Could someone ELI5 how computation can work using encrypted data? And does "computation" apply to ordinary internet transactions like when using a REST API, for example?

A very basic way of how it works: encryption is basically just a function e(m, k)=c. “m” is your plaintext and “c” is the encrypted data. We call it an encryption function if the output looks random to anyone that does not have the key If we could find some kind of function “e” that preserves the underlying structure even when the data is encrypted you have the outline of a homomorphic system. E.g. if the following h…

Thank you, this really clarified things for me!

Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet

#152

Post by mti »

blintz wrote: post #3

I say this as a lover of FHE and the wonderful cryptography around it: While it’s true that FHE schemes continue to get faster, they don’t really have hope of being comparable to plaintext speeds as long as they rely on bootstrapping. For deep, fundamental reasons, bootstrapping isn’t likely to ever be less than ~1000x overhead. When folks realized they couldn’t speed up bootstrapping much more, they started talking…

There is an even more fundamental reason why FHE cannot realistically be used for arbitrary computation: it is that some computations have much larger asymptomatic complexity on encrypted data compared to plaintext.

A critical example is database search: searching through a database on n elements is normally done in O(log n), but it becomes O(n) when the search key is encrypted. This means that fully homomorphic Google search is fundamentally impractical, although the same cannot be said of fully homomorphic DNN inference.

Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet

#153

Post by haiku2077 »

johnisgood wrote: post #99
dismalpedigree wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have true 3-2-1 backups on a server running proxmox with 32 cores, 96gb of ram, and 5TB of ssd disks (2TB usable for VMs). Cost me $1500 for the new server hardware 2 years ago. Runs in my basement and uses ~30w of power on average (roughly $2.50/mo). The only cloud part is the encrypted backups at backblaze which cost about $15/mo. Its a huge savings over a cloud instance of comparable performance. The closest mat…

Only $1500? How much would this setup cost today?

Each 2TB of SSD is like $85, double it if you want local redundancy in your software RAID.

The rest is basically a nice custom PC minus a cool case and a high end GPU. A 9950X is $500, a 2x48GB kit is maybe $200. A few hundo more for a mobo, PSU and basic case.

Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet

#154

Post by liampulles »

> Privacy awareness of users is increasing. Privacy regulations are increasing.

I beg your unbelievable pardon, but no? This part of the equation is not addressed in the article, but it is by far and away the biggest missing piece for there to be any hope of FHE seeing widespread adoption.

Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet

#155

Post by cwmma »

adamc wrote: post #126

Very cool, although I have some reservations about "... closest vector problem is believed to be NP-hard and even quantum-resistant". "Believed to be" is kind of different from "known to be".

all modern encryption is currently held together by asymmetric encryption that are all based on "believed to be" foundations not "known to be" foundations

Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet

#156

Post by dismalpedigree »

johnisgood wrote: post #99
dismalpedigree wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have true 3-2-1 backups on a server running proxmox with 32 cores, 96gb of ram, and 5TB of ssd disks (2TB usable for VMs). Cost me $1500 for the new server hardware 2 years ago. Runs in my basement and uses ~30w of power on average (roughly $2.50/mo). The only cloud part is the encrypted backups at backblaze which cost about $15/mo. Its a huge savings over a cloud instance of comparable performance. The closest mat…

Only $1500? How much would this setup cost today?

Some quick checking on Newegg and I came up with this. https://newegg.io/64113a4 About $1200. I didn’t look into the power draw for this setup. Added bonus there is space for a GPU if you want to do some AI stuff.

Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet

#157

Post by PeterisP »

ipnon wrote: post #4
blintz wrote: post #3

I say this as a lover of FHE and the wonderful cryptography around it: While it’s true that FHE schemes continue to get faster, they don’t really have hope of being comparable to plaintext speeds as long as they rely on bootstrapping. For deep, fundamental reasons, bootstrapping isn’t likely to ever be less than ~1000x overhead. When folks realized they couldn’t speed up bootstrapping much more, they started talking…

Don't you think there is a market for people who want services that have provable privacy even if it costs 1,000 times more? It's not as big a segment as Dropbox but I imagine it's there.

FHE solves privacy-from-compute-provider and doesn't affect any other privacy risks of the services. The trivial way to get privacy from the compute provider is to run that compute yourself - we delegate compute to cloud services for various reasonable efficiency and convenience reasons, but a 1000-fold less efficient cloud service usually isn't competitive with just getting a local device that can do that.

Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet

#158

Post by konstantinua00 »

seanhunter wrote: post #150
darkwater wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But shouldn't proper FHE address most of these concerns? I mean, most of those extra measures are exactly because if you can physically access the server, it's game over. With FHE, if the code is trusted, even tampering with the hardware should not compromise the software.

How does FHE help with someone executing a process on the server that affects the latency of your trading algo? eg by sucking up the CPU resources you need to do FHE. How does FHE help with the fact that regulators generally want single-tenant shared-nothing for registered broker/dealers? Have you tried to explain a technical mitigation like FHE to a financial regulator? I have, there are 2 standard responses: 1) (in…

why would latency matter if the trading we're talking about isn't high-speed?

Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet

#159

Post by j2kun »

JohnFen wrote: post #149
j2kun wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your assumption that operations leak info is just not correct. RSA has homomorphic properties (you can multiply two RSA ciphertexts and get the encrypted product of the plaintext), just not enough to enable general purpose computation.

> Your assumption that operations leak info is just not correct. My assumption is that you're right, that my assumption is incorrect. What I'm trying to do is understand why it's incorrect. It's not just about operations leaking info, though, it's also an issue that, intuitively, leaving enough underlying structure in the encrypted form of the data to allow for this implies that the encrypted form is weaker. I'm also…

All modern cryptography is based on problems with some mathematical structure. With enough structure it's true, it does weaken security, and many cryptosystems are broken by exploiting the underlying structure. So I suppose the only solid answer here is that attacks haven't been discovered yet despite many smart people trying.

Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet

#160

Post by JohnFen »

j2kun wrote: post #159
JohnFen wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your assumption that operations leak info is just not correct. My assumption is that you're right, that my assumption is incorrect. What I'm trying to do is understand why it's incorrect. It's not just about operations leaking info, though, it's also an issue that, intuitively, leaving enough underlying structure in the encrypted form of the data to allow for this implies that the encrypted form is weaker. I'm also…

All modern cryptography is based on problems with some mathematical structure. With enough structure it's true, it does weaken security, and many cryptosystems are broken by exploiting the underlying structure. So I suppose the only solid answer here is that attacks haven't been discovered yet despite many smart people trying.

Heh, I didn't realize that you were the Jeremy Kun that wrote the piece that gave me a bit of enlightenment (that I mentioned in the edit to my comment above). Thank you for writing that. It was helpful.
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