E2EE git was invented. I asked the creator if server can enforce protected branches or force pushes. He has no solution for evil clients. Maybe this could lead to E2EE Github?
Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet
21–30 of 202 posts
Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet
#22> 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…
I get how that works for arithmetic operations - what about stuff like sorting, finding an element in a set etc? This would require knowledge of the cleartext data, wouldn't it?
Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
??? For the equivalent of $500 in credit you could self host the entire thing!
You're not joking. If you're like most people and have only a few TiB of data in total, self hosting on a NAS or spare PC is very viable. There are even products for non-technical people to set this up (e.g. software bundled with a NAS). The main barrier is having an ISP with a sufficient level of service.
Sure, hardware is cheap.
However if you actually follow the 3-2-1 rule with your backups, then you need to include a piece of real estate in your calculation as well, which ain’t cheap.
Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I get how that works for arithmetic operations - what about stuff like sorting, finding an element in a set etc? This would require knowledge of the cleartext data, wouldn't it?
You can reduce anything happening on the computer to arithmetic operations. If you can do additions and multiplications, then it's turing complete. All others can be constructed from them.
Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet
#25> Internet's "Spy by default" can become "Privacy by default".
I've been building and promoting digital signatures for years. Its bad for people and market-dynamics to have Hacker News or Facebook be the grand arbiter of everyone's identity in a community.
Yet here we are because its just that much simpler to build and use it this way, which gets them more users and money which snowballs until alternatives dont matter.
In the same vein, the idea that FHE is a missing piece many people want is wrong. Everything is still almost all run on trust, and that works well enough that very few use cases want the complexity cost - regardless of operation overhead - to consider FHE.
Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet
#26The idea that these will keep being improved on in speed reminds me of the math problem about average speed:
> An old car needs to go up and down a hill. In the first mile–the ascent–the car can only average 15 miles per hour (mph). The car then goes 1 mile down the hill. How fast must the car go down the hill in order to average 30 mph for the entire 2 mile trip?
Past improvement is no indicator of future possibility, given that each improvement was not re-application of the same solution as before. These are algorithms, not simple physical processes shrinking.
Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get how that works for arithmetic operations - what about stuff like sorting, finding an element in a set etc? This would require knowledge of the cleartext data, wouldn't it?
You can reduce anything happening on the computer to arithmetic operations. If you can do additions and multiplications, then it's turing complete. All others can be constructed from them.
While correct, that doesn't answer the question at all, though. If I have my address book submited into an FHE system and want to sort by name - how do you do that if the FHE system does not have access to cleartext names?
Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet
#28I 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…
I get that there is a big LLM hype, but is there really no other application for FHE? Like for example trading algorithms (not the high speed once) that you can host on random servers knowing your stuff will be safe or something similar?
I speak as someone who used to build trading algorithms (not the high speed ones) for a living for several years, so knows that world pretty well. I highly doubt anyone who does that will host their stuff on random servers even if you had something like FHE. Why? Because it's not just the code that is confidential.
1) if you are a registered broker dealer you will just incur a massive amount of additional regulatory burden if you want to host this stuff in any sort of "random server"
2) Whoever you are, you need the pipe from your server to the exchange to be trustworthy, so no-one can MITM your connection and front-run your (client's) orders.
3) This is an industry where when people host servers in something like an exchange data center it's reasonably common to put them in a locked cage to ensure physical security. No-one is going to host on a server that could be physically compromised. Remember that big money is at stake and data center staff typically aren't well paid (compared to someone working for an IB or hedge fund), so social engineering would be very effective if someone wanted to compromise your servers.
4)Even if you are able to overcome #1 and are very confident about #2 and #3, even for slow market participants you need to have predictable latency in your execution or you will be eaten for breakfast by the fast players[1]. You won't want to be on a random server controlled by anyone else in case they suddenly do something that affects your latency.
[1] For example, we used to have quite slow execution ability compared with HFTs and people who were co-located at exchanges, so we used to introduce delays when we routed orders to multiple exchanges so the orders would arrive at their destinations at precisely the same time. Even though our execution latency was high, this meant no-one who was colocated at the exchange could see the order at one exchange and arb us at another exchange.
Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get how that works for arithmetic operations - what about stuff like sorting, finding an element in a set etc? This would require knowledge of the cleartext data, wouldn't it?
You can reduce anything happening on the computer to arithmetic operations. If you can do additions and multiplications, then it's turing complete. All others can be constructed from them.
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Re: Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can reduce anything happening on the computer to arithmetic operations. If you can do additions and multiplications, then it's turing complete. All others can be constructed from them.
While correct, that doesn't answer the question at all, though. If I have my address book submited into an FHE system and want to sort by name - how do you do that if the FHE system does not have access to cleartext names?
You can do that by encrypting the names. You send encrypted names to the FHE-server, and then the server does necessary sorting computations on it.
The point of FHE is it can operate on gibberish-looking ciphertext, and when this ciphertext decrypted afterwards, the result is correct.
Indeed, there are those working on faster FHE sorting: https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/551.pdf