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Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet

bozmen.io

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

#51

Post by drcolly »

poly2it wrote: post #5
ipnon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

??? For the equivalent of $500 in credit you could self host the entire thing!

The statements made in the linked description of this cannot be true, such as Google not being able to read what you sent them and not being able to read what they responded with.

Having privacy is a reasonable goal, but VPNs and SSL/TLS provide enough for most, and at some point your also just making yourself a target for someone with the power to undo your privacy and watch you more closely- why else would you go through the trouble unless you were to be hiding something? It’s the same story with Tor, VPN services, etc.- those can be compromised at will. Not to say you shouldn’t use them if you need to have some level of security functionally, but no one with adequate experience believes in absolute security.

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

#52

Post by gadders »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #27
barisozmen wrote: post #24

Earlier 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?

Honestly it breaks my brain as well. I just have to take it on trust that it apparently works.

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

#53

Post by bawolff »

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.

If we are talking 1000x more latency, that is a pretty hard sell.

Something that normally takes 30 seconds now takes over 8 hours.

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

#54

Post by JumpCrisscross »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #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 matte…

> that works well enough that very few use cases want the complexity cost

FHE + AI might be the killer combination, the latter sharing the complexity burden.

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

#55

Post by deknos »

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…

From your perspective: which FHE is actually usable? Or is only PHE actually usable?

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

#56

Post by Retr0id »

> The entire business model built on harvesting user data could become obsolete.

This is far too optimistic. Just because you can build a system that doesn't harvest data, doesn't necessarily mean it's a profitable business model. I'm sure many of us here would be willing to pay for a FHE search engine, for example, but we're a minority.

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

#57

Post by swores »

perching_aix wrote: post #31
gblargg wrote: post #26

The 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 possibilit…

41 mph, assuming the person asking the question was just really passionate about rounding numbers and/or had just the bare minimum viable measurement tooling available :)))

I'm afraid your maths doesn't add up, so you've missed their point: it can't be done.

To average 30mph over 2 miles, you need to complete those 2 miles in 4 minutes.

But travelling the first mile at 15mph means that took 4 minutes. So from that point the only way to do a second mile and bring your average to 30mph is to teleport it in 0 seconds.

(Doing the second mile at 41mph would give you an average speed of just under 22mph for the two miles.)

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

#59

Post by Retr0id »

udev4096 wrote: post #48
redleader55 wrote: post #47

Full homomorphic encryption is not the future for private internet, confidential VMs are. CVMs are using memory encryption and separation from the host OS. ARM has TEE, AMD has SEV and Intel has been fumbling around with SGX and TDX for more than a decade.

https://sgx.fail

I think SGX (et al) can still be useful as part of a layered defense. We know how to defeat security mitigations like NX and ASLR, but that doesn't mean they're useless.

The problem is that SGX is marketed as the solution.

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

#60

Post by perching_aix »

swores wrote: post #57
perching_aix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

41 mph, assuming the person asking the question was just really passionate about rounding numbers and/or had just the bare minimum viable measurement tooling available :)))

I'm afraid your maths doesn't add up, so you've missed their point: it can't be done. To average 30mph over 2 miles, you need to complete those 2 miles in 4 minutes. But travelling the first mile at 15mph means that took 4 minutes. So from that point the only way to do a second mile and bring your average to 30mph is to teleport it in 0 seconds. (Doing the second mile at 41mph would give you an average speed of just…

Of course.

My math only "checks out" if you accept and account for the additional assumption I made there: that the datapoints provided in the question have been rounded or were low resolution from the get-go.

The motivation behind this assumption is twofold: the numbers in the question are awfully whole (atypical for any practical problem), and that just the rote derivation of it all doesn't produce very interesting results (gives you the infinite speed answer). :)

Try introducing some error terms and see how the result changes! It's pretty fun, and it's how I was able to eek out that 41 mph result in the end.

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