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Intel joins DARPA in search of encryption 'holy grail'
- adrianN 6y agoCan someone explain how FHE can make data useable e.g. for a database application without also leaking lots of information? Like when I select count(*) from data where name = 'Bob' and SSN = 123, can't I use that to find out Bob's social security number with little effort despite FHE?
- Dylan16807 6y agoThe database server won't have any idea what the query is, and doesn't know how to create encrypted queries either. It also won't know the size of the result, only seeing a fixed-size buffer.
- xyzzy123 6y agoI think what OP meant is that this logically implies every query must touch all the data (or else you could infer information from data access patterns) at which point is it really a database anymore as we know it?
- Dylan16807 6y agoIf that's the question, then the answer is "if you make it usable for a database application then it's not FHE, sorry"
- adrianN 6y agoInteresting, so FHE is essentially useless for cloud applications? What would be a good use case where FHE can be applied?
- Dylan16807 6y agoMany types of processing on small data sets are fine. Or lots of small data sets in parallel. You could run statistics on data or do a grid-based simulation. Running a neural net would be almost trivial. General purpose code is extremely difficult to adapt, since it loves to branch based on data.
- adrianN 6y agoNeural nets are a very convincing use case. Thanks!
- haggy 6y agoNo offense but just "running a neural net" is rarely trivial
- Dylan16807 6y agoWhat do you mean? I'm not talking about design or tuning or anything, just shoving raw data through. All you have to do is multiply each weight and add up each node. Pure bulk arithmetic is both simple and a perfect match for FHE.
- fingerlocks 6y ago“Trivial” is relative, and in the context of this forum post and the audience that is reading it, running a basic neural net is unlikely a large hurdle for most here. Hell, I’m not an ML practitioner and I almost never use python, and yet it took me maybe a day or two learn enough about covnet training to detect my dog on a home security camera.
- numpad0 6y agoProbably good for batch jobs? Updating billing information, device location registry, etc., for 10k users each day or each hour etc.
- bawolff 6y ago"Cloud applications" cover a big range. If you mean is it useless as a replacement for the mysql backend of your php app, the answer is yes.
- threeseed 6y agoI'm confused what your plan of attack is. Because simply querying the database a billion times and replacing SSN with 1, 2 etc. is never going to work in any reasonably secure environment. Queries are logged and people will know if you're trying to brute force a table.
- comex 6y agoThe whole point of homomorphic encryption is that you don’t trust the server doing the computation.
- threeseed 6y agoIs it ? I thought the whole point was that your data remains encrypted during computation. Especially for data lakes where the act of manipulating data can sometimes involve moving actual files around a distributed cluster in a potentially insecure environment e.g. cloud.
- KenoFischer 6y agoFor practical applications you can do better if you allow some information leakage or multiple rounds of communication. People play various tricks. What kind of leakage is acceptable depends on the application.
- doomrobo 6y agoYou're right. This isn't a good use case for FHE. Instead, FHE is really useful when the query itself is private, and the data is not private. One example is a private OCSP. Every time you open a TLS-secured webpage, your browser has to check whether or not the TLS certificate has been revoked (I'm leaving out some complications but bear with me). In order to do that, you browser has to contact the certificate authority (CA) and ask "has anyone revoked this cert?". But in doing that, the browser is revealing your browsing patterns to the CA! It would be nice, instead, to use Private Information Retrieval to ask the CA "please process this encrypted query and return the result". Then the CA knows nothing about your browsing patterns, and you still get your data. Well, (computational) Private Information Retrieval is super inefficient today, and the best asymptotic solution we have is based on FHE (https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1142 https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1142). So getting efficient FHE would hopefully make something like this a lot more reasonable for moderately sized databases. For the record, this is only a toy example. We actually have really good solutions for private OCSP that don't require FHE. We can side-step the difficult of Private Information Retrieval in this case because OCSP databases are small enough for anyone to download. If this interests you, check out CRLite https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/01/09/crlite-part-1-all-web-pki-revocations-compressed/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/01/09/crlite-part-1-a...
- totetsu 6y ago- Does -my time/location- match any time/location where we know corona case was. - Does -my dna- match known predistortions for diseases that kind of thing.
- vinay_ys 6y agoThey could potentially extend SGX type mechanism to execute more complex data operators within an enclave and give out only results that are at least k-anonymous or allow decrypted results only if it is explicitly allowed when enclave is created. And of course all this has to be implemented in an isolated hardware so that classic chip timing/race attacks cannot steal secrets like it is possible from within the enclaves with SGX today.
- doggodaddo78 6y agoWonderful for e2e hosted guest VMs. I would like to see adiabatic physical computing to reduce power consumption too.
- imvetri 6y agoDon't create information that needs to be hidden. you wouldn't even need encryption after that
- h0l0cube 6y agoFor the naive like myself, if FHE permits an untrusted computer to perform operations on encrypted data, without being able to read the unencrypted data, what operations could be performed? (multiply/add?) Is it still capable of conditional logic? If so, how could this be done without unveiling some of the information? Edit: And what's even a good use case for it?
- sa1 6y agoSince conditional logic can be implemented as and/or logic gates, FHE should still apply to them and should be quite general purpose. But I’m not an expert, and I think it would depend on the design of specific FHE schemes.
- bawolff 6y agoI think there's a bunch of confusion between conditional logic in the sense of being able to solve a problem that can be specified with conditional logic, and the sense of having the performance implications of a normal program that has data-dependent branches.
- sa1 6y agoI think FHE is nowhere close to practical performance, conditional branches or not.
- moonchild 6y ago> conditional logic Conditional logic can be expressed in terms of arithmetic: if c then t else f = c*t + (1-c)*f You can also do boolean logic: NOT y = 1 - y x AND y = x * y x OR y = (x + y) - (x * y) (Where 1 indicates truth and 0 falsity.) What you can't do, however, is conditional execution, as this would leak information. Which doesn't limit the capabilities of the system in principle, but does in practice because this harms performance. E.G. ‘select count(*) from users where name = bob’ will be much slower with HFE than with a traditional database because there will be no possibility of using precalculated indices.
- intricatedetail 6y agoI am worried that Intel will present a new encryption tech that turns out to be 5 years old /s