4 ms·

seriously did not think we would see homomorphic encryption productized for a few more years. pretty impressive!

8jy89hui 4y ago
> Some of the existing tools, such as homomorphic encryption or secure enclaves have performance unsuited to scalable encrypted search, require proprietary hardware, or have uncertain security properties. I don't think this is exactly homomorphic. I hope they put out a whitepaper so researchers can properly evaluate its security.
- uberdru 4y ago
  Nice catch, I was scanning for homomorphic encryption, but missed this. Have no idea how else they would implement this.
samwillis 4y ago
Homomorphic encryption allows you to modify the encrypted data without decrypting it or even knowing the the content. I don’t think this is homomorphic encryption. If they are able to do this without decrypting the data then I think you could describe this as a somewhat week encryption that exposes some data attributes as queryable. You could not implement this with strong encryption without at least decrypting for indexing.
dandraper 4y ago
Its not Homomorphic but "structural encryption". Less useful than HE but faster.
- cvwright 4y ago
  Faster has a usefulness all its own
  - dandraper 4y ago
    Absolutely! FHE isn't practical for most applications.
- snorkel 4y ago
  Correct. It's not homomorphic encryption, but rather more like TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) except that MongoDB service isn't decrypting the data. This is essentially client-side encryption (at the driver) and without server-side decryption.
muchpir 4y ago
Homomorphic Encryption is available at large scale today for limited use cases. See the MuchPIR project (https://github.com/ReverseControl/MuchPIR https://github.com/ReverseControl/MuchPIR) which implements Information-Theoretic Private Information Retrieval (IT-PIR) in Postgresql; In addition to the demo there is a high performance version available for commercial use.

> Some of the existing tools, such as homomorphic encryption or secure enclaves have performance unsuited to scalable encrypted search, require proprietary hardware, or have uncertain security properties. I don't think this is exactly homomorphic. I hope they put out a whitepaper so researchers can properly evaluate its security.

uberdru 4y ago
Nice catch, I was scanning for homomorphic encryption, but missed this. Have no idea how else they would implement this.

samwillis 4y ago

Homomorphic encryption allows you to modify the encrypted data without decrypting it or even knowing the the content. I don’t think this is homomorphic encryption. If they are able to do this without decrypting the data then I think you could describe this as a somewhat week encryption that exposes some data attributes as queryable. You could not implement this with strong encryption without at least decrypting for indexing.

dandraper 4y ago

Its not Homomorphic but "structural encryption". Less useful than HE but faster.

cvwright 4y ago
Faster has a usefulness all its own
- dandraper 4y ago
  Absolutely! FHE isn't practical for most applications.
snorkel 4y ago
Correct. It's not homomorphic encryption, but rather more like TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) except that MongoDB service isn't decrypting the data. This is essentially client-side encryption (at the driver) and without server-side decryption.

muchpir 4y ago

Homomorphic Encryption is available at large scale today for limited use cases. See the MuchPIR project (https://github.com/ReverseControl/MuchPIR https://github.com/ReverseControl/MuchPIR) which implements Information-Theoretic Private Information Retrieval (IT-PIR) in Postgresql; In addition to the demo there is a high performance version available for commercial use.