3 ms·
Ask HN: What happened to fully homomorphic encryption?
With all the decentralized twitter replacements, I expected to hear about FHE a lot. It was "hot" a couple of years ago, google even has a nice lib for it. Is it silently being used withour any fan-fare or is there just not enough practical applications for it yet?
- wslh 3y agoAs an incumbent I think most of the time is not about the lack of products but about how to politically link different organizations that compete in the market. For example, we have used this to share statistical information about a specific industry while the actors (private pharmaceutical companies) don’t reveal the individual information. Connecting competitors is difficult.
- throwawayadvsec 3y agothere is a lot of applications, but it's too computationally expensive for now imo There is a few companies working on making it mainstream though like Zama.ai
- _8j50 3y agoThanks, I didn't know how expensive it was computationally.
- rurban 3y agoDJB just released today https://lib.mceliece.org/ https://lib.mceliece.org/ a good enough implementation, which should become the gold standard. For others and applications see https://github.com/jonaschn/awesome-he https://github.com/jonaschn/awesome-he
- rurban 3y agoOops, sorry I've mixed that up. McEliece public-key encryption is a gold-standard post-quantum encryption scheme, but it is not homomorphic. Homomorphic would allow computations on the encrypted data without decrypting it.
- j2kun 3y agoI'm at Google working on it. We're making progress, but the only people who are using it in production for real are the Koreans. Their national COVID contact tracing system used FHE to keep location data private. I think it was Cryptolab that did the engineering? (I should really have a canned reference but I don't)
- readyplayernull 3y ago> but the only people who are using it It's difficult for large companies to realize new uses for tech, that's why we need small innovators. But large companies deploy landscapes of patents to trap them.
- _8j50 3y agoThank you. Any theories on why it hasn't gained traction?