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I believe that homomorphic encryption is one of those technologies that is too dangerous to develop. It is one step to a path where any person on earth will eve

I believe that homomorphic encryption is one of those technologies that is too dangerous to develop. It is one step to a path where any person on earth will eventually have access to enormous amounts of computation. Is that a good thing? Well, it means one can do high-powered AI research on chemical and biological weapons or advanced malware by using high-powered compute clusters that they may not otherwise have access to. Moreoever, it will be impossible to detect since the computations themselves are encrypted.

ramchip 3y ago
How does FHE lead to people getting access to more computation?
- pas 3y ago
  (as far as I understand) it makes trustless compute farms possible im theory
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Well, more people can buy time on an FHE computer and compute whatever they want on it, like a program that can find even more dangerous viruses, and no one will be able to detect what they are doing because their computations are encrypted. In other words, the data that could give them away is transformed under a homomorphism that disguises that data with encryption so that the nature of the computations is not evident.
  - smoothgrammer 3y ago
    You should reread. It is very obvious why that won't be a problem if you sit back and think about it.
    - vouaobrasil 3y ago
      Okay, I await your explanation.
      - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        The existence of homomorphic encryption doesn't give me any more money to buy compute time on servers, nor does it make compute servers any cheaper. Those are completely orthogonal. So, it may make it so that people with money can do nasty things on servers undetected, but it absolutely does not make it so everyone on earth can.
        Nevermark 3y ago
        And to top that off, the ratio in costs for regular vs. homomorphic computing, is far greater than the ratio of costs for using other's servers, which might be monitored for "safe" or "legal" code, vs. just buying and managing your own private servers. So if the problem is simply to hide a computation, that is already "solved". Homomorphic computing enables hiding in plain sight, but that's not necessary to simply hide.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
j2kun 3y ago
I think there's a case to be made that FHE will empower "laundering" responsibility for using cloud resources for evil purposes. But I don't think that will have much to do with high-power computation.

ramchip 3y ago

How does FHE lead to people getting access to more computation?

pas 3y ago
(as far as I understand) it makes trustless compute farms possible im theory
vouaobrasil 3y ago
Well, more people can buy time on an FHE computer and compute whatever they want on it, like a program that can find even more dangerous viruses, and no one will be able to detect what they are doing because their computations are encrypted. In other words, the data that could give them away is transformed under a homomorphism that disguises that data with encryption so that the nature of the computations is not evident.
- smoothgrammer 3y ago
  You should reread. It is very obvious why that won't be a problem if you sit back and think about it.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    Okay, I await your explanation.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      The existence of homomorphic encryption doesn't give me any more money to buy compute time on servers, nor does it make compute servers any cheaper. Those are completely orthogonal. So, it may make it so that people with money can do nasty things on servers undetected, but it absolutely does not make it so everyone on earth can.
      - Nevermark 3y ago
        And to top that off, the ratio in costs for regular vs. homomorphic computing, is far greater than the ratio of costs for using other's servers, which might be monitored for "safe" or "legal" code, vs. just buying and managing your own private servers. So if the problem is simply to hide a computation, that is already "solved". Homomorphic computing enables hiding in plain sight, but that's not necessary to simply hide.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

j2kun 3y ago

I think there's a case to be made that FHE will empower "laundering" responsibility for using cloud resources for evil purposes. But I don't think that will have much to do with high-power computation.