3 ms·
It is a bad idea but not in the way you think. FHE hardware don't decrypt data on-chip. It's like using the Diffie-Hellman key exchange for general computation.
by numpad0 8mo ago
It is a bad idea but not in the way you think. FHE hardware don't decrypt data on-chip. It's like using the Diffie-Hellman key exchange for general computation. The data and operations stay encrypted at any given moment while outside your client device.
The textbook example application of FHE is phone book search. The server "multiply" the whole phonebook database file with your encrypted query, and sends back the whole database file to you every time regardless of queries. When you decrypt the file with the key used to encrypt the query, the database is all corrupt and garbled except for the rows matching the query, thereby causing the search to have practically occurred. The only information that exists in the clear are query and the size of entire database.
Sounds fantastically energy-efficient, no? That's the problem with FHE, not risks of backdooring.
- esseph 8mo agoSo one of the potential use cases mentioned is for secure data transfer. So here's my question: Could FHE hardware be used to extremely quickly and reliably secure something like a database connection? I looked through Gemini, and it says the following: "Zama are building libraries that use FHE accelerators to allow "Confidential Smart Contracts" or private AI queries. You could send a highly sensitive health query to an AI, and the AI hardware would process it and send the answer back without the AI company ever knowing what you asked." https://www.zama.org/ https://www.zama.org/ Which is why I ask. Because if you have a backdoor into the hardware, as either a corporation or a government, then you can get access to those "very sensitive and fully secured communications". They also discuss a crypto / smart contracts use case, and advertise " securing L1 or L2".
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]