You can examine the output and so on, but that's not a side-channel attack, which is what I was responding to.

And yes, it is a malleable cryptosystem, but that doesn't imply you can learn the key from an input/output pair, nor does it imply you can read the input given to you. It just means you can change the output in a way that can still be decrypted by the same key.

Usually people use padding and IVs and such to prevent that, but this system is made to allow computation with it instead.

Certainly there may be some flaw that we can't see yet, but to say you're "sure" some secrets will be quickly surrendered seems foolhardy.

> And all that risk for what benefit?

It's very interesting from a theoretical perspective, and it's good to know that if you need to carry out computation on devices you don't trust, it is at least possible to prevent your input and output from being stolen.

This is already a 30x increase in efficiency from the last generation. It may never be faster, but there's always a chance someone will find other reasons to use it.

you dont need to get the key, you just need to decrypt the data.

they do not need to be one in the same, if, statistically you can infer input given output.

And i never said sure in any way shape or form. what i said is i am skeptical of the motivations driving a project like this, when we know for an absolute fact bad men are trying to steal our secrets. It seems like a lot of work and very heavy math for something that will never tip the balance that is holding the cloud back with people not trusting it to keep their secrets.

for example, if you can do something as simple as compute a hash of the unencrypted data, you can instantly decrypt all data with known hashes with a high degree of certainty, without ever knowing the keys - side channel attack.

In homomorphic encryption, the cloud performs operations on encrypted data, and gets only an encrypted result. He does not have any information on the decrypted result.

That's the difference between FHE and IO or multilinear maps. The second ones are almost all broken, mostly because of the attacks you mention. FHE, on the other hand, has semantic security.

> the known plaintext attack breaks pretty much every crypto system

This isn't true at all.

aside from aes and its varients, which of the other thousands of crypto systems arent vulnerable to it?

None of the other AES finalists were vulnerable to known plaintexts attacks. Neither is 3-DES or chacha20. DES and RC4 are now considered insecure, but in their day they were resistant known plaintext attacks as well.

Other than some toy examples, and cryptosystems that were used before cryptography was studied academically, I can't think of any that are vulnerable to known plaintext attacks.

> And all that risk for what benefit? none of this processing will ever be faster than doing the processing in place.

The benefit comes into play when you mix data from different sources that don't trust each other (to the point where they would never agree to one of them doing the processing in place). Homomorphic encryption allows combining the data without ever revealing it to the one doing the computation.

for example?

For example when two parties are interested in making a deal, but don't want to reveal it unless the other party is interested as well. (The example is usually a date, but it could be applicable to voting or other situations where both privacy and unanimity are desired.)

By performing a homomorphically encrypted computation, they can set it up to only reveal the final decision, but not the individual inputs that determined it, so nobody loses face.