Re:Intro to Fully Homomorphic Encryption
by mahmoudimus on Saturday July 04, 2020 @04:12PM
(#23734622)
There are a few companies doing some stuff commercially - some have mentioned TFHC, sponsored by commercial entity called Inpher (https://www.inpher.io/ ) and you have others like Enveil (https://enveil.com), who are building some cool use cases for Private Information Retrieval.
Ultimately, they end up being very niche use cases that are part of a broader security strategy- we are very far away from having this be practical enough for general use cases. Deployment are also difficult because they require client side changes to adapt to the underlying cryptographic protocols.
At my place of employment, we believe the right approach is a combination of locked down execution environments (see: keystone enclave) + webassembly that expose what is effectively a compiler to choose the right cryptographic computation paths based on query planner (similar technologies that power database query engines). Itβs not a one-size fits all, but there are ways that you can optimize down to a fully homomorphic operation _for a particular computational path_. If this stuff is interesting to you, we are hiring :)!
Ultimately, they end up being very niche use cases that are part of a broader security strategy- we are very far away from having this be practical enough for general use cases. Deployment are also difficult because they require client side changes to adapt to the underlying cryptographic protocols.
At my place of employment, we believe the right approach is a combination of locked down execution environments (see: keystone enclave) + webassembly that expose what is effectively a compiler to choose the right cryptographic computation paths based on query planner (similar technologies that power database query engines). Itβs not a one-size fits all, but there are ways that you can optimize down to a fully homomorphic operation _for a particular computational path_. If this stuff is interesting to you, we are hiring :)!