News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Spiral’s Homomorphic Encryption – Is This the Future of Privacy?.

Re:Spiral’s Homomorphic Encryption – Is This the Future of P... by xphos on Monday November 21, 2022 @09:24AM (#33692775)
Does this limit the type of operation you can do. I could imagine if you were allowed decision operators you would completely defeat the encryption. This makes me think there is a a limit on some of the algorithms that you can actually run. I saw in the comments about Differential Privacy which sounds like it overcomes this issue but I am curious on what more educated people how to say about the operation sets available in a Homomorphic environment
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spiral’s Homomorphic Encryption – Is This the Future of P... by noam_k on Monday November 21, 2022 @12:35PM (#33695356)
When using Homomorphic Encryption you need to compile your application to a circuit. This means that for branches you need to evaluate both sides and multiply by a bit (like a multiplexor). This way you preserve privacy at the price of heavy computation on the server side.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spiral’s Homomorphic Encryption – Is This the Future of P... by j2kun on Monday November 21, 2022 @12:56PM (#33695629)
+1, and some compilers already exist to do that for you. See, e.g., Google's compiler (which I work on). https://github.com/google/fully-homomorphic-encryption
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spiral’s Homomorphic Encryption – Is This the Future of P... by a1369209993 on Monday November 21, 2022 @03:30PM (#33697513)
> This means that for branches you need to evaluate both sides

Not true in general, since you can reuse the multiplexor multiple times during the evaluation, to produce essentially a circuit-wise least-common-multiple of the two sides of the branch. Eg, if one side performs two multiplications, and the other a multiplication and a division, you only need to evaluate a division and two multiplications, not a division and three multiplications. So "evaluate both sides" is a worst-case upper bound on the amount of computation.

Loops are still a pain in the ass, though.

[ Parent | on HN ]