A High-Level Technical Overview of Homomorphic Encryption

Re:A High-Level Technical Overview of Homomorphic Encryption by vouaobrasil on Monday May 06, 2024 @08:01AM (#40273597)

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.

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Re:A High-Level Technical Overview of Homomorphic Encryption by ramchip on Monday May 06, 2024 @08:06AM (#40273657)

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

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Re:A High-Level Technical Overview of Homomorphic Encryption by vouaobrasil on Monday May 06, 2024 @08:24AM (#40273799)

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.

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Re:A High-Level Technical Overview of Homomorphic Encryption by smoothgrammer on Monday May 06, 2024 @08:34AM (#40273884)

You should reread. It is very obvious why that won't be a problem if you sit back and think about it.

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Re:A High-Level Technical Overview of Homomorphic Encryption by vouaobrasil on Monday May 06, 2024 @08:54AM (#40274061)

Okay, I await your explanation.

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Re:A High-Level Technical Overview of Homomorphic Encryption by AnimalMuppet on Monday May 06, 2024 @09:20AM (#40274301)

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.

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Re:A High-Level Technical Overview of Homomorphic Encryption by Nevermark on Monday May 06, 2024 @01:08PM (#40276844)

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.

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Re:A High-Level Technical Overview of Homomorphic Encryption by pas on Monday May 06, 2024 @08:20AM (#40273774)

(as far as I understand) it makes trustless compute farms possible im theory

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Re:A High-Level Technical Overview of Homomorphic Encryption by j2kun on Monday May 06, 2024 @04:33PM (#40279186)

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.

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