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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Whats the real world application? For example you can't train a neural network on such a database as all the values are no longer commensurate.

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One application would be distributed storage systems where the user doesn't trust the service provider.

Using FHE one could implement a distributed storage system, with replication, conflict resolution, error correction and so on, without ever revealing the plaintext to the storage and compute provider.

Tallying of encrypted votes, allowing for secure voting over the internet.

Seems like overkill. I'd rather just see every vote get a random unique identifier and all the votes get sent to a central database that is publicly searchable with the identifier.

A Swiss private bank can encrypt and keep its data outside Switzerland. Daily data processing batches can be executed over encrypted data. In theory at least...

You could do secure anonymous DNA testing. Just submit your encrypted genome and their FHE algorithm, presto chango, computes the answer to your sensitive queries without them knowing the result.

Theoretically, FHE can perform any computation including training neural networks. Practically, it's still not viable because of the overhead.

I don’t understand how that could work (unless you decrypted the data). The point of this encryption is that you can’t see what’s in the underlying data so two identical values will be encrypted to different values, no?

Regard the process of fitting a statistical model as a function mapping input training data to output model parameters.

If the homomorphic encryption scheme allows for arbitrary functions to be computed, it could work for particular functions of statistical model fitting (perhaps appallingly slowly).

The output model will be encoded as cyphertext.

It would be possible to evaluate the fitted cyphertext model on new features to make predictions, also output as cyphertext.

> the library can evaluate a net-list of binary gates homomorphically at a rate of about 76 gates per second per core, without decrypting its input. It suffices to provide the sequence of gates, as well as ciphertexts of the input bits. And the library computes ciphertexts of the output bits.

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