Homomorphic encryption, which enables you to process data without decrypting it. Would solve privacy / data security issues around sending data to be processed in the cloud
Unless we figure out some awesome hardware acceleration for it, it's not practical but for a few niche applications.
It also has the problem that you can use computation results to derive the data, if you have enough control over the computation (e.g. a reporting application that allows aggregate reports).
Really?! Now I'm curious. If I have a simple program for an 8-bit CPU @ 1 MHz, when can I run this program on a virtual machine using homomorphic encryption, under a reasonable runtime? Is it possible yet? If the performance hit is only 100x, the runtime should not be much longer than the actual chip. But the last time I checked, the hypothetical runtime seems to be still impractical.
There are basically 2 strategies:
- do fast operations, with a limit on how many you can do. This is called Leveled Homomorphic Encryption, with CKKS being the most popular scheme. Microsoft open sourced a lib called Seal for it.
- do unlimited operations, but with extra overhead. This is called Fully Homomorphic Encryption, with TFHE being the fastest implementation. My company Zama has open sourced an library in Rust called Concrete.
Reminds me a lot of deep learning in 2010, just before it took off!
1 Zero-knowledge proofs,
2 shielded ledgers,
3 democratized and energy efficiency mining,
4 inflationary control, and
5 wallet recovery.
No one has all of these yet, but ZKP is a big part of it.
Monero and Ravencoin have transparent and shielded entries. I believe the node is encrypted with an ECDH shared secret, so the payer and the payee know each other's wallets, but no one else does.