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Comment by furkanturan | Hacker News Reader

Thanks a lot. Though encrypted AI chat bot is not far ahead, do not think of that as the primary target of today. Instead, there are many untapped applications (e.g. inter-bank transfers, industry, healthcare) where regulations, privacy laws and compliance requirements restrict institutions from touching data. These will initially be our key enablers, and over time we hope to extend the range of applications.

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Have you considered that maybe the computation itself on the private data, no matter how you put it, even if encrypted, was designed to protect the consumer?

I.E., gaining any sort of insight a transaction of protected information is what the protections were in place for.

So is FHE more about skirting regulations and privacy laws? Or, is it a new frontier of an untapped data source that has some red tape around it?

To me, something was simply not encrypted properly if you are able to draw conclusions/learn insights/detect anything about the data. It's in conflict with the idea of what secure encryption means to me.

> gaining any sort of insight

The server providing the FHE-based service does not gain any sort of insight. This is a key point: only the client can see the output of the computation.

Interesting. I have some homework to do then. Do we have to close our eyes and look away for it to be true or does it really not gain any insight?

Where can I find out more about how this could be possible?

Good primer on FHE here: https://eurocrypt.iacr.org/2021/slides/gentry.pdf

Check this one too: https://openmined.org/blog/ckks-explained-part-1-simple-enco...

this is only true in the IND-CPA model for most "practical" FHE work. So a more precise way to describe things is "a server who faithfully performs the task given to them does not gain any sort of insight" (perhaps with an additional caveat about decryption failures).

In the case of single key FHE with server-side processing (the demo setup), the server can never gains any insight, even as an active adversary that can arbitrarily deviate from the protocol because it only has access to public evaluation keys and ciphertexts. The worst it can do is return tempered output to the client, but it doesn't help it learning anything about the client request.

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