Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilurk | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about CC processing, because... banks and regulations.

But what fully homomorphic encryption allows you to is to perform arbitrary computations on encrypted data.

So you send your encrypted data to a machine, it performs the computation, and sends it back to you still encrypted. Like the password list example you mentioned.

What is cool about this is that is solves the problem with privacy in cloud computing platforms. You don't expose your data.

NOTE: I'm not a cryptographer nor haven't read the article yet. Just writing what I can remember.

View on HN

I recall something similar to this recently on HN, http://www.zerodb.io/. Are they using homomorphic encryption here?

Would homomorphic encryption make it possible for cloud hosting to run a website without knowing the code that is being ran?

ZeroDB here. We're not homomorphic, and it is possible to make a cloud hosting you're talking about w/o homomorphic encryption.

But if you are to perform heavy computing on server side, you have to be homomorphic. Or other amazing opportunities like decentralized key management, content tokenization (DRM) etc appear from this homomorphic work (even if the speed is 100 times slower than unencrypted)

This isn't fully homomorphic encryption though only somewhat homomorphic encryption. Addition and things that can be done with routines that only use addition would be able to be performed on the encrypted data, but other operations would not.

Or at least having skimmed the white paper, and having some background in this, that was my take away.

EDIT: Your explanation of homomorphic encryption is a good way to explain it at a level people can understand just what a breakthrough a workable implementation would be.

Ah, thanks for the edit. I've read about homomorphic computing a while ago, and I was getting excited, but there's still no fully homomorphic implementation, is that right?

Is there at least proof that it is possible? This would be amazing technology.

I believe there is a proof of concept which if implemented would be trillions of time slower, so lets say kinda? 100x slower as is the case with this method would be amazing if they managed to get make it fully homomorphic eventually and keep that speed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com