I'm a nerd without much academic background interested in cryptographic techniques to improve privacy. For example, techniques like PAKEs offer interesting privacy tradeoffs and allow for E2EE as seen in software like password managers.
One big obstacle with E2EE, though, is that it relies on clients to do basically all of the computations. But, among other things, there are situations where you might imagine wanting to be able to allow an operation to be completed without needing both clients to actively participate, without revealing key matter directly.
Examples of FHE seem to stick to fairly simple things, but a lot of the more modern demos show off more interesting capabilities. What I wonder is, what is practical today using today's stacks? For example, could a server blindly perform cryptographic operations under the veil of FHE, potentially using parameters from multiple parties?
It seems like, if FHE proves to be robust and sufficiently secure, it has a lot of potential, and I really wonder what can be done with it today. I've made some effort to explore, but not being an academic a lot of it has been pretty difficult to grok.
I think FHE is so powerful that we tend to let the cool possibilities distract from really practical and useful stuff that is possible today. Today, I think just the ability to do private lookups is, while super simple from an academic lens, could be really powerful. Plus, if it gets widely used, the underlying tech will mature, and then the more exotic stuff (multiple clients, more complex computations) becomes more realistic.
We're currently building a service that will let you do private lookups without needing to really mess with the underlying cryptography or schemes. You'll be able to use it to deliver even stronger privacy than E2EE ("E2EE+"?). For example, DNS that doesn't learn what you resolve (this is beyond something like DNS-over-HTTPS), or a messaging service that doesn't learn who you talk to.
I found this interesting and approachable, thanks. To be honest, I'm not trying to come up with anything ridiculous, mostly just wondering if FHE could add any value to use cases where PAKEs and E2EE are involved; that is, could it enable more capabilities or better usability with E2EE client-server systems. So far it feels as though the answer is "not really." That having been said, it's obviously still useful and undoubtedly a technique like PIR could be used in tandem with other techniques that are designed to preserve user privacy even if they don't directly compliment eachother. The use case of not being able to discover who the user is talking to in a chat definitely seems like an excellent idea, and I'd like to explore that some time.
Comments
I'm a nerd without much academic background interested in cryptographic techniques to improve privacy. For example, techniques like PAKEs offer interesting privacy tradeoffs and allow for E2EE as seen in software like password managers.
One big obstacle with E2EE, though, is that it relies on clients to do basically all of the computations. But, among other things, there are situations where you might imagine wanting to be able to allow an operation to be completed without needing both clients to actively participate, without revealing key matter directly.
Examples of FHE seem to stick to fairly simple things, but a lot of the more modern demos show off more interesting capabilities. What I wonder is, what is practical today using today's stacks? For example, could a server blindly perform cryptographic operations under the veil of FHE, potentially using parameters from multiple parties?
It seems like, if FHE proves to be robust and sufficiently secure, it has a lot of potential, and I really wonder what can be done with it today. I've made some effort to explore, but not being an academic a lot of it has been pretty difficult to grok.
I think FHE is so powerful that we tend to let the cool possibilities distract from really practical and useful stuff that is possible today. Today, I think just the ability to do private lookups is, while super simple from an academic lens, could be really powerful. Plus, if it gets widely used, the underlying tech will mature, and then the more exotic stuff (multiple clients, more complex computations) becomes more realistic.
We're currently building a service that will let you do private lookups without needing to really mess with the underlying cryptography or schemes. You'll be able to use it to deliver even stronger privacy than E2EE ("E2EE+"?). For example, DNS that doesn't learn what you resolve (this is beyond something like DNS-over-HTTPS), or a messaging service that doesn't learn who you talk to.
As far as learning more, I wrote a blog post that tries to cover the basics of doing private lookups: https://blintzbase.com/posts/pir-and-fhe-from-scratch/.
I found this interesting and approachable, thanks. To be honest, I'm not trying to come up with anything ridiculous, mostly just wondering if FHE could add any value to use cases where PAKEs and E2EE are involved; that is, could it enable more capabilities or better usability with E2EE client-server systems. So far it feels as though the answer is "not really." That having been said, it's obviously still useful and undoubtedly a technique like PIR could be used in tandem with other techniques that are designed to preserve user privacy even if they don't directly compliment eachother. The use case of not being able to discover who the user is talking to in a chat definitely seems like an excellent idea, and I'd like to explore that some time.