
Homomorphic Encryption Breakthrough - gthank
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/homomorphic_enc.html
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alex_stoddard
The idea of homomorphic encryption has really caught my attention - I am
trying to work on distributed computing with privacy sensitive biometric data.

I hadn't appreciated before that Gentry's work was both general (any
computation can be performed as a boolean circuit of addition and
multiplication) but also impractical : a trillion fold increase is
computational burden for an encrypted web search? That is going to kill the
advantages of distributed computation.

Schneier also opened my eyes to fact that previous existing encryption schemes
are homomorphic under certain operations, such as RSA under multiplication.

I wonder if there would be any gain to distributing parts of a computation and
then reassembling it rather than having a fully remote computation done under
homomorphic, but very costly, encryption. Of course the gains of parallel
computation would have to more than offset the costs of distribution, but that
is always the case for parallel applications.

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fizx
While this particular algorithm is impractical, its discovery will lead to
refinement, additional research, etc. We are much closer to a practical
algorithm now.

