
Craig Gentry named MacArthur Fellow for work on fully homomorphic encryption - sweis
http://www.macfound.org/fellows/914/
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xnull
Yes. Yes yes yes.

Craig Gentry did more than just discover the first theoretical scheme, he
reopened an interest in FHE. Yeah all the schemes are inefficient and will
remain so for decades. But already the progress on FHE is incredible.

2007 for FHE was the 1982 for Secure Multi Party Computation. It will take 30
years, but I expect someday we'll see it privately allocating contracts in
sugarbeet auctions.

~~~
wyager
> contracts in sugarbeet auctions

I highly recommend that everyone reads
[http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/PEC2011/presentations2011/tof...](http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/PEC2011/presentations2011/toft.pdf)

Crazy stuff.

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swordswinger12
I can think of few people who deserve it more. His recent work has been truly
groundbreaking. Not just on FHE, either - multilinear maps, IO, lattices... I
could go on. Just a brilliant dude.

~~~
Jonovono
Interesting stuff. Who are the people you think might deserve it more?

~~~
zaroth
"I can think of few people who deserve it more" basically means the exact
opposite of... "I can think of a few people who deserve it more".

I read it wrong the first time too.

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ryanpardieck
This is awesome. Reading about his work and the subsequent work on FHE in
general was one of my favorite "holy shit this is the future" moments. (And I
don't have those moments hardly at all ... kind of silly. But I was giddy, and
it was amazing, and so I was silly.)

It was also one of my foremost "I will never ever in my life be as smart as
these guys" moments. Alas.

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higherpurpose
Google should be funding the heck out of this guy. Privacy concerns are only
going to get bigger in the future, and the reason for that is simple:
companies like Google are inevitably going to want _more and more_ data. So at
least they should be trying to do that in a privacy-friendly way.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
Why would they willingly deprive themselves of large amounts of user data?

~~~
xnull
Adapting Ur-Beowulf to Ar-Curunir and Grendle to Google:

"So the Shieldings' hero, hard-pressed and enraged, took a firm hold of the
hilt and swung the blade in an arc, a resolute blow that bit deep into her
neck-bone and severed it entirely, toppling the doomed house of her flesh; she
fell to the floor. The sword dripped blood, the swordsman was elated.
(1563-1569)"

Sometimes the better product makes less profit. It's hard for someone with
Capitalistic incentives to respond with a better product if
delaying/discouraging/regulating-out-of-existence is cheaper.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
Oh I would love to create a search engine that would preserve the privacy of
its users, but I just don't foresee Google doing that.

I'm aiming at studying Theoretical Cryptography, with an interest in MPC
specifically, so this would be right up my alley, but my pessimistic world
view tells me that any efforts to create more secure and privacy-preserving
services will fail because of institutional opposition and low market demand.

~~~
xnull2guest
We're on the same page. There's been tons of great work in the past couple
years (Smart's SPDZ and others).

The financial model has to use something like a pay-per-search instead of the
usual ad model (although technically even better ads could be served over
SMPC!).

If you're interested in studying this you're also probably interested in 1-k
Oblivious Transfers (get me a static webpage I request out of a choice of k
without revealing which I've requested), in Functional Encryption and also in
Securely Obfuscated Programs.

Also, there was a really awesome paper at CRYPTO this year: "How to Use
Bitcoin to Design Fair Protocols"
([http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/129.pdf](http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/129.pdf))

:)

------
riemannzeta
Ex patent lawyer. A very select crew.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Patent lawyer or no, he's an incredibly gifted and accomplished cryptographer.
You don't have to agree with everything in someone's past to appreciate their
contribution to the field.

~~~
darkmighty
I think that was just a joke.

[http://xkcd.com/1067/](http://xkcd.com/1067/)

~~~
TallGuyShort
Ah - I thought it was sarcasm. Didn't get the Einstein reference.

------
quinndupont
If anyone ever had any doubt about the coming reality of ubiquitous
cryptography, here is the next move.

~~~
xnull
Oblivious Transfer, ZKPs, SMPC, Functional Encryption, Attribute-Based
Encryption, (better) cryptocurrency are all things I expect to see before FHE.

~~~
quinndupont
Homomorphic encapsulates some of this, no? Certainly functional crypto, c.f.
[http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-45239-0...](http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-45239-0_5)

And there will certainly be many more advances, but if/when functional crypto
gets totally sorted out it will change everything.

~~~
xnull2guest
Yes, it's more general. The schemes that just do functional encryption are
more efficient because they don't need to do everything else FHE needs to.

