

Perform math on encrypted data without ever decrypting it - ars
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0713/breakthroughs-privacy-super-secret-encryption.html?partner=relatedstoriesbox

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mnemonicsloth
It's been interesting to watch this story roll downhill.

It started out as "fully homomorphic encryption using ideal lattices."
<http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1536414.1536440>

Then it got covered by the tech press: "Do calculations on encrypted data."

<http://www.ddj.com/security/218101417>

And is now in Forbes and probably other publications for highbrow laypeople:
"IBM's Blindfolded Calculator."

This process has been talked about elsewhere:

<http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174>

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timf
Not practical technology yet, note the "multiply the necessary computing time
by around 1 trillion" part of the article.

Discussed on HN already, here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=657859>

And here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678975>

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deutronium
I don't know anything about this area at all, but I remember in a cryptography
lecture, being told you can perform arithmetic on un-padded standard RSA, is
this similar to that. I imagine this could be very useful for banks possibly
in databases, to for instance increase and decrease peoples funds, without
standard employees seeing the total ammount of money in the account.

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agmiklas
You might be thinking of blinding, which lets you do stuff like affix a
signature to an encrypted message in such a way that the signature can be
"moved" to the plaintext version of the message (I think that's how it went,
anyway).

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pixcavator
One should be able to do something similar with analysis of images. You can’t
scramble them though...

~~~
ed
How so? Any relevant links you can share?

~~~
pixcavator
If you transform the image homeomorphically, its analysis may still be
meaningful because the topology is preserved. So, you pass the transformed
image to me, I analyze it topologically without seeing the real image, pass
the results to you, then you can recover the topology of the original image.
It was just a thought...

