[bikeshaving]

Why do people always talk about arbitrary computation in relation to homomorphic encryption? What I really want is a homomorphic encryption system which allows me to arbitrarily slice and concatenate strings without knowing their contents. This would be immensely useful for implementing end-to-end encrypted collaborative editing of documents. Is homomorphic encryption there yet?

[tuxxy]

You can do this with a TFHE implementation, if I understand your use case correcltly. You encrypt bits and then you can operate/manipulate on those individual encrypted bits.

I referenced NuFHE in a comment, but you should give it a try and see if it will do what you're wanting. See https://github.com/nucypher/nufhe/. We also have a discord channel where you can ask questions on using it in the #nufhe channel -- https://discord.gg/rmSafk

[kradroy]

I'm dying for this. My team builds ML models on text corpora. Most of this data is sensitive. My company has very strict data privacy policies and it's a pain to even share the data with other teams in the department. I've made it part of my long-term goals to facilitate secure sharing of sensitive data across the organization. Numerical data seems to be the easiest to anonymize (randomized response, etc), but I have yet to find any techniques for text other than generating synthetic data.

[tuxxy]

Hi, I've been replying to other people in this thread. I work at NuCypher doing some research and cryptography engineering. I work on Proxy Re-Encryption and Fully Homomorphic Encryption.

Do you mind sending me an email with your use case and needs? I'd love to have a chat with you.

[e-mail]

[drenvuk]

This guy right here, this guy knows whats up. gl john.

[drenvuk]

So you want to slice and concatenate strings without you yourself and any other collaborators knowing what the string is? what about hashing each word? you could slice and concat on whitespace boundaries if that's the case.

i'm not sure how this helps e2e encrypted collaborative editing though. why not just use asymmetric encryption? what am i missing?

[bikeshaving]

Asymmetric encryption is great, but it means that all rebasing/transforming of edits has to be done client side. Having a homomorphic system would allow us to do some of this work server-side without revealing the documents themselves.

[drenvuk]

eh, I'm still not getting it. why not have a single or maybe multiple admins that all need to coordinate and decrypt before values can be decrypted for anyone else? upload their subkeys to the server for hashing the words, create shortened aliases for the hashes and then allow you to see them all. then you can do whatever you want with individual words that you want.

did you want to transform within words or something?