[TimSchumann]

I was unaware there exists a fully homomorphic encryption scheme that has the right trade offs between security and computational effort to make this economically viable for even moderate to small workloads.

I’ve always thought it was either far too time or far too space intensive to be practical.

Do you have sources on this, either from Apple or academic papers of the scheme they’re planning on using?

[timenova]

They posted about this recently [0][1]. They are using Homomorphic Encryption in iOS 18 for Live Caller ID Lookups.

[0] https://www.swift.org/blog/announcing-swift-homomorphic-encr...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41111129

[rpdillon]

I've posted about this above a little after you did. Reading the article, I'm unable to determine whether or not this has any practical utility outside of niche applications or if it has the potential to be broadly useful. Has anyone reviewed the SDK that can render an opinion?

[flarex]

Homomorphic encryption is broadly useful and in fact should be ubiquitous for remote computation that leaks private data (not to comment specifically on Apple's implementation). They did open source it though, which gives you an idea that they want others to follow.

[saagarjha]

Can you point to other ways this is used or is intended to be used?

[j2kun]

It's useful for situations that would otherwise be illegal, so that tradeoffs are less relevant.