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by ReidZB
4696 days ago
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Honestly, I think the potential advent of efficient fully-homomorphic encryption is potentially one of the largest effects we could ever see on privacy-related computing. The possibilities are absolutely staggering. Imagine, for example, a search engine that returns useful results but does not know what the user is searching for. And so on; the possibilities are well-covered in the literature. As of right now, the current-day state-of-the-art fully-homomorphic schemes impose roughly a billion-factor overhead on operations, but this is quickly decreasing (in the past 4 years, we've already knocked off three orders of magnitude). But I am personally convinced that an efficient scheme would likely revolutionize privacy in computing. Exciting stuff, especially with recent events. Unfortunately, I don't expect an efficient scheme to be widely-used for at least 15-25 years. For one, even if a super-efficient FHE scheme was published tomorrow, it'd probably take at least 6-10 years of powerful, sustained cryptanalysis for the community to trust it. Add the time to discover such a scheme (if even possible...) and you have quite a while. But still, the potential is amazing. |
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Even so, for the use cases suggested (e.g. search engines), it'd still be a vast improvement on what we currently have – even if it later turns out to be flawed.