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Kryptnostic lets you search fully encrypted data in the cloud (techcrunch.com)
52 points by UnsungHero97 4106 days ago
3 comments

This is interesting. Homomorphic encryption has been talked about a lot in the past, but no one had an efficient implementation.

Good overview: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2012/5/alice-and...

Only problem is: the field is littered with patent landmines. It'll be interesting to see how these guys can work around that... http://blogs.teamb.com/craigstuntz/2012/04/04/38707/

This is definitely an issue and has been for a few years now: http://community.embarcadero.com/index.php/blogs/entry/the-h...

One thing in our favor is that we're not using a lattice or ring-learning with errors approach, which is where the majority of the patents lie.

Our general IP strategy is to only use patents defensively, and make that technology available under open source licenses that allow unrestricted non-commercial use.

We're also making all of our SDKs Apache v2 so that its easy to integrate into other software stacks.

Which type of fully homomorphic encryption are you using?

Edit: Ah, found your patent: http://www.google.com/patents/US20130329883

We'll have a more readable write up available on ePrint, soon.
I do not dare to sign up via your https: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=kryptnostic.c... "This server accepts the RC4 cipher, which is weak. Grade capped to B." cf. http://www.isg.rhul.ac.uk/tls/RC4mustdie.html
We agree. RC4 must die.

Will post back once we have resolved the issue.

I noticed the change, thank you.
Does this maintain query privacy?
Yes, but there are some limitations when doing server side sharing of documents without a central trusted authority.

It's dangerous to accept shares from untrusted sources as it exposes you to attacks by malicious servers colluding or impersonating a user.

Without using Oblivious RAM you risk losing query privacy, when indexing documents that consist of one word repeated many times.