Slashdot Mirror
IBM Claims Breakthrough In Analysis of Encrypted Data
An anonymous reader writes "An IBM researcher has solved a thorny mathematical problem that has confounded scientists since the invention of public-key encryption several decades ago. The breakthrough, called 'privacy homomorphism,' or 'fully homomorphic encryption,' makes possible the deep and unlimited analysis of encrypted information — data that has been intentionally scrambled — without sacrificing confidentiality." Reader ElasticVapor writes that the solution IBM claims "might better enable a cloud computing vendor to perform computations on clients' data at their request, such as analyzing sales patterns, without exposing the original data. Other potential applications include enabling filters to identify spam, even in encrypted email, or protecting information contained in electronic medical records."
TFA doesn't seem clear on this point, but what the name of the technique implies is that you can perform the operation, but neither the inputs nor the outputs are ever decrypted. So if you can't see the question, and you can't see the answer, then why would you perform the operation other than at the request of someone who can (i.e. the client)?
That said, I'd like to know a lot more about this before I'd want to trust it. For this to work, I'd think a lot of the data's structure must be preserved. Maybe you can't detect that structure from the encrypted data, but you can probably infer a lot about it by analyzing the algorithms your clients ask you to apply (especially if they're your algorithms - i.e. software-as-a-service type stuff). I'm impressed if this doesn't create vulnerabilities.
Also I suspect this is fundamentally divorced from public key techniques. If I'm able to encrypt values of my choosing and perform operations of my choosing on encrypted values, I'm pretty sure I can work backward to extract the cleartext from the encrypted data the client provides...