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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."
Have you seen the new neighbours. I think they're homomorphic.
"perform computations on clients' data at their request, such as analyzing sales patterns"
Or without their request.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
The abstract for Gentry's article can be found at: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1536414.1536440
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Just FYI this site is whole sale cut and paste ripping IBM press off.
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/27840.wss
The point is not to read the content, but to enable a computer to analyze the content in such a way that they can deduce statistics and patterns from it. FTFA:
computer vendors storing the confidential, electronic data of others will be able to fully analyze data on their clients' behalf without expensive interaction with the client, and without seeing any of the private data
I don't need to know that you love apples to know you definitely love the same thing as 14 other people. Lets assume that we have 20 encrypted sets of data. Lets also assume the 20 sets say basically the same thing but because of the encyrption method look nothing a like from the raw data perspective. If you go ahead and find a way to analyze the encryption enough to know that the 20 emails all contain a similar message, but not enough to actually know what the message is... well then! You could go ahead and store all of ebay's customer information and do massive amounts of data crunching for them, without ever actually seeing any data.
This is a huge problem in IT, where admins need access to the databases in order to see how the data is being stored, how the tables are working, etc etc.. but can't actually have access to the database because then they might see customer information. So you either let joe-bob admin in there and let him see all the data, or you don't. Now you can let the admin in there, they can determine anything they might want to know, but they never actually see any exact data.
No, I don't know anything about the math portion.. but thats basically what they are trying to say in the article. I think. :)
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Cool, but I'm half-convinced that holes will be found. The first time a new encryption scheme is put to the test, it usually fails. Still, hopefully, it'll lead to a truly secure scheme.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
You can not analyze the data. You can perform calculations on it without knowing what it is. So, for instance, you could encrypt all your tax info, send it to a company that processes the encrypted data without decrypting it, and sends you back your encrypted tax return, without ever having seen any of your financial detail.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
OK, it looks like a lot of people are missing the point.
What Gentry figured out was a scheme for carrying out arbitrary computations on encrypted data, producing an encrypted result. That way, you can do your computation on encrypted data in the "cloud", but only you can view the results.
If E() is your encryption function, x is your data, and f() is the function you'd like to compute, homomorphic encryption gives you a function f'() such that f'(E(x)) = E(f(x)). But at no point does it actually decrypt your data.
This could be huge for secure computing.
but after RTFA my suspicions may be justified:
Two fathers of modern encryption...
This article needs some clarification. In particular, a lot of the worried comments here show a lack of understanding of the word "homomorphic".
Here's a very simplified example of a homomorphism. I define a function
f(x) = 3x
This function is a homomorphism on numbers under addition. Its image "preserves" the addition operation. What I mean more precisely is
f(a) + f(b) = f(a + b)
That's pretty easy to verify for the function I've given.
Homomorphic encryption is interested in an encryption function f() that preserves useful computational operations. If we take my example as a very very simplified encryption then, say I have two numbers, 6, and 15, and I lack the computational power to do addtion, but I can encrypt my data with my key--3. (I'm generalizing my function to be multiplication by a key. And yes, for some reason I have the computational power to do multiplication. Humor me). I can encrypt my data, f(6) = 18 and f(15) = 45, and pass these to you, and ask you do do addtion for me. You'll do the addition, get 63, and pass this result to me, which I can then decrypt, which yields 21.
Now, my encryption here is very simple and very, very weak, but if you're willing to suspend disbelief, you'll note that the information I've allowed you to handle does not reveal either my inputs or my outputs. (In fact, with the particular numbers I've chosen, you might guess that my key is 9 instead of 3, (though relying on lucky choices or constraining myself to choices which have this property make my scheme rather useless))
If you generalize this to strong encryption and more useful computational operations, you begin to see how homomorphic encryption can be useful. One should note that, no, homomorphic encryption will not be a drop-in replacement for other forms of encryption. (Sending encrypted emails with homormorphic encryption would be unwise. An attacker can modify the data (though, if my understanding is correct, only with other data encrypted with the same key)) Homomorphic encryption simply fills a need that the other forms do not serve.
Hopefully you now also see how the article's use of the word "analysis" can be rather misleading. In particular, one of the earlier comments notes that it might be useful in allowing you to determine if different people's encrypted information is identical. By my understanding, homomorphic encryption would not allow this.
In any case, if my explanation is not enough, here's the wikipedia article.
A few misconceptions continue to circulate here; let me try to shed some light.
First, the encryption system is apparently not practical in its current form. Maybe improvements will occur some day to make it practical, maybe not. It is still a major theoretical breakthrough because fully homomorphic encryption had often been thought to be impossible in the past. It has been a long sought goal in cryptography and it is remarkable to see it finally achieved. So in practice nobody is going to be doing spam filtering, income tax returns, or anonymous google searches any time soon.
Second, several people have gotten tripped up over an apparent weakness: if you can calculate E(X-Y) you can get an encryption of 0; if you can calculate E(X/Y) you can get an encryption of 1; and from these you could get other encryptions and potentially break the system. This idea fails for two reasons: first, it is a public-key system, so you don't need to go through all this rigamarole to get encryptions of 0, 1, or anything. In public key cryptography, anyone can encrypt data under a given key, without knowing any secrets. So it is already possible to get encryptions of known values, even without the special homomorphic properties. Second, in order for public key systems to be secure, they need to have a randomization property. In randomized encryption, there are multiple ciphertext values that encrypt the same plaintext. Basically, the encryption algorithm takes both the plaintext and a random value, and produces the ciphertext. Each different possible random value causes the same plaintext to go to a different ciphertext. The decryption algorithm nevertheless can take any of these different ciphertext values and produce the same plaintext.
This may be confusing because the most well known public key encryption system, RSA is not randomized. At the time it was invented, this aspect was not well understood. Shortly afterwards it became clear how important randomization is. Other encryption systems like ElGamal do use randomization, and RSA was adapted to allow randomization via what is called a "random padding" layer, known by the technical name PKCS-1. This adds the randomness which allows RSA to be used securely.
One other point is that people are getting hung up about what "fully" homomorphic encryption covers. Exactly what operations can you do? I think the best way to think of it is to go down to the binary level. We know that in our computers, at the lowest level everything is 1's and 0's. These get combined with elementary logical operations like AND, OR, NOT, XOR, and so on. Using these primitive operations, all the complexity of modern programs can be built up.
In the case of the homomorphic encryption, it is probably best to think of the values being encrypted in binary form, as encryptions of 1's and 0's. Keep in mind the point above about randomized encryption: all the encryptions of 1 look different, as do all the encryptions of 0. You can't tell whether a given value encrypts a 1 or a 0. Given these encrypted values, you can compute AND, OR, XOR, NOT and so on with these values, and get new encrypted values as the answers. You don't know the value of the outputs, they are encrypted. Only the holder of the private key, who originally encrypted the data, could decrypt the output. But you can continue to work with these output values, do more calculations with them, and so on.
Let me give an example of how you could do an equality comparison. Suppose you have two encrypted values and want to determine if they are the same. Recall that we are working in binary, so you actually have two sequences of encrypted bits; some are encrypted 1's and some are encrypted 0's, but you can't tell which. So the first thing you compute is the XOR of corresponding bits in the two values: XOR the 1st bits of each value; XOR the 2nd bits of each value, and so on. Now if the values are equal, the results are all encryptions of 0's. If the values are different, some of the results will be encryptions of 1's. But aga