[HN Gopher] Explained from scratch: private information retrieva...
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Explained from scratch: private information retrieval and
homomorphic encryption
Author : blintz
Score : 54 points
Date : 2022-09-26 19:25 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blintzbase.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blintzbase.com)
| blintz wrote:
| Author here, happy to answer any questions! I know it's a
| complicated topic, and I'm still trying to figure out how best to
| explain it.
|
| Also, we've applied to YC for W23 to commercialize and expand
| this tech; wish us luck!
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Very nice technical explanation, thanks.
|
| The technology is cool, but I wonder what kind of market you
| think might exist for it?
|
| Some years back I worked for a privacy startup, but we never
| really figured that out...
| blintz wrote:
| Yeah, the challenge always seems to building privacy
| technologies that people are _actually_ willing to pay for.
|
| The one trove of public data that folks seem really eager to
| access in a metadata-private way seems to be blockchain data.
| As someone who was not really a blockchain person, I've been
| really pleasantly surprised by how much interest people in
| that field take in our tech. In the short run, we are
| definitely focused on this area.
|
| I do think there are significant applications beyond that
| though: I am really personally excited by metadata-private
| messaging/email and sensitive datasets (financial data,
| medicine/health data, cybersecurity data).
| teleforce wrote:
| Thanks for the article, really interesting read, most
| likely your startup will be successful and all the best!
|
| I think the killer application for homomorphic encryption
| (HE) will be on the regulated and sensitive data as you
| have mentioned. In healthcare, high accuracy machine
| learning requires massive datasets and it is difficult to
| get your hands on the data mainly due to privacy concerns.
| If HE can make data available to be analyzed without
| compromising the patients' anonymity it will be a game
| changer and perhaps can relax on the accessibility of the
| sensitive clinical data in the near future.
|
| Just wondering, can we not achieve similar privacy using
| secret sharing (SS) cryptography for anonymity? With (SS)
| unlike HE, you can perform arbitrary calculations in the
| encrypted domain [2].
|
| [1]How to Share a Secret:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31817716
|
| [2]Secure multi-party computation:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_multi-
| party_computati...
| ElCheapo wrote:
| Do you think homomorphic encryption will be the next hot thing
| in security-related sectors of tech?
| blintz wrote:
| I think it will be if we're successful!
|
| I do think the cool thing about what we're building is you
| don't really have to understand exactly what homomorphic
| encryption is to use / benefit from it.
|
| We're really just building a database that can't learn what
| rows you read, which is useful (and practical!) across a
| bunch of domains. The fact that it uses homomorphic
| encryption under the hood is cool, but hopefully you don't
| need to get too bogged down in the details to use it.
| timobile wrote:
| Just want to thank you for doing this!
| thethirdone wrote:
| Not really related to the article, but ever since I learned
| that homomorphic encryption exists I wondered if it is possible
| to make a trustless internet poker game.
|
| That would entail some type of homomorphic encryption where
| each party would get to know which cards they drew, but not
| anyone elses. The type of system I am imagining has each player
| generate a permutation of 52 cards, encrypt it with their key
| and then take everyone's encrypted permutations together and
| decrypt a result where they only get to see the 5 cards they
| got dealt.
|
| Is there any research into multi-key systems or ways to apply a
| single key system to get the kind of result I am looking for?
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(page generated 2022-09-26 23:00 UTC)