A lot changed back in 2009 when Craig Gentry introduced the first fully-homomorphic encryption scheme. Several of the classical encryption methods had long before supported partial homomorphism and allowed to perform some operations with encrypted data. One of the application perspectives for this type of encryption is the processing of sensitive information in cloud services: the processed data is not disclosed to the owner of the cloud. The data is never unencrypted while being processed in the Cloud For example, we can add up two encrypted numbers and then decrypt the sum without ever knowing what these numbers were. The computation results match those performed on non-encrypted data. It is a type of encryption that permits performing computations on encrypted data without decrypting it first. Encryption equals privacy, right? Ironically, this technology will give companies even more access to user data and more options for analyzing it for ad targeting purposes.
A new era of user security or just smoke and mirrors again?Īlphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, and IBM are all testing a new encryption technology. Tech giants implement homomorphic encryption.
