On Global Encryption Day: A Practical Guide to Homomorphic Encryption
On Global Encryption Day: A Practical Guide to Homomorphic Encryption
Yesterday was Global Encryption Day, so let’s look to the future, and one vision of the future is to encrypt all of our data — by default. Why can’t we have a Cloud environment where the original data is never actually revealed unless we really need to show it. If we just need to process it or just perform a test on it, why can we make sure our data is always protected by encryption?
A legacy data world
The data infrastructure we have has basically evolved through the evolution of a flawed device: the Intel 8086. Over the years, rather than starting again, we have just bolted on more and more, without really ever-changing much. At every turn, security has always been seen as an extra — and add-on — and there is little care about the last bastion of cybersecurity: the registers and the memory. In there, our secrets can be revealed in full sight. At one time it was just too difficult to examine the running contents of memory, but these days, most devices can be analysed for the code that is running on the machine, and for the contents of memory and registers.
And, unfortunately, the implementation of encryption within data structure has often been seen to be very. Data breach and data breach has shown that sensitive data is often not encrypted. So, do we need a new model that brings a new way of processing and data storage — encryption by default approach?
The answer must be yes!
Homomorphic encryption
For this, the end game could be homomorphic encryption, and where it implements encryption by default, and where we never have to reveal the original sources of our data (unless we need to), but can still process with it. And one of the great things about the new methods that are used with homomorphic encryption — such as with lattice methods — are already quantum robust, so they can be used to replace many of our existing public-key methods.
But, what do homomorphic encryption methods look like? Well here is an overview:
Overall, we have either Full Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) and which can perform all of the relevant arithmetic operations (such as add, subtract, multiply and divide) or Partial Homomorphic Encryption (PHE), and where we only implement a few of the operations.
There are many proposed methods for FHE and PHE, and I have outlined many of them here:
https://asecuritysite.com/homomorphic
Conclusions
Go do encryption by default, and learn about a new privacy-aware world. The Internet we have is basically still the Internet we created many decades ago. The CPUs are often not built with security in mind. So, let’s look to a more secure, trusted and private future.