Has FHE really progressed so far that it's now so efficient that doing computation on an encrypted prompt is feasible? I thought even basic operations like FHE addition were still thousands of times more complex. The only mention in the article I see is:<p>> But while homomorphic encryption has a nontrivial cost overhead, it shifts the capability/privacy trade-off to a question of cost. And the cost of homomorphic encryption is rapidly decreasing.<p>Which doesn't spell out exactly hon "nontrivial" the cost overhead still is.
My master's thesis is on a topic in this field (Privacy Preserving ML) and from my understanding HE and other techniques have very high overheads(~10^3) on inference tasks and thus aren't very commercially viable.
This is the same Google that doesn't have e2ee on their password manager by default. Like WTF, it's a password manager.
Proper encryption means the ciphertext is indistinguishable from noise. So...in order to be able to process on it, you have to make it not indistinguishable from noise.<p>So I take offense to the term FHE. It's a oxymoron.<p>The whole thing immidiatly stands out as a sham to build trust where it's gone.
[delayed]
they could have gone with an oblivious transfer approach (where it's working on what looks like multiple problems at once, you don't know which)
Eh? With secret sharing one can do computation on a shared secret where it is provable that no individual party can recover any information about the data with their share alone.<p>I don’t see why you conclude that FHE couldn’t be close to as secure as that. (Like, not information theoretically, but with computationally bounded adversaries.)
It sounds neat, but I do wonder how viable this is commercially. How high do we rate the chances that governments around the world will step in before another kind of E2E is rolled out.
Zama.ai is also a player in this space
Correct. I appreciate the theoretical technology here, but I believe a great deal of harm is done by the fact that people are not likely to understand exactly what this means.<p>Which is to say, I believe that google is strongly implying the falsehood of "no one at Google can read your stuff."
Encryption or not, if it's on somebody else's server, it isn't yours. I don't believe Google has my best interest.
With Fully Homomorphic Encryption it's nobody elses.<p>The basic idea of of the project is to remove the need for trust.
It's FHE for "cryptographically-secure private AI inference" not for every other service where they snoop into your behavioral information.
This kind of attitude is really disrespectful of decades of progress in cryptography. Without even considering homomorphic encryption, classic encryption is specifically designed to make intermediate nodes such as ISP dumb pipes that do not know the contents of communication. The ISP can store your communications on their server however they want.<p>If you don’t agree with this model, I’m afraid modern cryptography doesn’t have anything to offer.
One flaw with FHE is that it guarantees only that you need the key to see the inputs or outputs of the computation, but not necessarily that the computation is the one you want. For example, the computation could be adversarial for certain inputs, or an adversary could insert their own computation first (or last).
Does this rely on the Trust Me Bro model, or is there some way for the client to verify that the provider actually isn't able to see your inputs?<p>I want to read a whitepaper but all I can find is the tl;dw conference presentation
The linked project page [1] claims to be fully homomorphic. Assuming the claim holds (I haven't verified it), then there is provably no way for Google or anyone else to obtain any information from the encrypted data or computation performed on them.<p>FHE is traditionally <i>horrifically</i> slow, so it's hard to imagine running anything beyond toy models with it. They list some applications on the original article page, but (presumably) they must be dramatically stripped down in order to run within any reasonable time budget. This is not going to run anything like a Sol/Opus any time soon.<p>[1]: <a href="https://heir.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://heir.dev/</a>
Related, I'd seen this blog [0] posted on HN a few years back that gave a nice run down on the "programmable cryptography" space which introduce FHE and a few other neat concepts. Really enjoyed the read and learned some new terms.<p>[0] <a href="https://0xparc.org/blog/programmable-cryptography-1" rel="nofollow">https://0xparc.org/blog/programmable-cryptography-1</a>