Comment by teraflop
3 years ago
This has nothing to do with editing Wikipedia. The problem this demo is solving is "private information retrieval" -- that is, you send a query for a particular article, and the server sends back a response containing that data, but the server does not learn which article you asked for. Homomorphic encryption is just one of the building blocks used to achieve this.
A trivial solution to this problem would be for the client to just download a copy of the entire Wikipedia database and pick out the particular article it's interested in. With a proper implementation of PIR, the server still needs to scan through the entire encrypted dataset (this is unavoidable, otherwise its I/O patterns would leak information) but the amount of information that needs to be sent to the client is much smaller.
Ah, I understand. I thought it was the usual presented use case to apply an operation to a crypt directly and was confused since the title already stated otherwise.
Unfortunately, it's not that trivial. I tried a few offline wikis with varying success, but haven't had a ton of success using it day to day.
Oh, certainly, I didn't mean to imply that there would be no implementation difficulties -- just that if you're willing to download the entire dataset, the privacy aspect is trivially solved, without requiring any fancy cryptography.