Comment by nixpulvis
3 years ago
This kind of stuff gives some of the best arguments for open source software (OSS) to date. Otherwise, it has to be taken completely on faith, which then defeats nearly the entire purpose and makes the performance overhead untenable.
Homomorphic encryption actually causes some interesting asymmetries here. It is very important to have an open source client, since of course a malicious client could trivially leak your desired index. However, the server’s operation is totally untrusted… so it’s actually not important for the server to be open source. It is still nice for all the regular reasons open source is good, but interesting to note.