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Comment by 3form

7 days ago

The idea of homomorphic encryption is to do things without the knowledge, and not gaining the knowledge. If ciphertext contains a number, and you don't need to know what number it does to always be able to multiply it by 2, you succeeded - as a simple example.

It still just sounds like fancy obfuscation to me. I've read alot of examples trying to understand but I can't get past that being able to run processes on ciphertext in a way you can learn something doesn't make sense without me changing my definition of what I think encryption means.

  • I thought though the idea is that you cannot learn anything from the ciphertext, how it is processed, or what the final result is?

    Unless you are a participant of the computation and you have the key, that is.

    • To actually make it work, you would need to preformat your data very specifically, and the data you want to allow to be processed would need a subkey to unlock the parts you want processed.

      I don't see a way to make it a open standard. The processing steps would need to be part of the key.

      Anyway If someone figured it out I would be very interested to be sure they weren't just trying to slap a it's encrypted to meet some standards required. And..also, what amount of data processing does Alice need to do that required outsourcing to Bobs machines. Data processing and anaysis is cheap.

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