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rubenhorne / ic-issues

Where Jordan and Ryan list and prioritize issues regarding the Internet Computer and its governance
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Fully Homomorphic Encryption #36

Open rubenhorne opened 2 years ago

rubenhorne commented 2 years ago

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) would allow canisters to perform computations on encrypted data. This would prevent node operators from being able to read canister state, even if they performed a side-channel attack on the secure enclaves (not yet implemented) running the canisters within the nodes.

FHE might even make the use of secure enclaves unnecessary, though there may be useful reasons besides privacy for running secure enclaves (e.g. ensuring blessed replica binary has not been tampered with). One of the major benefits of FHE could be that it is not subject to side-channel attacks, and relies on cryptographic guarantees of privacy.

lastmjs commented 2 years ago

As far as I know, there is no major IC-specific work being done with FHE. FHE is an evolving field of mathematics/cryptography and I do not believe that performant FHE exists yet, at least FHE that would be useful for general-purpose canister development.