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27.06.09
Crypto Breakthrough - Fully Homomorphic Encryption
This seems to me to be one of the most important breakthroughs in many years:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1536414.1536440
Using this scheme, one can arbitrarily compute on encrypted data – i.e., one can process encrypted data (query it, write into it, do anything to it that can be efficiently expressed as a circuit) without the decryption key. A user can store data on an untrusted
server in encrypted form, yet still allow the server to process it, respond to (encrypted) queries etc... There is a list of “killer” applications for fully homomorphic encryption. For example, you can now process data on a completely untrusted cloud provider.
Posted by Giles at 27.06.09 18:47