The simplest way to describe homomorphic encryption would be the following: HE is the particular type of converting data into cipher text that allows this encrypted data to further get analyzed, permuted, associated to, and generally used into various computations without any decryption involved.
The denomination comes from Greek and it means “same structure”, in direct reference to the property of such encrypted structures to undergo various processes while being able to keep their encrypted-form.
Homomorphic encryption is trendy, and the tendency to give more and more importance to this technique is not just a phase. Also dubbed end-to-end encryption, this type of keeping data private would ensure the ultimate cyber-safety while performing cloud operations.
Manipulating fully encrypted data is a goal for today’s cyber professionals – the answer resulting from such operations will also be in encrypted form, accessible only to the data owner that has the initial key.
The time estimate
Perfecting homomorphic data is an ongoing challenge for today’s cyber researchers – and one of the latest predictions includes homomorphic encryption on a list of major technology changes within the next 10 years.
The technical definition comes with an illustrative example, from one of the most sensitive areas of data privacy – healthcare. With this kind of encryption available, medical providers and patients would be capable of handling data and use it in cyber processing without exposing or even accessing the raw information, therefore meeting all privacy compliance requests and minimizing the data exposure risks.
There are previous homomorphic systems already established, but they each have imperfections or problems. In the order of their appearance, the already existing systems are:
- Lattice-based cryptography (the Gentry homomorphic scheme), presented in Craig Gentry’s 2009 dissertation;
- Integers-based cryptography (a 2010 simpler re-take on Gentry’s construction, by Marten van Dijk, Craig Gentry, Shai Halevi and Vinod Vaikuntanathan);
- The predominantly integer-based second generation schemes (specific to 2011-2012, belonging to Zvika Brakerski, Craig Gentry, and Vinod Vaikuntanathan, generally in relation to the previously developed models).
The speed issue
In February 2016 researchers at Microsoft experimenting with homomorphic encryption have announced the considerable increase of these systems’ speeds, following the employment of artificial intelligence CryptoNets, whose optical recognition system can make 51,000 predictions/hour with 99% accuracy.
As the source mentions, in comparison with the new registered speed, the first fully working such system took 100 trillion times as long for encrypted data calculations.
The HE expectancy
As we have mentioned in previous articles, any cyber-security issue has the potential for exponentially bigger risks once the Internet of Things integrates various systems, terminals, and types of data traffic.
Cyber-security as we know it cannot deal with the multiple possibilities of malicious entities accessing such an Omni-system once it will be set up and synchronized. Although many end-points will be highly secured, others will lack proper protection, and exclusion might not be an option. An uneven protected system is prone to unpredictability, and the way things are going so far, cyber-criminals are resourceful in overcoming the defense barriers one after another.
Disposing of means to circulate only encrypted data perhaps won’t protect the data per se, but it will surely make it less attractive for cyber thieves. Remember the LastPass data breach? The team’s representatives stated in the aftermath that although the data was stolen, it would not be accessible in raw form for the thieves, or at least it would be very hard to break the encryption. (“We are confident that our encryption measures are sufficient to protect the vast majority of users,” LastPass CEO Joe Siegrist, as quoted by Wired).
The current situation does not usually allow data transmission and processing without micro-moments in which the encryption is off and the content vulnerable. Why this type of encryption is not already in use then, one might ask. Well, taking fully Homomorphic Encryption to mainstream requires a great deal of synchronization, standardization and (as we have seen above) better traffic speeds than previously experienced in first generation HE.
HE alternatives
HE is not the only type of advanced model of encryption tested and developed in view of the Internet of the future. Cloud computing is first and foremost at risk, especially when enterprises decide to migrate to public or hybrid clouds, since there are no absolute guarantees of data security in a partially-exclusive environment.
Microsoft chose to advance HE, while others fragment sensitive information and distribute disparate batches, aiming to make ant data theft futile by keeping all intelligible information disparate.
*Alternate explored methods would be honey encryption (in which incorrect guesses trigger fake data that only mimics the real data behind the encryption layers), functional encryption (in which only a specific function of the encrypted data is accessed via the restricted key) and quantum key encryption (in which the quantum nature of atoms serves as the protective layer).
Perfecting encryption in order to unlock the future of computing
The state of cyber-security and the repeated cyber-incidents currently block further developments in fields such as healthcare, financial operations, satellite networks or infrastructure. Companies are still reluctant in relinquishing control over their data since they fear cyber-security incidents. Partnerships are locked by fears linked to data spillage and regulations are enforced in order to protect the entities that benefit from a greater degree of protection in their cooperation with less protected partners.
The full-scale availability of an universal cyber-protection method would allow surpassing all these frictions and (justified) fears. The specialists forecast the expectancy of bright new horizons once better cyber-protection methods come into practice.
Basically, the future of connectivity and all it triggers in computing depends on such new methods’ success – Homomorphic Encryption being one of the potential candidates in unlocking a safer and better data transmission, usage and storage era.
