🪄 Let's talk about Fully Homomorphic Encryption, a technology that is indistinguishable from magic
🔒Fully Homomorphic Encryption, FHE for short, is going radically make the internet a safer and more secure place
🧵Data? Where we are going, your data is always encrypted
Let's start with the basics, what is encryption?
Encryption is the process of encoding information so that only people with a specific key can decode it
Alice writes the message "Hello" to Bob. If David intercepts the message he will not be able to read it. Only Bob can decrypt
What about encryption on the internet?
When you see the little 🔒symbol in your browser, it's because the website your using has a SSL certificate.
Your device and the website are both encrypting and decrypting so no one can steal your credit card information.
While this has been revolutionary for doing business on the internet, we still have plenty of hacks and data breaches.
Why?
Data is not encrypted all the time when its at the website servers
The more official way to say it is that your data isn't encrypted during 'processing'
So, what's special about Fully Homomorphic Encryption? 🤩
It allows data to be encrypted before it leaves your device and then manipulated by a third party without them ever having access to the data!
Basically your data is always encrypted even during 'processing'
Let's take an example:
When you go to blockstream.info/ and type in your #bitcoin address, the owner of the this server will be able to log your bitcoin address and the IP you connected from.
Not terrible but I hope you are using a VPN!
Now what does this look like with FHE?
@SpiralPrivacy created a #bitcoin block explorer that provably can't see the bitcoin address you are looking up on the blockchain.
btc.usespiral.com/
What are some other examples of how we can use FHE?
@zama_fhe outlines some examples but check out their website for more info
6min.zama.ai/
Preventive Medicine:
AI will provide insane breakthroughs in healthcare but it requires a central server to have all of your data. Remember data breaches?
FHE will allow everyone to get the benefits of AI but in a fully private way. Only you can see the health recommendations
Voice Assistants:
Every time you talk to Siri or Alexa, your PII is being processed on servers.
With FHE, no one will be able to listen to what you say to the AI!
But you still will get shitty answers from Siri... When does ChatGPT get a device in my home??
@zama_fhe coined the term HTTPZ and I ❤️ it
FHE is going to be revolutionary for privacy on the internet.
Privacy is especially important for pseudonyms who don't want to reveal their real life identity to services they use.