A jewellery box and data privacy
A demo of the methods involved in this article is here.
Working with gems
With homomorphic encryption, defined by Craig Gentry in 2010 [here], we can operate on data without ever decrypting it. Craig defined a scenario where Alice had a jewellery box, which she locked with her key, and where her workers could not gain access to the gems contained with it. Then when they wanted to work on the gems, they could do so with special gloves but couldn’t remove them from the box.
With homomorphic encryption allows ciphered values to be moved to wherever they are required, and then processed, without giving away the original data. Data could thus traverse across the Internet and move to places that it is required, and then used to calculate results.
For your tax return we might see:
Sales (Web) &*X43=%Sales (Print) *65tfd1= ----------Total Sales 64,532 (=B1+B2)
The sales values are ciphered, but we can still process the addition of the two values. We could also apply subtraction, multiplication and division.
