Encrypted Computing 101 💻

I got in touch with Encrypted Computing through my Bachelor Thesis in January 2019. Encrypted Computing is for me a framing word for the following technologies:

• Homomorphic Encryption (HE)
• Zero-Knowledge-Proofs (ZKP)
• (Secure)Multiparty-Computation (SMC)
• Differential Privacy (DP)
• Order Preserving Encryption (OPE)
• Pailler Encryption (PE)
• And other technologies that allow you to compute sensible functions on encrypted data or private inputs.

In some later posts, I’ll go deeper into the specific technologies but for the moment is enough to understand that Encrypted Computing exists and that it is possible through the methods mentioned above.

“ Encrypted Computing: Computing sensibel functions on encrpyted data or private input data”

Where does Encrypted Computing differentiate from Encrypted Communications?

Encrypted Communication is the encoded exchange of information between multiple parties. It is basically used to protect the transport of your data between some points. One of the best examples is probably Telegram. Telegram is encrypting every message as such only the recipient can see it. Encrypted Computing on the other side would try to take this encrypted data and calculate something meaningful out of it.

As an example, Alice sends Bob an encrypted, message that she’s going to start a party on Thursday at 6 pm. This is valuable information for Bob and certainly not information for Alices ex-boyfriend Peter. But Peter knows something about Alice: If Alices is throwing a party she expects everybody to bring beer. Her circle of friends is aware of this but not Bob, who only recently met her. With Encrypted Computing, it would be possible to use Peter’s knowledge add it to the message and save Bob’s ass on Alice’s first party.

Why is this such a big deal?

In our example is the message from Alice to Bob hidden from the outside world and that is the main objective of Encrypted Communication. But this also means that our third-party, Peter, can’t add his knowledge (I’m not sure if he would even do this, in case he would know what the message is about, but I assume he’s a generally nice guy who loves to safeguard parties). With Encrypted Computing, Peter could add his knowledge without seeing the message or recipient and the data would be still private for Alice and Bob.

What are the real-life use cases?

I assume, right now, your thinking: “nice that you explained the basics about encrypted computing, which sound more like witch-craft, but what are some real-life use cases where this could improve my life?”

• MRT-Scans: Your MRT-Scans are very sensitive information about you and your current condition. To save your privacy, Encrypted Computing would encrypt the file send it to a machine-learning algorithm which got trained to detect cancer and you would receive an encrypted result, which only you can open.
• Authentication: You want to authenticate anonymously for a forum on the internet. With a Zero-Knowledge-Proof, you can prove with an ID that you are a real person but you don’t have to show whats your name or age is.
• Andy many more…

in general, you can add encrypted computation to every multiparty use case where some data should be kept private.

This is only a very brief intro. Also, the examples are not my best ones. I try to improve this in the future. If you have any questions or remarks, please comment 😉.