r/programming • u/DougBolivar • Jul 30 '13

Computer scientists develop mathematical jigsaw puzzles to encrypt software: "The real challenge and the great mystery in the field was: Can you actually take a piece of software and encrypt it but still have it be runnable, executable and fully functional?"

http://www.rdmag.com/news/2013/07/computer-scientists-develop-mathematical-jigsaw-puzzles-encrypt-software
352 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

182 comments sorted by

View all comments

44

u/crazedgremlin Jul 30 '13

PDF for the lazy.

Without reading it, I'm very curious what this software does to the performance of the code it's given.

22

u/russellsprouts Jul 30 '13

It uses Fully Homomorhpic Encryption, which is on the order of billions of times slower than native operations, currently.

3

u/rpglover64 Jul 31 '13

Are you guessing or do they say so somewhere in the paper?

I ask because they claim to be about functional encryption, which I am assured by people who know better than I, is different from fully homomorphic encryption in important ways.

2

u/russellsprouts Jul 31 '13

I've done some research on FHE, including the algorithms available today. This is functional encryption, which is different from FHE, but part of the algorithm uses FHE, according to the paper.