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I implemented a Paillier encryption library in Clojure a few months back (which I am currently unable to open-source due to an NDA), and in researching it, I was astounded by the elegance of some of these schemes. I really hope that HE research continues and becomes the standard in the near-ish future.

Whenever I get a free couple weekends, I want to port IBM's HELib to Clojure, so that I can more easily use it for a Java project.

Is it easy to write timing-attack-resistant crypto code in Clojure? Sounds interesting, what company was this for? Thinking of implementing Damgard-Jurik myself sometime.
It was just a proof of concept thing for a hackathon, hardly industry-grade, but was quite fun to write.

The crypto code was quite fun to write in Clojure; literally yesterday I just got permission to open source it.

If you want to play with it, the code is available here: https://github.com/tombert/scudlib

Since I have the ability work on it in my free time, I'll probably add more schemes.

I think if anything's going to save us from a generalised AI takeover it's this. Even if encrypting the world doesn't stop them it'll make computation too slow for world domination.
If I had $$$$ to fund one scientific endeavor, it'd certainly be HE hands down.

There are a million different ways we're imminently hurtling down an empty abyss, and obviously if I was an inundated Texan or a general I might be more concerned about the environmental or nuclear apocalypse, but as a programmer the Cloud apocalypse is what concerns me the most.

Can you help a newcomer to this understand how HE could help prevent a generalised AI takeover? If it's generalized AI that is optimizing efficiency, wouldn't it quickly realize the large gain to be made by turning off HE? Or is that not possible?
this is the weirdest mishmash of hot buzzwords. what does generalized AI have to do with encryption? are you imagining that generalized AI would be magically able to crack RSA or whatever?
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I'm pretty sure this guy was just making a joke about how slow computations on HE data is and you all are taking him seriously about generalized AI.
I'm glad at least one person got it.
Are there any known PHE or FHE schemes that can run a full blown virtual machine ?
All FHE schemes can run a full-blown virtual machine, but you might not live long enough to see Ubuntu finish booting up.
What are the time complexities like?

Do they actually do better than "factor the RSA key, then compute the output, then re-encrypt"?

Aren't there MASSIVE (read: showstopper) complications when you want to use FHE for "looping" computations?

I always thought FHE was only good if you can fully unroll your "fixed-length" computation, and even then you can only use each "program" once without compromising security.

Hmm so it doesn't work well with variable length data?
You could say that.

Every time you want to run a computation on your FHE-enabled VPS you would need to upload data proportional to the maximum number of operations in the computation. Otherwise, re-running the same computation with a different input gives away information about both of your inputs and about the computation.

The short answer is yes. There are some (slow) ways to fix this: https://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/goldwasser-we.p...
Their construction relies on two unproven conjectures.

In particular the "Extractable Witness Encryption" conjecture is impossible under a reasonable falsifiable assumption: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8587/dba4ff31e8118e9bd5914a...

Under that assumption, general purpose differing-inputs obfuscation cannot exist.

The way I understand it, FHE being applicable to anything other than "unwrapping a path through a circuit" seems implausible. Any claims of arbitrary encrypted computation should be viewed with the highest dose of skepticism.

I worked with Hiyadet, Selcuk, and Abbas last year while I was doing undergraduate research in the Florida International University Cyber Physical Systems Security Lab.

Awesome to see their work getting attention! These guys all put in long hours and love what they do.