Zvika Brakerski : 2012 Security Session

As increasing portions of our data are being stored and processed by third party cloud servers, privacy from the eyes of the cloud itself becomes a concern. To protect ourselves, we wish to outsource our data in an encrypted form that hides the contents from the cloud server. However, this will require the cloud to process the data "blindfolded", without knowing the very input it is working on!

Whether an encryption scheme that allows blindfolded computation is even theoretically possible has been an open problem for cryptographers for over 30 years. It is only in the last 3 years that we learned how to design such schemes, known as "fully homomorphic encryption schemes".

In my talk I will explain what fully homomorphic encryption is, describe the new techniques that made it possible, and present some of the remaining obstacles for efficient implementation.

Zvika Brakerski is a Simons postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford cryptography group.