In this episode of What That Means, Camille tasks Principal Engineer at Intel Labs, Rosario (Ro) Cammarota, with defining homomorphic encryption in three minutes or less. And yes, he nails it.

The convo is an interesting one and covers things like:

• What homomorphic encryption is and why it’s considered the ‘Holy Grail’ of cryptography
• What the security advantages of homomorphic encryption are
• Where traditional encryption is vulnerable to attacks
• How homomorphic encryption raises the bar of protection in healthcare and other uses cases
• Why not all data would be encrypted with homomorphic encryption
• How homomorphic encryption can be used in clinical trials to bring drugs to market faster
• The barriers and challenges in the evolution and adoption of homomorphic encryption

And more. Listen now.

Here are some key take-aways:

• The concept of processing data while in their encrypted form is not a new concept.
• The advantages of homomorphic encryption are that: 1. The data is never decrypted through its lifecycle, and 2. The decryption keys that are used in traditional encryption techniques to access the content of the data don’t need to be stored on the system.
• Homomorphic encryption is something that can be used in combination with other protocols, like blockchain and distributed ledger technology.
• When multiple entities are collaborating on data, homomorphic encryption increases confidence that: third party data aren’t being leaked and that privacy aspects inherent with the data aren’t being violated.
• The adoption of standardized cryptography is needed.
• Because the ciphertext of homomorphic encryption procedure is so much larger than the original data type, you wouldn’t encrypt all of your data.
• The term homomorphic encryption describes a family of cryptographic schemes. The most efficient homomorphic encryption schemes are based on lattice-based cryptography constructions.

Some interesting quotes from today’s episode:

“Homomorphic encryption defines a set of encryption techniques and rules that allow you to perform a computation on the content of the encrypted envelope, without the decryption.”

“Homomorphic encryption, specifically, is considered the Holy Grail of cryptography, just because it has this capacity of computing on encrypted data.”

“Homomorphic encryption raises the bar of protection by protecting the data also from the tenant.”

“Any time you need to process data within a trusted execution, you need to decrypt the data.”

“Homomorphic encryption is very computational expensive. And just the encryption procedure compared to traditional encryption also is relatively inefficient.”

“This idea that you can compute on encrypted data without decrypting, may be puzzling, to say the least.”

“My guess is that in the future, we will see the deployment of a hybrid type of schemes.”