March 28, 2024

Google announced open source FHE: can process encrypted data without decryption

In an official blog post released today, Google announced the open source of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). The relevant source code has been hosted on GitHub. This is Google’s first universal transcoder, which will enable developers to perform calculations on encrypted data without access to personally identifiable information.

Google said that through FHE, encrypted data can travel across the Internet to a server, where it can be processed without being decrypted. Google’s transcoder will enable developers to write code for any type of basic calculation, such as simple string or number processing, and run it on encrypted data. The transcoder will convert these codes into a version that can be run on encrypted data. In this way, developers can create new programming applications that do not require unencrypted data. FHE can also be used to train machine learning models on sensitive data in a private way.

For example, imagine you are building an application for people with diabetes. This application may collect sensitive information from users. You need a way to keep this data private and protected, and at the same time share this data with medical experts to understand valuable insights to achieve important medical advancements. With the adapter provided by Google for FHE, you can encrypt the data you collect and share it with medical experts, and the medical experts can analyze the data without decrypting it-providing useful information for the medical community, While ensuring that no one can get the basic information of the data.