Neutral mention · rule
We already have AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). If you trust AMD, you can have a secure VM running on that CPU that's totally opaque to the person who owns the CPU. So even if the KGB could own the CPU, and the USA's president could use a VM on it in full confidence the KGB wouldn't know what calculations he's using it for. What's more it runs existing software, at full speed. Well, that's the theory anyway. In practice, researchers say modifying the encrypted memory, then running the program and seeing what happens next reveals something, enough to get them root in fact. [0] But even so, it's a deficiency that can be fixed, so if we aren't there yet we will…
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be one day. The difference between SEV and FHE is where with SEV you have to trust AMD, but with FHE you don't have to trust Intel. China could have designed and made this FHE chips, and you should be fine. But on the downside FHE is very, very slow (and this won't really close that gap), and expands the data hugely and of course doesn't run conventional software. To me it looks like that sorts of applications people are discussing here, such as database servers, will be done by SEV because of the shear amount data and processing they have to deal with. The article talks about speeding things up, but the primary bottle neck for those applications is MIPS/Watt. Speeding up FHE by throwing a huge GPU at it doesn't sole the MIPS/Watt problem. However, there are applications that tend to involve primary secrets - things like handling passwords, PIN's, PIN Pads, perhaps even gab.com's OAuth2 bearer tokens that involve tiny amounts of highly sensitive data. Perhaps FHE could be useful in dealing with them. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05090.pdf