Intel Demos Chip to Compute with Encrypted Data

Perhaps it's a cynical way to look at it, but in the days of the war on general purpose computing, and locked-down devices, I have to consider the news in terms of how it could be used against the users and device owners. I don't know enough to provide useful analysis so I won't try, but instead pose as questions to the much smarter people who might have some interesting thoughts to share.

There are two, non-exclusive paths I'm thinking at the moment:

1. DRM: Might this enable a next level of DRM?

2. Hardware attestation: Might this enable a deeper level of hardware attestation?

First and foremost, grateful for the ability to take and give to this HN community for what HN has done for me. With that stated I am reminded near daily when reading posts on HN of my experience, my age, and some of my now lost hair color.

After nearly 3 decades of critical technology systems architecture and management involving ongoing industry audits my experience and age knows why my hair has lost some of its color. Much of that lost color comes from security management of third party systems, yes the old dreaded dependencies. Elimination of those third parties is key for one's cyber sanity and hair color yet with technology still in its infancy some cannot distinguish the forest from the trees.

Nothing remains the same as progress moves forward correcting for past mistakes while learning what works and does not along that journey, technology platforms are no exception. Analogously early automobiles lacked safety features as well such as windshield wipers and seatbelts so has the passage of time proved their addition to be valued? Few people today truly understand how things work as nearly all just want the instant fix "pill" to alleviate their issues however this approach cannot work with security. True security is designed in from the foundation and such secure platforms go unseen yet we have an endless list of victims from those insecure systems which have "bolted on" security after the fact. This security change and more is coming to system designs as the entire world is now fully aware of cyber security, or in this case, the lack of it.

Time, the young fail to consider it up until a single moment in their life, while the old reflect on where theirs went. After the reflection of one's time however change becomes obvious.

> Heracles, which sped up FHE computing tasks as much as 5,000-fold compared to a top-of the-line Intel server CPU.

That is nice speed-up compared to generic hardware but everyone probably wants to know how much slower it is than performing same operations on plain text data? I am sure 50% penalty is acceptable, 95% is probably not.

Someone explain how you'd create a vector embedding using homomorphically encrypted data, without decrypting it. Seems like a catch 22. You don't get to know the semantic meaning, but need the semantic meaning to position it in high dimensional space. I guess the point I'm making is that sure, you can sell compute for FHE, but you quickly run up against a hard limit on any value added SaaS you can provide the customer. This feels like a solution that's being shoehorned in because cloud providers really really really want to have a customer use their data center, when in truth the best solution would be a secure facility for the customer so that applications can actually understand the data they're working with.

FHE is the future of AI. I predict local models with encrypted weights will become the norm. Both privacy preserving (insofar as anything on our devices can be) and locked down to prevent misuse. It may not be pretty but I think this is where we will end up.

This is incredible work.. And makes the technology absolutely viable.

However... In a world where privacy is constantly being eroded intentionally by governments and private companies, I think this will NEVER, ever reach any consumer grade hardware. My cynic could envision the technology export ban worldwide in the vein of RSA [0] .

Why would any company offer the customers real out of the box e2e encryption possibilities built into their devices.

DRM was mentioned by another user. This will not be used to enable privacy for the masses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

This is a huge win for cybersecurity and data privacy.

If they can get this shrunk down and efficient enough in a future scenario I think Apple could move back to Intel for this with their stance on encryption and things it being a pillar of their image.

One thing I'm curious about is whether this could change how cloud providers handle sensitive workloads.

If computation can happen directly on encrypted data, does that reduce the need for trusted environments like SGX/TEE, or does it mostly complement them?

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Everything about this in my head screams "bad idea".

If you need to trust the encryption and trust the hardware itself, it may not be suitable for your environment/ threat model.