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"The entire business model built on harvesting user data could become obsolete" with Fully Homomorphic Encryption [1]
['Ellsworth Toohey']
Date: 2025-07-21
Picture putting your diary in a sealed box, letting a proofreader edit your spelling without ever opening it, then reading the fixed pages once the box comes back. That's Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), a mathematical process that lets computers work with locked data.
Why does this matter? Today, data is safe on your disk and safe while traveling over the internet, but it must be decoded to be used. That tiny window when it sits in RAM is when breaches happen. FHE keeps the box locked even during use.
Barış Özmen explains FHE in his post, "Fully Homomorphic Encryption and the Dawn of A Truly Private Internet," and I'll freely admit I don't understand how it works. FHE relies on "lattices," giant grids with millions of dimensions. Finding the shortest path between two points on such a grid is so hard that even future quantum computers are expected to fail. By adding a speck of noise to each point, FHE creates a lock that can only be removed by someone holding the secret key.
"Imagine sending Google an encrypted question and getting back the exact results you wanted," says Özmen, "without them having any way of knowing what your question was or what result they returned.
Early versions og FHE were slow enough to make dial-up look fast — 30 minutes per bit in 2011. Since then, new math and hardware have enabled FHE to increase in speed by roughly eight times each year. Experts now see a path to cloud services that run AI, databases, and blockchains entirely on encrypted data, ending the era of "spy by default" and ushering in an era of "privacy by default."
In the early days of the Internet, data transmission was like sending postcards. The introduction of HTTPS gave us the equivalent of sealed envelopes. FHE promises envelopes that stay sealed even while they're being read.
"The implications are big," says Özmen. "The entire business model built on harvesting user data could become obsolete. Why send your plaintext when another service can compute on your ciphertext?"
Previously: A new "quantum proof" encryption standard is broken by a low-end PC
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