this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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Homomorphic encryption, which allows for analyzing secret data without a decryption step, is actually incredibly cool. It’s a shame the conversation will begin with the fact that they deployed the feature as on by default.
This is not the case, but I do still disagree with the “trust me bro” approach to a feature rollout that does send data your somewhere, encrypted or not.
Edit: For those interested, the reason it's not the same as a backdoor is that the result of the computation done on HE data is itself still encrypted and readable only by the original owner. So you can effectively offload the work of a certain analysis to a server that you don't actually trust with your keys.
Right now it's not. All encryption gets its back broken by security flaws and brute force mathematics.
Do iPhones have a BYOK system for people to supply their own keypairs? Or is their OS open-source so that people can see how the keys are being handled? Because if not, it just sounds like all it takes to break this is for Apple's OS that it controls to ship the private keys that it generated up to its servers?