The social networking giant confirmed as much to The Information (paywalled), and is apparently one of several tech companies interested in a field known as homomorphic encryption....

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I’m not sure if this is just rumors, or if there’s any hope to succeed. If not a rumor, who knows what exactly might analyzing encrypting data means… Nonetheless, if everybody were using distributed (not even just decentralized) communications and sharing mechanisms…

    • freely@lemmy.ml
      71·
      3 years ago

      The article talks about homomorphic encryption, not brute-forcing ecnryption.

      This means they’re looking at ways to get analytics out of their own platform’s data without first decrypting it. Arguably increasing security of the system as a whole, since then the data itself isn’t on the system in a decrypted state.

      Of course they’ll need to decrypt the anaylitics to read them, but the idea is that’s less of a security risk that way. This topic is still a bit above my understanding though, so I might be wrong here.

      • Lynn Stephenson@lemmy.ml
        32·
        3 years ago

        Homomorphic encryption is still in early development in the academic community. I doubt Facebook is going to boost development majorly. It would ultimately mean breaking the Signal protocol that Signal implemented/audited for them.

        Thankfully for now, they can’t learn much except the length of our data, and deduce context of our conversations with metadata.

        • Dreeg Ocedam@lemmy.ml
          8·
          3 years ago

          Holomorphic encryption is not about breaking existing encryption. It’s about building new cryptosystems that allow specific operations that current cryptosystems don’t. The goal is to build a cryptosystem where given a function f such that f(x) = y you want to have an encryption scheme where someone who doesn’t know x but knows encrypt(x) can calculate encrypt(y) without learning anything about x or y.

          If someone found a way to do something like that with a current cryptosystem it would be considered broken.