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…
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.
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.
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
fsuch thatf(x) = yyou want to have an encryption scheme where someone who doesn’t knowxbut knowsencrypt(x)can calculateencrypt(y)without learning anything aboutxory.If someone found a way to do something like that with a current cryptosystem it would be considered broken.