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....

reddit comments

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…

  • 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.