[Cryptography] Advances in homomorphic encryption

[Eric Mill]

I am new-ish here and not a crypto expert (a mere web dev) - so please
don't shred me. But! I've been hearing more about homomorphic
encryption and it *sounds* really promising.

Basically[1], that you can take two encrypted pieces of data, perform
operations on them, and get an encrypted result that, when decrypted,
has the result as if you performed that operation on the decrypted
pieces. Data that is both manipulable and encrypted.

So lots of people naturally see potential in making more
privacy-oriented cloud services, that can perform computation for you
without having access to your data. And the activity around it seems
to be ramping up, like this paper[2] (which of course is not actually
available to read, though the related works are):

Poking around Github, I found one active, interesting library[3]
that's focused on building out HE primitives. But it's very difficult
for me to follow.

Does anyone know about the state of affairs? Is this worth getting
excited about?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
[2] http://ecewp.ece.wpi.edu/wordpress/vernam/projects/homomorphic-encryption/
[3] https://github.com/shaih/HElib

Math: http://icsd.i2r.a-star.edu.sg/acns2012/slides/S9/Enhanced%20Flexibility%20for%20Homomorphic%20Encryption%20Schemes%20via%20CRT.pdf
Slight math: http://cps-vo.org/bitcache/a76d514fb1c214a13635394baf6df05355c1f243?vid=15128&disposition=inline&op=view

-- Eric

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