IBM announces IBM Homomorphic Encryption Toolkit

The Research Department of the IBM Corporation has recently launched a fully homomorphic encryption toolkit. The first version of the fully homomorphic encryption toolkit supports macOS and iOS.

According to Wikipedia’s explanation of the term, homomorphic encryption allows people to perform certain forms of algebraic operations on the ciphertext, and obtain the result that is still encrypted.

This technology can perform operations such as retrieval and comparison on encrypted data and obtain correct results, without the need to decrypt the data in advance during the operation.

In 2009, Craig Gentry published a paper to mathematically propose a feasible method for fully homomorphic encryption, that is, to perform plain-text operations on encrypted data without decryption.

The main purpose of the researchers’ launch of the fully homomorphic encryption toolkit is to help people protect their data, which is not only for enterprises but also for ordinary users.

According to the researchers, there are quite a few encryption tools that can achieve high-strength encryption, and when the data is encrypted, it can get very good encryption protection.

However, when people manipulate the data, they need to decrypt the data before operating, which results in an attacker having the opportunity to steal the data, which also poses a threat to the user.

For ordinary users to protect their key information or corporate users to protect their business secrets, the usual encryption method has weaknesses in the decryption link.

The fully homomorphic encryption launched by IBM supports the retrieval of data without decrypting data, and can even view the corresponding content according to user rights in an enterprise environment.

Interestingly, the Fully Homomorphic Encryption Toolkit (FHE) launched by IBM mainly supports macOS, iOS, Android, and Linux but is not ready to support Windows.

IBM said it expects to launch Android and Linux versions of FHE next week. As for why it is not prepared to support the Windows operating system, it is unclear why.

The FHE toolkit is released in an open-source format to allow developers to modify or customize. Of course, IBM has provided a variety of examples for users to use.

However, in terms of use, FHE may have a certain threshold. Ordinary users or enterprise users who want to use it can refer to the compilation and usage guide issued by IBM.