Too Many Secrets

October 4, 2012 11:17 AM

Over the years, Alice and Bob have gone their separate ways. Alice now works as the research director of a cryptographic software company; Bob has gone into hardware, running a cloud computing service. As they have drifted apart, their security and privacy needs have changed somewhat. When Alice talks to Bob, she still needs to guard against Eve’s snooping. But, in addition, Alice’s company now has proprietary information that she must not disclose to Bob. Complicating her predicament, she wants to use Bob’s computers for tasks that involve the secret data. Ordinary cryptography is no help in this situation. Alice can encrypt the data when she sends it to Bob, but he can do nothing with it unless he can decrypt it. That is exactly what Alice seeks to avoid. They are at an impasse, which homomorphic encryption is designed to surmount.
posted by Frayed Knot (6 comments total)

Metafilter: The methods have been shown to work in principle, but they still impose a heavy penalty of inefficiency.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:21 AM on October 4, 2012 [2 favorites]

double
posted by facetious at 11:33 AM on October 4, 2012

Alice and Bob used to be so close. What went wrong?
posted by rusty at 11:36 AM on October 4, 2012

Carol & Ted, on the other hand, have an open source relationship.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 11:39 AM on October 4, 2012 [6 favorites]

Didn't Alice and Bob used to run the "Lab of Pepsi-Cola and Doom" at Computer Shopper?


(Just used the "Edit" link for the first second time!)
posted by mmrtnt at 11:51 AM on October 4, 2012

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.
- Someone
posted by blue_beetle at 11:52 AM on October 4, 2012