From the article: … Sharing because I had thought of homomorphic encryption as being an impractical technique that researchers are studying. I hadn’t realized it was being used at scale. Here is...
From the article:
One of the key technologies we use to do this is homomorphic encryption (HE), a form of cryptography that enables computation on encrypted data (see Figure 1). HE is designed so that a client device encrypts a query before sending it to a server, and the server operates on the encrypted query and generates an encrypted response, which the client then decrypts. The server does not decrypt the original request or even have access to the decryption key, so HE is designed to keep the client query private throughout the process.
…
Enhanced Visual Search for photos, which allows a user to search their photo library for specific locations, like landmarks and points of interest, is an illustrative example of a useful feature powered by combining ML with HE and private server lookups. Using PNNS, a user’s device privately queries a global index of popular landmarks and points of interest maintained by Apple to find approximate matches for places depicted in their photo library. Users can configure this feature on their device, using: Settings → Photos → Enhanced Visual Search.
Sharing because I had thought of homomorphic encryption as being an impractical technique that researchers are studying. I hadn’t realized it was being used at scale.
From the article:
…
Sharing because I had thought of homomorphic encryption as being an impractical technique that researchers are studying. I hadn’t realized it was being used at scale.
Here is the paper:
Scalable Private Search with Wally