What If You Could Use Data Without Ever Unlocking It?
Imagine you had a locked treasure chest, and somehow you could count the coins inside or even do math with them—without ever opening the chest.
That’s exactly what homomorphic encryption does for data.
Today, when companies process sensitive information—like your health records or bank info—they usually have to decrypt it first. That means the data becomes visible, and that opens the door to potential leaks, hacks, or privacy violations.
Homomorphic encryption changes the game: it allows computers to work with the data while it’s still encrypted. So, nobody—not even the computer—ever sees the raw data.
How Is That Even Possible?
Homomorphic encryption is like magic math. It lets systems do calculations on encrypted data, and when you finally decrypt the result, it’s as if the computer had access to the real data all along.
For example:
- An AI model could predict your risk for disease using your encrypted health history, and only you would ever see the result.
- A bank could run fraud detection on encrypted transaction data without ever seeing what you bought.
The strongest version is called Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). It means you can do anything with encrypted data that you could do with regular data.
Why This Is Cooler Than What We Have Now
Most of today’s systems rely on “trusting” whoever processes your data:
- Cloud providers must be trusted not to look.
- Your info gets decrypted at some point, which can be a vulnerability.
But with homomorphic encryption:
- Your data stays encrypted 100% of the time.
- Even if hackers broke into the system, all they’d get is scrambled code.
- It’s future-proof—resistant to quantum computers that could break today’s encryption.
This makes it perfect for:
- Healthcare: Analyzing medical data without compromising patient privacy.
- Finance: Securely processing credit reports or transactions.
- AI: Training and running models on private data without ever exposing it.
What’s the Catch?
Right now, FHE is super slow. Doing calculations on encrypted data takes thousands of times longer than on regular data.
But here’s the good news:
- Big names like IBM and Microsoft are creating faster and easier-to-use FHE tools.
- Researchers at MIT are working on ways to make FHE much simpler.
- Global efforts are underway to standardize and speed it up.
It’s not perfect yet—but it’s getting there, and fast.
The Future of Privacy Is Here
We live in a time where our data is more valuable—and more vulnerable—than ever. Homomorphic encryption is one of the most promising privacy-preserving technologies in development.
Once it’s fast and easy enough to use, it could change how the internet works—by letting us keep our secrets secret, even while using them.
Check out the cool NewsWade YouTube video about this article!
Article derived from: Castelvecchi, D. (2025, June 4). Homomorphic technologies could process still-encrypted data. Communications of the ACM. https://cacm.acm.org/news/homomorphic-technologies-could-process-still-encrypted-data/
