What happened to fully homomorphic encryption?
With all the decentralized twitter replacements, I expected to hear about FHE a lot. It was "hot" a couple of years ago, google even has a nice lib for it. Is it silently being used withour any fan-fare or is there just not enough practical applications for it yet?
As an incumbent I think most of the time is not about the lack of products but about how to politically link different organizations that compete in the market. For example, we have used this to share statistical information about a specific industry while the actors (private pharmaceutical companies) don’t reveal the individual information. Connecting competitors is difficult.
I'm at Google working on it. We're making progress, but the only people who are using it in production for real are the Koreans. Their national COVID contact tracing system used FHE to keep location data private. I think it was Cryptolab that did the engineering? (I should really have a canned reference but I don't)
there is a lot of applications, but it's too computationally expensive for now imo
There is a few companies working on making it mainstream though like Zama.ai