Slowly but Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) improves. Actually this is a dream for all: service providers (SaaS) would not need to worry about the confidentiality of their clients’ information, and clients about the risk of having confidential information processed by a third party.

In a few words, FHE provides computing on encrypted data so that the result of the computation is obtained once data is decrypted. This was mostly an idea until 2009 when Craig Gentry described the first plausible construction for a fully homomorphic encryption scheme. But the major problem of all the proposed FHE schemes is that they are extremely slow and resource intensive. But this year (see here for example) new chips should arrive on the market which implement in hardware the critical operations of FHE computations, speeding them up many times. Still, this is just another step forward to a practical FHE, there is still a long way to go, but we are getting closer.