Craig Gentry named MacArthur Fellow for work on fully homomorphic encryption

http://www.macfound.org/fellows/914/

by sweis • 12 years ago

152 21 12 years ago

xnull3• 12 years ago

Yes. Yes yes yes.

Craig Gentry did more than just discover the first theoretical scheme, he reopened an interest in FHE. Yeah all the schemes are inefficient and will remain so for decades. But already the progress on FHE is incredible.

2007 for FHE was the 1982 for Secure Multi Party Computation. It will take 30 years, but I expect someday we'll see it privately allocating contracts in sugarbeet auctions.

wyager• 12 years ago

contracts in sugarbeet auctions

I highly recommend that everyone reads http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/PEC2011/presentations2011/tof...

Crazy stuff.

swordswinger122• 12 years ago

I can think of few people who deserve it more. His recent work has been truly groundbreaking. Not just on FHE, either - multilinear maps, IO, lattices... I could go on. Just a brilliant dude.

Jonovono• 12 years ago

Interesting stuff. Who are the people you think might deserve it more?

zaroth• 12 years ago

"I can think of few people who deserve it more" basically means the exact opposite of... "I can think of a few people who deserve it more".

I read it wrong the first time too.

swordswinger122• 12 years ago

Nobody deserves it 'more' but another person who has been doing similarly groundbreaking stuff is Sanjam Garg.

riemannzeta• 12 years ago

Ex patent lawyer. A very select crew.

TallGuyShort2• 12 years ago

Patent lawyer or no, he's an incredibly gifted and accomplished cryptographer. You don't have to agree with everything in someone's past to appreciate their contribution to the field.

darkmighty• 12 years ago

I think that was just a joke.

http://xkcd.com/1067/

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Google should be funding the heck out of this guy. Privacy concerns are only going to get bigger in the future, and the reason for that is simple: companies like Google are inevitably going to want more and more data. So at least they should be trying to do that in a privacy-friendly way.

Ar-Curunir2• 12 years ago

Why would they willingly deprive themselves of large amounts of user data?

xnull3• 12 years ago

Adapting Ur-Beowulf to Ar-Curunir and Grendle to Google:

"So the Shieldings' hero, hard-pressed and enraged, took a firm hold of the hilt and swung the blade in an arc, a resolute blow that bit deep into her neck-bone and severed it entirely, toppling the doomed house of her flesh; she fell to the floor. The sword dripped blood, the swordsman was elated. (1563-1569)"

Sometimes the better product makes less profit. It's hard for someone with Capitalistic incentives to respond with a better product if delaying/discouraging/regulating-out-of-existence is cheaper.

hyperbovine• 12 years ago

I'm certain ibm is already paying him quite well to sit in a room and stare into space, and will continue to do so for as long as he desires it. Google is not the be-all-end-all of cs research funding.

quinndupont2• 12 years ago

If anyone ever had any doubt about the coming reality of ubiquitous cryptography, here is the next move.

xnull3• 12 years ago

Oblivious Transfer, ZKPs, SMPC, Functional Encryption, Attribute-Based Encryption, (better) cryptocurrency are all things I expect to see before FHE.

quinndupont2• 12 years ago

Homomorphic encapsulates some of this, no? Certainly functional crypto, c.f. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-45239-0...

And there will certainly be many more advances, but if/when functional crypto gets totally sorted out it will change everything.

ryanpardieck• 12 years ago

This is awesome. Reading about his work and the subsequent work on FHE in general was one of my favorite "holy shit this is the future" moments. (And I don't have those moments hardly at all ... kind of silly. But I was giddy, and it was amazing, and so I was silly.)

It was also one of my foremost "I will never ever in my life be as smart as these guys" moments. Alas.

Craig Gentry named MacArthur Fellow for work on fully homomorphic encryption

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