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As 2025 dawns, FHE (fully homomorphic encryption) is a PET (privacy-enhancing technology) that is about to go mainstream.
FHE keeps data encrypted during computation so that even if intercepted, it cannot be read.
Hardware acceleration, venture capital investment, and cross-industry organizations and standards development consortia have all gathered strong prevailing tailwinds behind FHE, and the first commercial applications will occur within the next two years.
In 2025, I expect to see three trends as FHE adoption begins in earnest.
1. Adoption starts at the cutting edge with AI and blockchain
AI requires third-party computation on a massive, unprecedented scale, and that data is vulnerable with every query.
Despite all the potential benefits of artificial intelligence (AI), many Chief Security Officers (CSOs) have postponed adoption due to the security risk. AI providers need FHE to create a rock-solid security solution for enterprise customers.
Blockchain is the other industry currently making efforts to implement FHE.
Blockchain ledgers are public and immutable, which prevents certain desirable activities and makes it difficult for blockchain applications to fully comply with privacy regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
FHE would allow users to process transactions or execute smart contracts while keeping all personal identification data private, enabling use cases such as private DeFi (decentralized finance) or private auctions.
Since the 2024 elections brought several well-known crypto enthusiasts to power in the US, we are also in the midst of an undeniable blockchain resurgence.
The crypto bull market will fuel a wave of new investments in blockchain technology, accelerating development efforts in an industry already proven to be eager to embrace FHE.
2. Law enforcement will support widespread encryption
Agencies such as the FBI and the IACP (International Association of Chiefs of Police) has warned that encryption allows criminals to ‘go dark’, making it impossible for law enforcement agencies to obtain digital communications data, even with a warrant.
Lately, however, the FBI has also found itself promote use of encrypted messaging tools in response to ‘Salt Typhoon’, a massive telecommunications cyber attack attributed to Chinese actors.
Salt Typhoon makes it clear that widespread encryption is a matter of national security.
The perpetrators were reportedly able to steal metadata from communications and even record exchanges involving US government officials and they have been compounded by the fact that perimeter-based security cannot scale fast enough to keep pace with the billions of endpoints and attack surfaces inherent in global telecommunications (telcos).
The data itself must be encrypted at each stage.
The threat extends far beyond telecom companies. Amazon has reported this we see a 750% increase in attacks by 2024 to almost a billion hacking attempts per day.
State and non-state actors work tirelessly to gain access to financial data, personal data, corporate data and more.
Encrypting all this data would greatly exacerbate the problem of going dark but FHE provides some relief.
Using FHE, regulators can perform compliance checks and audits without having to view sensitive data in plain text.
Likewise, law enforcement can analyze a data set for evidence of a suspected crime without exposing the suspect’s entire private life to scrutiny.
FHE could prevent ‘digital stop and frisk’ without hampering the ability to investigate serious crimes.
3. It will be a group effort
We are done with ‘safety through ambiguity’.
Practical, scalable FHE solutions will emerge not from private Skunk Works, but from a foundation of co-developed industry standards.
Closed-loop development of security solutions often hides vulnerabilities until they are widely deployed.
Had Intel’s SGX been subjected to an open design review, its vulnerability to Specter and Meltdown-style side-channel attacks might have been exposed before large-scale deployment.
The same can be said of the AMD Zen Two Zenbleed exploit, or the Rowhammer vulnerabilities in multiple generations of DRAM.
Open development and evaluation encourage broader research, which helps uncover errors more quickly.
What’s more privately developed solutions may be unacceptable to many stakeholders. For example, consider Google’s efforts to create new private browsing solutions.
In 2019, Google launched the ‘Privacy Sandbox’ initiative to replace third-party cookies with privacy-preserving technologies that would still enable targeted advertising.
A year later, they announced plans to eliminate the use of third-party cookies in Chrome.
The cookie phase-out was supposed to be complete by 2024, but British antitrust regulators stepped in to oppose the change. Why?
Google’s competitors in targeted advertising were concerned that the various programs proposed under the Privacy Sandbox would make them more dependent on Google’s internal Chrome browser data.
According to them, this led to a serious risk that Google Ads would receive preferential access to data. British regulators agreedforcing Google to reconsider.
Privacy Sandbox continues to work with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to develop more open alternatives to private browsing but Google’s original plan to quickly phase out third-party cookies has been consigned to the ash heap of history.
FHE hardware and software vendors and users should work together to develop standards for hardware/software interoperability, deployment best practices, computer optimization guidelines, and more.
This work is currently being carried out by FHE and PEC focused consortia and industry associations, with new organizations launched in the last twelve months specifically focused on removing barriers to commercial implementation.
Open standards will help the industry build solutions that are more secure, widely adopted, and easier to deploy and scale.
Despite the interest of industries such as AI and blockchain in FHE solutions and the urgency of the risks they face These collaborative efforts are still in their early stages.
Still, I expect things to move quickly in 2025 And as we start to see real benefits in emerging use cases, mainstream computing applications will soon follow.
Jorge Myszne is the Chief Product Officer of Niobium microsystemsa developer of groundbreaking zero trust computing hardware solutions. He is a successful entrepreneur. He founded two startups that were later acquired and has held technical and leadership roles at Intel and Qualcomm.
Featured image: Shutterstock/Everyonephoto Studio/Sol Invictus
Credit : dailyhodl.com
