alt Hacker NewsEven without bootstrapping FHE will never be as fast as plaintext computation: the ciphertext is about three orders of magnitude much larger than the plaintext data it encrypts, which means you have to have more memory bandwidth and more compute. You can’t bridge this gap.
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paulgerhardt • last Friday at 2:46 PM
That actually sounds pretty reasonable and feels almost standard at this point?
To pick one out of a dozen possible examples: I regularly read 500 word news articles from 8mb web pages with autoplaying videos, analytics beacons, and JS sludge.
That’s about 3 orders of magnitude for data and 4-5 orders of magnitude for compute.
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Technically, there are rate-1 homomorphic encryption schemes, where ‘rate’ refers to the size ratio between the plaintext and the ciphertext. They’re not super practical, so your general point stands.