Intel Demos Chip to Compute with Encrypted Data

Perhaps it's a cynical way to look at it, but in the days of the war on general purpose computing, and locked-down devices, I have to consider the news in terms of how it could be used against the users and device owners. I don't know enough to provide useful analysis so I won't try, but instead pose as questions to the much smarter people who might have some interesting thoughts to share.

There are two, non-exclusive paths I'm thinking at the moment:

1. DRM: Might this enable a next level of DRM?

2. Hardware attestation: Might this enable a deeper level of hardware attestation?

> Heracles, which sped up FHE computing tasks as much as 5,000-fold compared to a top-of the-line Intel server CPU.

That is nice speed-up compared to generic hardware but everyone probably wants to know how much slower it is than performing same operations on plain text data? I am sure 50% penalty is acceptable, 95% is probably not.

Someone explain how you'd create a vector embedding using homomorphically encrypted data, without decrypting it. Seems like a catch 22. You don't get to know the semantic meaning, but need the semantic meaning to position it in high dimensional space. I guess the point I'm making is that sure, you can sell compute for FHE, but you quickly run up against a hard limit on any value added SaaS you can provide the customer. This feels like a solution that's being shoehorned in because cloud providers really really really want to have a customer use their data center, when in truth the best solution would be a secure facility for the customer so that applications can actually understand the data they're working with.

FHE is the future of AI. I predict local models with encrypted weights will become the norm. Both privacy preserving (insofar as anything on our devices can be) and locked down to prevent misuse. It may not be pretty but I think this is where we will end up.

One thing I'm curious about is whether this could change how cloud providers handle sensitive workloads.

If computation can happen directly on encrypted data, does that reduce the need for trusted environments like SGX/TEE, or does it mostly complement them?

Everything about this in my head screams "bad idea".

If you need to trust the encryption and trust the hardware itself, it may not be suitable for your environment/ threat model.