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Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 00:57:11 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: john-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Homomorphic Encryption

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 08:37:34PM -0700, Alain Espinosa wrote:
> A new form of encryption allows you to compute with data you cannot read:
> http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2012/5/alice-and-bob-in-cipherspace/1
> 
> Could be this the next "huge" thing in cryptography? I imagine John
> using it for supporting a distribute attack where clients do not even
> know the hash. Is a pity algorithms are in early days of development.

Not so early, actually.  Here's a practical application to SQL queries:

http://css.csail.mit.edu/cryptdb/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/12/19/an-mit-magic-trick-computing-on-encrypted-databases-without-ever-decrypting-them/
http://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=32610 (Russian)

(Yes, this is a special case.)

Somehow the (otherwise extremely well written) American Scientist
article does not mention this one.

Here's an idea (which I haven't given much thought yet): maybe
considering this goal at KDF design time would help in allowing for safe
and efficient testing for weak passwords "in the cloud" given an
encrypted derived key or password hash.

Meanwhile, all we got for this purpose are partial hashes and false
positives (to hide the real cracked password among many), and this might
be just good enough (although it needs much bandwidth on the way from
"the cloud").

Alexander

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