Homomorphic Encryption Library Open Sourced by Apple

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Apple recently open sourced its homomorphic encryption library for Swift, enabling developers who use the Apple programming language to implement the privacy-preserving technology.

Homomorphic encryption (HE) is a relatively new technology that allows encrypted data to be processed without first decrypting it into clear text. For example, a user can send sensitive data in encrypted form as part of a query to a server, and the server can respond to that query and the encrypted data without decrypting it.

While it may sound impossible at first, HE has been proven mathematically to be accurate and effective. Apple developed its own HE library for use with Swift, the high-level language used to develop applications across all Apple products.

By releasing the swift-homomorphic-encryption library under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, now anybody can use it to build Apple apps that preserve privacy and boost security. The news was shared by Apple engineers Fabian Boemer, Karl Tarbe, and Rehan Rishi in a blog post recently.

“We believe developers will find homomorphic encryption useful for a wide variety of standalone privacy-preserving applications both inside and outside the Apple ecosystem, including private set intersection, secure aggregation, and machine learning,” they write.

According to the engineers, Apple’s Swift HE implementation uses the Brakerski-Fan-Vercauteren (BFV) HE scheme, which is based on the ring learning with errors (RLWE) hardness problem, which is quantum resistant, they say.

They also shared one HE use case. “One example of how we’re using this implementation in iOS 18, is the new Live Caller ID Lookup feature, which provides caller ID and spam blocking services,” they write. “Live Caller ID Lookup uses homomorphic encryption to send an encrypted query to a server that can provide information about a phone number without the server knowing the specific phone number in the request.”

Developers can download the swift-homomorphic-encryption library on its GitHub page.

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