Apple Announces New Swift Package for Homomorphic Encryption

TapTechNews July 31st news, Apple yesterday (July 30th) released a press release, announcing the launch of a new open source Swift package (swift-homomorphic-encryption) for enabling homomorphic encryption in the Swift programming language.

TapTechNews note: Homomorphic Encryption (HE) refers to an encryption algorithm that satisfies the property of homomorphic operation on ciphertext, that is, after the data is homomorphically encrypted, performing specific computations on the ciphertext, and the resulting decryption of the ciphertext computation result is equivalent to performing the same computation directly on the plaintext data, achieving 'computable but invisible' of the data.

Homomorphic encryption technology can calculate encrypted data without revealing the underlying unencrypted data to the operation process. In the interaction of encrypted data between the client and the server, the server operates on the encrypted data and returns a result that the client can decrypt.

During the execution of the request, the server itself never decrypts the original data and even cannot access the decryption key. This method provides new opportunities for the operation of cloud services while protecting the privacy and security of user data, which is obviously highly attractive for many application scenarios.

Apple said that it has started to deploy homomorphic encryption technology in iOS18, and one example is the LiveCallerIDLookup function, which will display caller ID and spam blocking services.

The LiveCallerIDLookup function will use homomorphic encryption technology to send an encrypted query to the server, and the server can provide the phone number information without knowing the specific phone number in the request.