securefs VS HElib

There's cppcryptfs & securefs as Cryptomator alternatives too. SiriKali is an option for a GUI that works nicely with them.

There's also this: https://github.com/netheril96/securefs/

Well, time to advertise my own competing offering: https://github.com/netheril96/securefs. Works on Win, Linux, Mac and BSD.

I wasn’t satisfied with the options available, so I wrote my own: https://github.com/netheril96/securefs. It has authenticated encryption, highest quality of password stretching, and works on both Unix-like and Windows.

If it is not against the rules, I want to promote my project (https://github.com/netheril96/securefs) here. It is essentially the same functionality, but with authenticated encryption, better password hashing and optionally file size obfuscation (but no fancy UI).

For clarity, let's assume the hospital stores its records in plaintext. For the pharma company, the hospital encrypts the patient records with a secret key. Now they let the pharma company run their homomorphic algorithm and send the values back. Only problem is the pharma company can not read those results without having access to the key. FHE is completely redundant in this use case - the hospital could have simply run the pharma company's SQL and audited the code and outputs.

What is FHE actually good for then? Let's imagine you are a top secret agent and you get instructions to fly to Bulgaria as a part of your mission. You have other hostile agents constantly monitoring you, trying to understand your next move. But there's a problem - to buy a plane ticket to Bulgaria you need to know the name of it's capital city. You can't just type it to Google, because these other agents have infiltrated the Google servers and see what you search (assume once you actually know the name of the capital, you somehow buy the actual ticket without "them" knowing..)

Lukcily though, CloudCorp offers a public homomorphic query service for all world capitals. This service allows you to send a query for the capital of any country over an intercepted connection, and get back the result. Even if the hostile agents had infiltrated CloudCorp and were monitoring all your comms, they would not be able know which country's capital you just queried.

How such service would be implemented is explained in good detail in this tutorial: https://github.com/homenc/HElib/tree/master/examples/BGV_cou...

P.S. The capital of Bulgaria is Sofia.

While I was searching for homomorphic encryption tools/libs, I stumbled upon this.

FHE has been around for a while now, IBM: https://github.com/homenc/HElib and Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/microsoft-seal/ both have their own (much more mature) FHE implementations.