IBM Launches Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) Toolkit for Linux

Fully Homomorphic Encryption

IBM informed me earlier that they launched today their Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology for Linux-based operating systems on IBM Z and x86 architectures.

Previously available for macOS and iOS, IBM’s Fully Homomorphic Encryption toolkit is now available on Linux too. It’s packaged as Docker containers with three editions for CentOS Linux, Fedora Linux and Ubuntu Linux.

What’s so special about the Fully Homomorphic Encryption technology? Well, it makes it possible to protect your data at rest and in-flight with pervasive encryption. More specifically, FHE helps protect your data at all times without ever decrypting it.

On top of that, Data Privacy Passports helps IBM Z clients manage who gets access to data via policy-based controls and revoke access to that specific data even if it transferred from the system, thanks to data protection controls.

“Initially suggested by mathematicians in the 1970s and then first demonstrated in 2009, FHE has emerged as a fundamentally different way to help protect data privacy,” said IBM. “The idea is simple, you can now process sensitive data without providing unencrypted access to that sensitive data. In short, you can’t steal information when you can’t understand it.”

The first release of the FHE toolkit for Linux only supports Ubuntu and Fedora on IBM Z (s390x) clients. For x86 platforms, the toolkit works on all supported distributions mentioned above, including Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS.

However, IBM says that it can be easily ported to other GNU/Linux distributions by experience Docker developers. Each toolkit edition will give users access to the built-in IDE (Integrated Development Environment) via a web browser on their host operating system.

To get started with the Fully Homomorphic Encryption toolkit on Linux, check out the documentation on the project’s GitHub page or try a pre-built container from Docker Hub. Meanwhile, you can see the Fully Homomorphic Encryption in action in the video below, courtesy of IBM.

Last updated 4 years ago

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