Apple's iOS 18 Uses Homomorphic Encryption for Private Photo Search
2025-01-15
Apple's iOS 18 utilizes homomorphic encryption to enhance its photo search functionality, enabling cloud-based searches without revealing the content of users' photos. The article explains the underlying principles of homomorphic encryption, allowing computations on encrypted data with the decrypted result matching computations on unencrypted data. Apple's implementation isn't fully homomorphic, trading some privacy for performance and combining it with differential privacy and anonymization networks to bolster privacy. While not perfect, it represents a significant step towards balancing privacy and usability.