Suggesting alternative approaches to such large corporations is not straightforward. Their IT and security teams cannot afford to risk handling sensitive financial data in plaintext. No manager would readily approve a solution that offers additional functionality at the cost of deviating, even slightly, from well-established compliance practices. Encryption is therefore fundamental to how these systems operate.

The challenge arises when these institutions need to perform computations or checks on such encrypted data. Decrypting the data, even under controlled conditions and with trained personnel, is operationally complex, introduces additional risk, and can create a significant compliance burden.

This is where FHE offers a compelling solution. We demonstrate how a check can be performed directly on encrypted transactions against a known blacklist, without requiring the underlying transaction data to be decrypted.

P.S. It is great to work with Marc :)

But there is more to it. Teams like us at Belfort, we are working to make FHE practical for organizations that want to deploy it for their own use cases, including on infrastructure they control themselves. Even in these setups, FHE can enable applications that would otherwise be blocked by regulatory, privacy, or compliance requirements.

This is where we believe Belfort can make a real difference: enabling organizations to compute on sensitive data while preserving strong privacy guarantees. And FHE doesn’t necessarily mean relying on Google, AWS, or Azure for encrypted compute. Companies can run FHE on their own infrastructure, allowing them to process their clients’ data privately while maintaining control over their systems and keys.

These applications are our initial focus, and over time, we aim to expand the range of use cases that FHE can unlock.

Besides, FHE is not always about using somebody else's server. At Belfort, in addition to FHE acceleration, we also explore such uses cases; https://belfortlabs.com/blog/encrypted-fraud-detection-with-... https://belfortlabs.com/blog/belfort-partners-with-lg-on-enc...

- https://belfortlabs.com/blog/belfort-partners-with-lg-on-enc... - https://belfortlabs.com/blog/encrypted-fraud-detection-with-...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49197380

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

Key management is a critical part of the story, as j2kun has pointed out before. In this demo, we're intentionally caching the same key material for every visitor so we can showcase the actual FHE computation without making everyone wait through client-side key generation and upload. Even as a one-time cost, having each user generate their own keys in the browser and transfer them to the server introduces noticeable setup time, which we felt would get in the way of the experience for a demo. We actually implemented it that way at first; setup wasn't a matter of minutes, but we changed course after worrying about the experience for visitors on mobile data.

This demo is focused on demonstrating the computation itself, not a production-grade key management flow. Supporting per-user keys and a more realistic trust model is definitely on our roadmap for future demos.