This FHE toolkit example demonstrates a privacy preserving search against an encrypted database. The database is a key value store prepopulated with the english names of countries and their capital cities from the continent of Europe. Selecting the country will use HElib to perform a search of the matching capital. BGV refers to the encryption scheme used in the demo, more information on the schemes is available here.
Privacy preserving search is a common scenario to demonstrate the benefits of homomorphic encryption. Being able to perform a query while preserving the privacy and confidentiality of the parameters of the query has many applications across various industry segments spanning from genomics to finance. This example uses a simple and easy to follow algorithm that demonstrates how one can use homomorphic encryption based techniques to generate a mask to retrieve data from a key-value pair database. It uses a dataset that is understandable for users across all industries and expertise levels.
With respect to realism of data, the dataset takes into account countries of the world. In a real use case, this could be information on customers or financial records for example. This is an educational example so a small dataset was needed to ensure timely responses and that it was relevant for all users.
Select the target Privacy Preserving Search that you would like to build and make sure "My Mac" is selected.
If you don't see the target, click on hold on the target that is in the bar, and a list of all the targets will present itself.
Press Build, the "Play" button in the upper left hand corner. The sample app with the embedded libraries and dependencies will start the build process. You will notice the bar at the top will indicate the build process is proceeding. If you don't see Privacy Preserving Search you might need to use the arrow to scroll to the top of list.
NOTE: “Privacy Preserving Search” might request access to the folder you selected for your workspace, please click “ok” to continue.
With the compilation of the mobile demonstration application complete, the app will launch, and you will see the sample application as shown.
Once you have built the app, select a European Country name. For example Sweden, Germany, Czech Republic. For countries in the United Kingdom, use one of: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Please note: there is no fuzzy matching, the spelling of the country name has to be exact.
This country lookup example is derived from the BGV database demo code originally written by Jack Crawford for a lunch and learn session at IBM Research (Hursley) in 2019. The original demo code ships with HElib and can be found here.
To view the options available for this demo, see the dataset.