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. 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 secrecy 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 all countries. 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.
Change directory to the example's home directory, then execute:
cmake .
make
Run the country capital lookup over the encrypted dataset:
./BGV_world_country_db_lookup
Type in a 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.