Practical applications of homomorphic encryption algorithms?

Question

It appears there there were interesting things going on in cryptography: the first homomorphic encryption scheme appeared recently (explanation, HT). Roughly sp

Answer 1

Distributed computing like SETI@Home, protein folding projects, etc., are fairly popular because they leverage the donation of CPU time and electricity from thousands of users. Even more interesting would be a model where people can get paid to provide these resources for commercial projects. However, no responsible company wants to ship its data out to thousands of anonymous computers for processing. If you can efficiently apply algorithms to encrypted data, it becomes possible to delegate the processing to anyone without a trusted relationship.