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Thanks. I suppose publishing a white paper at least opens them up to more serious scrutiny (which I've seen in serious-ish forums like HN). But my initial response is rather skeptical still, though. The encryption methods seem like they should be far more expensive than Apple is letting on [1], and they say they're using this for querying remote databases with encrypted queries. They're less clear on how these databases (for photographic landmarks, URLs, and such) are encrypted in a manner that actually hides the query from Apple. Are the encryption keys different per-device? If so, how do they avoid needing a separate database per device? And if not, it seems there's a lot of trust that they would be unable to figure out which rows matched.
I know Google's approach to similar issues has been focused more on device side ML models. Pixel phones support offline song recognition (I've noticed it's fairly limited to popular songs), and Google Translate can work (in a limited fashion) offline. Why does Apple need to do cloud-based POI recognition in photos? The whitepaper only shows 6 very well known landmarks, but it seems like it'd be easy enough (and secure!) to do this on-device. Given the known computational costs of FHE, it might even be better for battery life.
Oh, I would read it differently. I think they're letting on that it's pretty expensive, which is why they're doing all the mess with sharding and DP.
My understanding of BFV is that when the device does its keygen (unique for each query, I assume), it produces and then passes an "evaluation key" as part of the public key. One has to design the scheme so that there is sufficient expressivity in the set of evaluation functions that can take in the evaluation key and perform the desired operations on the encrypted message. I don't believe this involves completely encrypting the entire database from scratch using the public key every time; it just requires running the same operations on the same underlying database, but with the evaluation key in the operations. They call out that it's important that the BFV scheme has many of the operations they want, expressible in, shall we say "evaluation key parameterized form".
I think a lot of the work in library building is essentially building up a set of these "evaluation key parameterized" operations. You have to start with extremely simple operations and then build your way up to more usable tools that are composed of those simple operations.
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