The article discusses the challenges of maintaining document security while collaborating remotely using CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types) with homomorphic encryption.
End-to-end encryption is common for protecting document content, but it prevents sync servers from merging updates without all parties being online.
Homomorphic encryption allows operations on encrypted data without decryption, but has significant performance and efficiency drawbacks.
There are various approaches to homomorphic encryption, including partially, somewhat, and fully homomorphic encryption, each with its trade-offs in operations and noise handling.
Homomorphic encryption can theoretically allow servers to merge CRDTs without accessing plaintext data, but this introduces significant computation overheads.
The article describes the implementation of a homomorphically encrypted CRDT, its challenges, and performance drawbacks, highlighting that encryption requires extensive resources compared to data size.
Practical usage of homomorphic encryption faces massive key sizes and decreased performance, posing real-world limitations for local-first applications.
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