Homomorphic encryption allows you to delegate the processing of your data or your query to a "worker" (e.g., the "cloud") without sacrificing your privacy. The worker can process your private data or private query even though it is encrypted, and send back to you the (encrypted) response that you were seeking, without learning anything significant.

This talk will partly be a tutorial designed to give a taste of how homomorphic encryption schemes work, and why they have been so inefficient. Next, the talk will sketch some very recent results that dramatically improve efficiency and give us hope that homomorphic computation may one day be truly practical.