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quantum cryptography, according to some engineers, is not without its faults. In a preprint submitted late last week to arXiv, Hoi-Kwong Lo and colleagues at the University of Toronto, Canada, claim to have hacked into a commercial quantum cryptography system by exploiting a certain practical “loophole”.

A new form of encryption allows you to compute with data you cannot read

The technique that makes this magic trick possible is called fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE. It’s not exactly a new idea, but for many years it was viewed as a fantasy that would never come true. That changed in 2009, with a breakthrough discovery by Craig Gentry, who was then a graduate student at Stanford University. (He is now at IBM Research.) Since then, further refinements and more new ideas have been coming at a rapid pace.

Working with encrypted data without decrypting it first sounds too good to be true, but it's becoming possible.