
Securing Vector Similarity Search
Enabling Privacy-Preserving AI with Partially Homomorphic Encryption
This research demonstrates a practical approach to encrypted vector similarity computations using Partially Homomorphic Encryption (PHE) instead of more complex Fully Homomorphic Encryption.
- Enables privacy-preserving similarity search for facial recognition, recommendation engines, and LLMs
- Proposes novel method to calculate cosine similarity using PHE despite mathematical limitations
- Compares performance of different encryption schemes (Paillier, Damgard-Jurik, Okamoto-Uchiyama)
- Offers a practical security solution that balances privacy protection with computational efficiency
This advancement matters because it allows AI systems to compare vectors (like embeddings) while keeping the data encrypted end-to-end, addressing critical privacy concerns without sacrificing functionality.