Apple quietly added FHE
Apple has reportedly integrated Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) into core infrastructure since iOS 18 — enabling encrypted queries to be processed without decryption, and powering features like Live Caller ID on-device, the social thread argued reported. This suggests Apple is moving beyond homomorphic proofs as research and treating encrypted computation as production plumbing for privacy-first services.
[Apple published]swift.org the open-source swift-homomorphic-encryption package on July 30, 2024, and the project repository lists example applications and tooling for production use. The GitHub [repo shows]github.com roughly 628 stars and includes PIR and PNNS executables plus a live-caller-id-lookup-example backend. Apple’s machine‑learning research [team posted]machinelearning.apple.com a detailed article on October 24, 2024 describing a BFV-based HE implementation tuned for ML workflows. That [post describes]machinelearning.apple.com Private Nearest Neighbor Search (PNNS) and how BFV supports dot-product and cosine-similarity operations on embedding vectors used in Enhanced Visual Search for Photos. The Swift [announcement includes]swift.org a live-caller-id-lookup example backend to demonstrate Private Information Retrieval (PIR) and shows how metadata sync keeps client state small for very large server databases. Apple’s developer [docs detail]developer.apple.com Live Caller ID Lookup using Oblivious HTTP and anonymous authentication via the Privacy Pass protocol to hide client IPs and numbers. Support for third‑party caller-ID integrations went live in iOS 18.2, with Truecaller’s real‑time Live Caller ID and spam-blocking rollout beginning January 22, 2025, per coverage of the [release reporting]techcabal.com.
