The March 2010 issue of the Communications of the ACM includes a technical paper with an introduction entitled "A First Glance of Cryptography's Holy Grail" (ACM subscription required). That's enough to catch my attention. The paper itself, Computing Arbitrary Functions of Encrypted Data, describes a relatively new algorithm for homomorphic encryption.
Although these words may be unfamiliar to many, the subject matter is terribly important, because, like public-key encryption, which paved the...