A Survey on Homomorphic Encryption Schemes: Theory and Implementation

Legacy encryption systems depend on sharing a key (public or private) among the peers involved in exchanging an encrypted message. However, this approach poses privacy concerns. Especially with popular cloud services, the control over the privacy of the sensitive data is lost. Even when the keys are not shared, the encrypted material is shared with a third party that does not necessarily need to access the content. Moreover, untrusted servers, providers, and cloud operators can keep identifying elements of users long after users end the relationship with the services. Indeed, Homomorphic Encryption (HE), a special kind of encryption scheme, can address these concerns as it allows any third party to operate on the encrypted data without decrypting it in advance. Although this extremely useful feature of the HE scheme has been known for over 30 years, the first plausible and achievable Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scheme, which allows any computable function to perform on the encrypted data, was introduced by Craig Gentry in 2009. Even though this was a major achievement, different implementations so far demonstrated that FHE still needs to be improved significantly to be practical on every platform. First, we present the basics of HE and the details of the well-known Partially Homomorphic Encryption (PHE) and Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption (SWHE), which are important pillars of achieving FHE. Then, the main FHE families, which have become the base for the other follow-up FHE schemes are presented. Furthermore, the implementations and recent improvements in Gentry-type FHE schemes are also surveyed. Finally, further research directions are discussed. This survey is intended to give a clear knowledge and foundation to researchers and practitioners interested in knowing, applying, as well as extending the state of the art HE, PHE, SWHE, and FHE systems.Comment: - Updated. (October 6, 2017) - This paper is an early draft of the survey that is being submitted to ACM CSUR and has been uploaded to arXiv for feedback from stakeholder

Homomorphic encryption from codes

We propose a new homomorphic encryption scheme based on the hardness of decoding under independent random noise from certain affine families of codes. Unlike in previous lattice-based homomorphic encryption schemes, where the message is hidden in the noisy part of the ciphertext, our scheme carries the message in the affine part of the transformation and applies noise only to achieve security. Our scheme can tolerate noise of arbitrary magnitude, as long as the noise vector has sufficiently small hamming weight (and its entries are independent). Our design achieves "proto-homomorphic" properties in an elementary manner: message addition and multiplication are emulated by pointwise addition and multiplication of the ciphertext vectors. Moreover, the extremely simple nature of our decryption makes the scheme easily amenable to bootstrapping. However, some complications are caused by the inherent presence of noticeable encryption error. Our main technical contribution is the development of two new techniques for handling this error in the homomorphic evaluation process. We also provide a definitional framework for homomorphic encryption that may be useful elsewhere

Cloud-based Quadratic Optimization with Partially Homomorphic Encryption

The development of large-scale distributed control systems has led to the outsourcing of costly computations to cloud-computing platforms, as well as to concerns about privacy of the collected sensitive data. This paper develops a cloud-based protocol for a quadratic optimization problem involving multiple parties, each holding information it seeks to maintain private. The protocol is based on the projected gradient ascent on the Lagrange dual problem and exploits partially homomorphic encryption and secure multi-party computation techniques. Using formal cryptographic definitions of indistinguishability, the protocol is shown to achieve computational privacy, i.e., there is no computationally efficient algorithm that any involved party can employ to obtain private information beyond what can be inferred from the party's inputs and outputs only. In order to reduce the communication complexity of the proposed protocol, we introduced a variant that achieves this objective at the expense of weaker privacy guarantees. We discuss in detail the computational and communication complexity properties of both algorithms theoretically and also through implementations. We conclude the paper with a discussion on computational privacy and other notions of privacy such as the non-unique retrieval of the private information from the protocol outputs

Studies on the Security of Selected Advanced Asymmetric Cryptographic Primitives

The main goal of asymmetric cryptography is to provide confidential communication, which allows two parties to communicate securely even in the presence of adversaries. Ever since its invention in the seventies, asymmetric cryptography has been improved and developed further, and a formal security framework has been established around it. This framework includes different security goals, attack models, and security notions. As progress was made in the field, more advanced asymmetric cryptographic primitives were proposed, with other properties in addition to confidentiality. These new primitives also have their own definitions and notions of security. This thesis consists of two parts, where the first relates to the security of fully homomorphic encryption and related primitives. The second part presents a novel cryptographic primitive, and defines what security goals the primitive should achieve. The first part of the thesis consists of Article I, II, and III, which all pertain to the security of homomorphic encryption schemes in one respect or another. Article I demonstrates that a particular fully homomorphic encryption scheme is insecure in the sense that an adversary with access only to the public material can recover the secret key. It is also shown that this insecurity mainly stems from the operations necessary to make the scheme fully homomorphic. Article II presents an adaptive key recovery attack on a leveled homomorphic encryption scheme. The scheme in question claimed to withstand precisely such attacks, and was the only scheme of its kind to do so at the time. This part of the thesis culminates with Article III, which is an overview article on the IND-CCA1 security of all acknowledged homomorphic encryption schemes. The second part of the thesis consists of Article IV, which presents Vetted Encryption (VE), a novel asymmetric cryptographic primitive. The primitive is designed to allow a recipient to vet who may send them messages, by setting up a public filter with a public verification key, and providing each vetted sender with their own encryption key. There are three different variants of VE, based on whether the sender is identifiable to the filter and/or the recipient. Security definitions, general constructions and comparisons to already existing cryptographic primitives are provided for all three variants.Doktorgradsavhandlin

Block cipher based Public Key Encryption viaIndistinguishability Obfuscation

The article is devoted to generation techniques of thenew public key crypto-systems, which are based on applicationof indistinguishability obfuscation methods to selected privatekey crypto-systems. The techniques are applied to symmetrickey crypto-system and the target system is asymmetric one.As an input for our approach an implementation of symmetricblock cipher with a given private-key is considered. Differentobfuscation methods are subjected to processing. The targetsystem would be treated as a public-key for newly createdpublic crypto-system. The approach seems to be interestingfrom theoretical point of view. Moreover, it can be useful forinformation protection in a cloud-computing model

SHIELD: Scalable Homomorphic Implementation of Encrypted Data-Classifiers

Homomorphic encryption (HE) systems enable computations on encrypted data, without decrypting and without knowledge of the secret key. In this work, we describe an optimized Ring Learning With Errors (RLWE) based implementation of a variant of the HE system recently proposed by Gentry, Sahai and Waters (GSW). Although this system was widely believed to be less efficient than its contemporaries, we demonstrate quite the opposite behavior for a large class of applications. We first highlight and carefully exploit the algebraic features of the system to achieve significant speedup over the state-of-the-art HE implementation, namely the IBM homomorphic encryption library (HElib). We introduce several optimizations on top of our HE implementation, and use the resulting scheme to construct a homomorphic Bayesian spam filter, secure multiple keyword search, and a homomorphic evaluator for binary decision trees. Our results show a factor of 10× improvement in performance (under the same security settings and CPU platforms) compared to IBM HElib for these applications. Our system is built to be easily portable to GPUs (unlike IBM HElib) which results in an additional speedup of up to a factor of 103.5× to offer an overall speedup of 1,035×