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

Predicate Encryption for Circuits from LWE

In predicate encryption, a ciphertext is associated with descriptive attribute values x in addition to a plaintext μ, and a secret key is associated with a predicate f. Decryption returns plaintext μ if and only if f(x)=1. Moreover, security of predicate encryption guarantees that an adversary learns nothing about the attribute x or the plaintext μ from a ciphertext, given arbitrary many secret keys that are not authorized to decrypt the ciphertext individually. We construct a leveled predicate encryption scheme for all circuits, assuming the hardness of the subexponential learning with errors (LWE) problem. That is, for any polynomial function d=d(λ), we construct a predicate encryption scheme for the class of all circuits with depth bounded by d(λ), where λ is the security parameter.Microsoft Corporation (PhD Fellowship)Northrop Grumman Cybersecurity Research ConsortiumUnited States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Grant FA8750-11-2-0225)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Awards CNS-1350619)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Awards CNS-1413920)Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Fellowship)Microsoft (Faculty Fellowship

Fully Key-Homomorphic Encryption, Arithmetic Circuit ABE and Compact Garbled Circuits

We construct the first (key-policy) attribute-based encryption (ABE) system with short secret keys: the size of keys in our system depends only on the depth of the policy circuit, not its size. Our constructions extend naturally to arithmetic circuits with arbitrary fan-in gates thereby further reducing the circuit depth. Building on this ABE system we obtain the first reusable circuit garbling scheme that produces garbled circuits whose size is the same as the original circuit plus an additive poly(λ,d) bits, where λ is the security parameter and d is the circuit depth. All previous constructions incurred a multiplicative poly(λ) blowup. We construct our ABE using a new mechanism we call fully key-homomorphic encryption, a public-key system that lets anyone translate a ciphertext encrypted under a public-key x into a ciphertext encrypted under the public-key (f(x),f) of the same plaintext, for any efficiently computable f. We show that this mechanism gives an ABE with short keys. Security of our construction relies on the subexponential hardness of the learning with errors problem. We also present a second (key-policy) ABE, using multilinear maps, with short ciphertexts: an encryption to an attribute vector x is the size of x plus poly(λ,d) additional bits. This gives a reusable circuit garbling scheme where the garbled input is short.United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Grant FA8750-11-2-0225)Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Sloan Research Fellowship

Circuit-ABE from LWE: Unbounded Attributes and Semi-adaptive Security

We construct an LWE-based key-policy attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme that supports attributes of unbounded polynomial length. Namely, the size of the public parameters is a fixed polynomial in the security parameter and a depth bound, and with these fixed length parameters, one can encrypt attributes of arbitrary length. Similarly, any polynomial size circuit that adheres to the depth bound can be used as the policy circuit regardless of its input length (recall that a depth d circuit can have as many as 2d inputs). This is in contrast to previous LWE-based schemes where the length of the public parameters has to grow linearly with the maximal attribute length. We prove that our scheme is semi-adaptively secure, namely, the adversary can choose the challenge attribute after seeing the public parameters (but before any decryption keys). Previous LWE-based constructions were only able to achieve selective security. (We stress that the “complexity leveraging” technique is not applicable for unbounded attributes). We believe that our techniques are of interest at least as much as our end result. Fundamentally, selective security and bounded attributes are both shortcomings that arise out of the current LWE proof techniques that program the challenge attributes into the public parameters. The LWE toolbox we develop in this work allows us to delay this programming. In a nutshell, the new tools include a way to generate an a-priori unbounded sequence of LWE matrices, and have fine-grained control over which trapdoor is embedded in each and every one of them, all with succinct representation.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award CNS-1350619)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CNS-1413964)United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (Grant 712307

Reusable garbled circuits and succinct functional encryption

Garbled circuits, introduced by Yao in the mid 80s, allow computing a function f on an input x without leaking anything about f or x besides f(x). Garbled circuits found numerous applications, but every known construction suffers from one limitation: it offers no security if used on multiple inputs x. In this paper, we construct for the first time reusable garbled circuits. The key building block is a new succinct single-key functional encryption scheme. Functional encryption is an ambitious primitive: given an encryption Enc(x) of a value x, and a secret key sk_f for a function f, anyone can compute f(x) without learning any other information about x. We construct, for the first time, a succinct functional encryption scheme for {\em any} polynomial-time function f where succinctness means that the ciphertext size does not grow with the size of the circuit for f, but only with its depth. The security of our construction is based on the intractability of the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem and holds as long as an adversary has access to a single key sk_f (or even an a priori bounded number of keys for different functions). Building on our succinct single-key functional encryption scheme, we show several new applications in addition to reusable garbled circuits, such as a paradigm for general function obfuscation which we call token-based obfuscation, homomorphic encryption for a class of Turing machines where the evaluation runs in input-specific time rather than worst-case time, and a scheme for delegating computation which is publicly verifiable and maintains the privacy of the computation.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC Discovery Grant)United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA award FA8750-11-2-0225)United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA award N66001-10-2-4089)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF award CNS-1053143)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF award IIS-1065219)Google (Firm

Lattice-Inspired Broadcast Encryption and Succinct Ciphertext-Policy ABE

Broadcast encryption remains one of the few remaining central cryptographic primitives that are not yet known to be achievable under a standard cryptographic assumption (excluding obfuscation-based constructions, see below). Furthermore, prior to this work, there were no known direct candidates for post-quantum-secure broadcast encryption. We propose a candidate ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme for circuits, where the ciphertext size depends only on the depth of the policy circuit (and not its size). This, in particular, gives us a Broadcast Encryption (BE) scheme where the size of the keys and ciphertexts have a poly-logarithmic dependence on the number of users. This goal was previously only known to be achievable assuming ideal multilinear maps (Boneh, Waters and Zhandry, Crypto 2014) or indistinguishability obfuscation (Boneh and Zhandry, Crypto 2014) and in a concurrent work from generic bilinear groups and the learning with errors (LWE) assumption (Agrawal and Yamada, Eurocrypt 2020). Our construction relies on techniques from lattice-based (and in particular LWE-based) cryptography. We analyze some attempts at cryptanalysis, but we are unable to provide a security proof