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

Practical Homomorphic Encryption Over the Integers for Secure Computation in the Cloud

We present novel homomorphic encryption schemes for integer arithmetic, intended primarily for use in secure single-party computation in the cloud. These schemes are capable of securely computing arbitrary degree polynomials homomorphically. In practice, ciphertext size and running times limit the polynomial degree, but this appears sufficient for most practical applications. We present four schemes, with increasing levels of security, but increasing computational overhead. Two of the schemes provide strong security for high-entropy data. The remaining two schemes provide strong security regardless of this assumption. These four algorithms form the first two levels of a hierarchy of schemes which require linearly decreasing entropy. We have evaluated these four algorithms by computing low-degree polynomials. The timings of these computations are extremely favourable by comparison with even the best of existing methods, and dramatically out-perform running times of directly comparable schemes by a factor of up to 1000, and considerably more than that for fully homomorphic schemes, used in the same context. The results clearly demonstrate the practical applicability of our schemes

Practical homomorphic encryption over the integers for secure computation in the cloud

We present novel homomorphic encryption schemes for integer arithmetic, intended primarily for use in secure single-party computation in the cloud. These schemes are capable of securely computing arbitrary degree polynomials homomorphically. In practice, ciphertext size and running times limit the polynomial degree, but this appears sufficient for most practical applications. We present four schemes, with increasing levels of security, but increasing computational overhead. Two of the schemes provide strong security for high-entropy data. The remaining two schemes provide strong security regardless of this assumption. These four algorithms form the first two levels of a hierarchy of schemes, and we also present the general cases of each scheme. We further elaborate how a fully homomorphic system can be constructed from one of our general cases. In addition, we present a variant based upon Chinese Remainder Theorem secret sharing. We detail extensive evaluation of the first four algorithms of our hierarchy by computing low-degree polynomials. The timings of these computations are extremely favourable by comparison with even the best of existing methods and dramatically outperform many well-publicised schemes. The results clearly demonstrate the practical applicability of our schemes

A General Purpose Transpiler for Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is an encryption scheme which enables computation on encrypted data without revealing the underlying data. While there have been many advances in the field of FHE, developing programs using FHE still requires expertise in cryptography. In this white paper, we present a fully homomorphic encryption transpiler that allows developers to convert high-level code (e.g., C++) that works on unencrypted data into high-level code that operates on encrypted data. Thus, our transpiler makes transformations possible on encrypted data. Our transpiler builds on Google's open-source XLS SDK (https://github.com/google/xls) and uses an off-the-shelf FHE library, TFHE (https://tfhe.github.io/tfhe/), to perform low-level FHE operations. The transpiler design is modular, which means the underlying FHE library as well as the high-level input and output languages can vary. This modularity will help accelerate FHE research by providing an easy way to compare arbitrary programs in different FHE schemes side-by-side. We hope this lays the groundwork for eventual easy adoption of FHE by software developers. As a proof-of-concept, we are releasing an experimental transpiler (https://github.com/google/fully-homomorphic-encryption/tree/main/transpiler) as open-source software